As we learnt earlier this week, 2009 was yet another record year for theatre in the capital - both in terms of total box office income and the number of tickets sold.

At the beginning of the year, few in London theatre were predicting that 2009 would turn out to be yet another barnstormer.

The year just gone - 2008 - had defied the odds but, with the country heading deeper into recession, surely the industry could not continue to dodge the economic slump. Society of London Theatre president Nica Burns’ pre­diction of a 10% drop in 2009 did not seem like it would be particularly wide of the mark. In the event, it was way off - with performance up by as much as 7.6%, depending on how you chose to measure it.

This remarkable success, as both Burns and SOLT chief executive Richard Pulford have claimed, was in large part driven by the quality of the product on offer. But surely that can’t be the only reason, when so much of the rest of the economy has suffered.

This week marks the release of The Stage 100, our annual list of the great and the good in UK theatre.

As revealed on this site yesterday, Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire - the joint chief executives of Ambassador Theatre Group - have come top, displacing last year’s winner Cameron Mackintosh, as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber - the most successful entrant in the history of The Stage 100.

But, we’re sure you’re interested to find out who else has made the list in full. So, for your consideration, please find below the Stage 100, in full.

Although, if you want to read our justifications for each entrant you’ll have to pop into a newsagent and pick up a copy of The Stage, dated December 30, 2009. It’s a special Stage 100 edition, with lots of special features and a full break down of both the Stage 100 and the new state of theatre ownership in the UK.

Meanwhile, you can also listen to our podcast discussion of the list here.

Also, if you disagree with our decisions, please do leave a comment at the bottom. Also, from next week, we’ll be running a readers’ Stage 100, so you’ll have an opportunity to vote for your favourite online. Please check back in the new year.

So, culture secretary Ben Bradshaw is calling for a popular uprising among actors to help pre-emptively oust a Tory government.

According to a report in The Guardian, Bradshaw complained at a speech earlier this week:

“We need a few more luvvies to be jumping up and down about it because that is not happening at the moment. I am trying to provoke them into doing it.”

Apparently, actors aren’t being vocal enough about how awful it would be for everyone if a Tory government wins the next election.

As we revealed yesterday, Ambassador Theatre Group has completed the £90m purchase of Live Nation’s UK theatres.

It’s a massive deal - in every sense. The theatre equivalent of Sainsbury’s buying Tesco, if you like. Certainly it’s the biggest theatre sale of at least the last decade and it makes ATG the biggest theatre operator of the modern era.

Digital Theatre, a new pay-per-view online video site that streams theatre shows onto your computer, launched last week. I’ve already written about it here and here, but I’ve now finally sat down and watched the company’s first available download - Far From the Madding Crowd - so I thought I’d share my thoughts and see if anyone else out there would like to share theirs.

So, it’s almost here.

Andrew Lloyd Webber this morning gathered together industry folk and members of the press for a sneak peak of his long-awaited sequel to The Phantom of the Opera - Love Never Dies.

The original Phantom, as we were reminded this morning, is “the most successful single piece of entertainment of all time”, by which producers mean it has taken more than any other film or show or combination of the two - a grand total of $5 billion worldwide.

How do you follow that?

Sheridan Smith took to the stage of Café de Paris today - dressed in pink, with freshly fitted peroxide blonde hair extensions, and a chihuahua under her arm - to launch forthcoming West End musical Legally Blonde, which will preview at the Savoy Theatre from December 5.

For those of you unfamiliar with the 2001 chick-flick starring Reese Witherspoon, or indeed the Broadway stage adaptation, the story of Legally Blonde follows ditzy yet smart sorority girl Elle Woods in her quest to be taken seriously at Harvard Law School.

To give a taster of what can be expected in the West End show, Smith (in character as Elle), along with fellow cast members Jill Halfpenny, Susan McFadden and Aoife Mulholland, performed a series of numbers from the show including Omigod You Guys, Bend and Snap, and Whipped into Shape.

So girly. So fun. But will it appeal to male theatregoers?

The show’s producer Sonia Friedman seems to think so.

Speaking at the launch, she said: “The message I want to get across to all of you here is it is a show not just for girls. It is a show for girls to take boyfriends, boyfriends to take girlfriends, grandparents to take kids, kids to take dads, boyfriends to take boyfriends.

“It is genuinely for absolutely everybody. It is a real guilty pleasure and men love it. They won’t admit it, but whenever I saw the show on Broadway, the people who came out with the biggest grins were the middle-aged men.”

Anything to do with the pretty blondes on stage in the skimpy outfits?

It’s that time of year again and we are now looking for reader nominations for The Stage Award for Special Achievement in Regional Theatre, which we give out annually as part of the Theatrical Management Association Theatre Awards.

