Something extra for the weekend….

That deliberately ate into the weekend, which we were duly powerless to avoid since there were already other major openings on Thursday (the return of Les Miserables to the Barbican) and Friday (The Big Fellah at Lyric Hammersmith). It’s all very well to try to let critics “spread the load” and not all be concentrated into a single opening night, but it doesn’t work if the week is already so full that we can’t go on the earlier nights offered so have to use the weekend instead).

That was the culmination of a week that had also taken Charlie out of town to Scarborough for the new Ayckbourn play The Life of Riley on Tuesday and Sheffield for John Simm’s Hamlet on Wednesday. I didn’t make either trip myself, but some critics were also been lured to Liverpool on Thursday for Northern Broadsides’ production of The Game and then shunted over to Lancaster for their production of George Orwell’s 1984; in fact I had visited Liverpool the day before on another mission entirely, to see Will Russell’s Our Day Out.

And then there are the one-offs that I also try to squeeze in: on Friday, that took me to the Garrick for the West End concert debut of Broadway composer Jason Robert Brown, who I’ve previously seen do shows at the New Players and Purcell Room; and on Sunday, to see an all-star concert to celebrate the work of another younger American composer Scott Alan at the New Players.

It was ironic, Brown noted, that he was appearing at a West End theatre when he is yet to have a full run of a show at one, though in fact the producers behind his appearance here, Neil Eckersley and Paul Spicer, had brought The Last 5 Years to the Duchess for a week before now; but it’s even more ironic, surely, that the Alan concert should be celebrating a composer who is yet to have a show staged on either Broadway or in the West End.

Yet both Brown and Alan have big followings over here. In fact, Brown is the closest that the musical theatre has to a composer who is not only the best performer advocate for his own work, but also has a geeky rock star charisma that ideally matches the alternately acerbic and longing views of relationships his songs so beautifully articulate. He was thrillingly joined by Broadway’s Anika Noni Rose, whose unforced radiance and luminous voice reminds me of Audra McDonald - and my own pantheon of praise doesn’t get higher than that, trust me.

Alan, meanwhile, is perhaps the new David Friedman — a composer with shows perpetually in development, but who writes great self-contained songs for them that singers love to sing, making him the king of cabaret writers. Like Friedman, whose greatest exponent was the late, great Nancy LaMott, there’s a heavy emphasis on ballads in Alan’s work, and many of them sound curiously like Wicked out-takes. Alan, too, has his own star exponent in Shoshana Bean, an alumnus of the Broadway Wicked; and the Wicked connection is amplified by the presence here of such local stars of the show like the wonderful Louise Dearman and Ashleigh Gray.

Alan certainly draws on the combined might of the West End and Broadway stages being represented in the West End at the moment: other guests included Broadway’s Sierra Boggess and Patina Miller (both currently in London in Love Never Dies and Sister Act respectively, and here taking a night off from those shows to deliver better songs than they get there), and West Enders Alex Gaumond (currently in Legally Blonde), dashing Hadley Fraser, and Stuart Matthew Price, whose new solo CD “All Things in Time” is a glorious celebration of new musical theatre writing that brings together both Jason Robert Brown and Scott Alan, plus British writers like Stiles and Drewe, Laurence Mark Whthe, Douglas Irvine, Grant Olding and Richard Beadle and a couple of songs from Broadway’s brilliant Next to Normal (which as regular readers of this blog will know is a private obsession of mine).

But it was also a real treat in Alan’s concert to see Grainne Renihan again, too: a wonderful take-over as Florence in the original production of Chess in the 80s, who subsequently also did several stints as Fantine in Les Miserables, I’ve not seen or heard of her for years. It was wonderful to have her back.

And talking of Les Miz: just two nights after seeing the return of the show to the Barbican, where it all began, but in the new revised touring version, I returned to the original production myself on Saturday evening at the Queen’s. And as much as I admired the new Les Miz, the old Miz is still the biz. The epic grandeur of Nunn and Caird’s production - so beautifully designed by John Napier - may require a lot of gliding on and off of big setpieces instead of the simple painterly slide projections of the new version, but it gives it a scale and style lacking in the leaner tour.

But the reason I went back was not to make comparisons, but to see Broadway’s brilliant Norm Lewis - whom I’ve seen on his home territory in most of his major roles, from Off-Broadway’s A New Brain to his last Broadway appearance earlier this year in the company of Sondheim on Sondheim — and Alfie Boe doing a dry-run for their appearance this coming weekend in the 02 gala concert version of Les Miserables as Javert and Valjean. Unfortunately I won’t be able to go to the 02 as I’ll be in New York, so this was the closest I could get to seeing them; but it also meant seeing them far closer up than I’d no doubt see them in the 02 anyway, and they make a spectacular pairing. Not since the 10th anniversary Royal Albert Hall pairing of Colm Wilkinson, recreating his original role as Valjean, and Philip Quast (from the original Australian cast) as Javert, has there been a pair of equals like it.