Addressing the obstacles faced by female playwrights on a daily basis, Lucy Perman, executive director of women’s theatre company Clean Break, gives her perspective on how sexism in the industry can be overcome

My heart sinks as the glossy brochure drops on the mat announcing another season of plays by male playwrights. It doesn’t surprise me — from my perspective as executive director of Clean Break, a women’s theatre company, the stage is still a male domain, particularly the main stages of most of our leading venues.

Women playwrights have more to offer than this suggests and a different story to tell. I’d like to see change — not tokenistic change, but genuine transformation of the theatre sector to create more meaningful opportunities for female artists. This responsibility for change is not just a moral responsibility or even (for the more cynical) a desirable marketing outcome, but a legal one, now that the Gender Equality Duty requires all public bodies to promote and adapt their services to meet the needs of both men and women. This ought to galvanise the sector into action — but will it?

So, Live Nation, the UK’s largest theatre operator, is to be sold off to the highest bidder.

Well, sort of.

Live Nation has kicked off the very long and drawn out process which could lead to a sale, by asking Goldman Sachs to see if anyone wants to buy its 17 UK venues and, if so, for what price.

The answer to the first of those two questions is undoubtedly yes. But it’s worth remembering that the answer to the second could very easily be ‘not as much as Live Nation wants’.

With that proviso, however, what would the sale mean for UK theatre, if it were to go ahead?

So, it looks like the arts world could be heading for yet another funding crisis.

Okay, so it’s unlikely to be quite on the scale of the 2007 Christmas funding debacle, which saw large parts of the sector rise up in united anger against some of Arts Council England’s funding decisions, but this could still be pretty worrying stuff.

To recap, ACE is modeling three scenarios in case it finds out from DCMS later this month, post-Budget, that the government is going to reclaim some of the money it had previously promised for 2010/11. If this happens, DCMS will most likely reclaim some of its grant to ACE and ACE, in turn, is going to have to reconsider some of the commitments it has made to the sector.

In the ‘worst case scenario’ that is being planned for, ACE (and therefore the arts world) loses £14 million - 3% of its total grant.

Now, it should be stressed that ACE does not know that it is going to have its grant cut, but, if we’re being realistic, it wouldn’t be preparing for cuts, if it didn’t think there was a good chance they were going to happen.

Should this come as a surprise?

Harper’s Bazaar (yes, that wasn’t a typo in the headline) has announced who it (and a jewelry company) believes are the 20 most powerful women in British theatre.

As someone who helps compile The Stage’s own power list - The Stage 100 - I’m only too aware of how subjective these kind of things can be.

But still, this is a very strange top 20 indeed. Any list which omits the two most powerful women in theatre must surely stretch its credibility somewhat.

Where are Nica Burns and Rosemary Squire?

Peter Pan is coming home to Kensington Gardens this summer in a new tented version of the perennial family favourite.

It has been a while is the offing (The Stage first revealed the plans back in 2007) but, in that time producers have assembled an impressive creative team - ex Almeida director Ben Harrison, a brand new stage adaptation by Tanya Ronder (which she promises will “strip the candy floss” from the story) and - perhaps most importantly designer William Dudley.

Dudley’s design looks to be central to the whole project and at a press launch yesterday he unveiled some intriguing images showing early explorations of a 360 projection concept which he has planned for the show.

So, Bristol Old Vic has found itself a new artistic director.

Tom Morris strikes me as a pretty fantastic choice. As a director he has a foot in both camps - large scale and small scale - and will, if anyone is ever going to be able to, bring together the disparate artistic movements in Bristol, where you have physical theatre companies, street artists and of course a more traditional vein.

His work on War Horse shows that he is able to harness the skills of what is traditionally small-scale theatre (puppetry) and turn it into a big (and soon to be commercial) crowd pleaser.

This is what Bristol needs. Someone who can harness the abundant and very specific skills on offer in the region, but still turn out theatre that large numbers of people want to come to see.

We must remember that the problems of the previous regime were very much rooted in their inability to attract sufficient audiences.

Not too long ago, Chichester Festival Theatre was a bit of a mess.

First, there was the financial crisis. Then, the arrival of the artistic triumvirate of Ruth Mackenzie, Martin Duncan and Stephen Pimlott, who managed to secure extra public funding, but programmed seasons which failed to appeal to large swathes of the local population. When they left in 2005, the phrase “poisoned chalice” was muttered whenever the issue of who might replace them was discussed.

Step forward Jonathan Church..

It looked like a near impossible job, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that with the announcement of the venue’s 2009 season, the turnaround is now complete.