Though posting here every day has become an increasingly significant part of what I do — and certainly the first job that I complete each day — it is still far from my only job; so I was intrigued to read Charlotte Higgins, who has been The Guardian’s arts correspondent for the last four years, state in a feature in The Guardian on Wednesday that after being “a reporter who tried to fit blogging in around the edges of my life, I’m about to move online. From this week, blogging will take its place at the heart of what I do.”

Charlotte has duly launched a rolling blog, where she can potentially post updates throughout the day.

Nowadays, however, it’s primarily Stratford-upon-Avon and Chichester only that can count on getting most of the big guns out (and perhaps my gun just isn’t big enough, but I have been negligent about getting to Chichester at all this year so far, though am heading there next week to finally catch Six Characters in Search of an Author and The Music Man, even as The Circle and the Ronald Harwood double-bill of Taking Sides and Collaboration are also about to open, so I’ll be chasing my tail on those, though The Circle is already booked for a national tour after Chichester, so I’ll catch it then).

You can be sure, of course, that we’ll all be at Stratford for the RSC opening of the David Tennant Hamlet on August 5, even if it means interrupting the early days of the Edinburgh Fringe for some.

She kept warning us that it made for a very dense, intense collection of difficult songs; but Barb, as ever, brings both great personal warmth and such a richly heightened sense of drama and theatricality to them that she takes us on a dark journey with that material effortlessly.

Nothing tells you more about a playwright, either, than the kind of smug, easy literary put-downs that in Joanna Murray-Smith’s play have Margot and Allende apparently swapping quotes on each other’s book covers that declared each other a genius, but then Margot revoking her fictitious one here: Molly exclaims of Allende, “She’s fantastic!”; and Margot replies, “Marvellous, yes. Marvellously… marvellous. Full of… marvelosity. But if you ask me, no genius”. Mind you, who needs fellow writers to put you down when your involvement in a show like Zorro proves the case.

But it kicked off a weekend of many changes of pace and place, though the highlight had to be seeing the show-tune loving, lonely earth robot Wall-e, propelled into a journey into outer-space, whose favourite thing is watching endless re-runs of songs from the film version of Hello, Dolly! — “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment”, both of which, incidentally, featured Michael Crawford. And it only took a moment, of course, to fall in love with Wall-e, too. (How many of us seek refuge when we’re feeling similarly lonely in showtunes? I could certainly identify!)

None of which, of course, accounts for the ongoing commercial success of the likes of We Will Rock You in the face of overwhelmingly negative reviews, but then it is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. But I have a far more serious complaint: critics giving good reviews to bad shows can be just as damaging.

That’s no surprise, I suppose, given the numerical dominance of the West End by its musicals over its plays; though as SOLT Chief Exec Richard Pulford previously put the record straight for me last year, there are actually significantly more plays produced annually than musicals overall, and that’s even the case when you take the National, Donmar and Royal Court out of the equation.

In fact the ongoing productivity of the West End is a thing of wonder.

Inside the auditorium, too, it turned out that the theatre owners were also following London Underground’s lead - while some stations are benefiting this summer from some 40 industrial-sized fans being installed around the network, the Garrick had ten portable air-conditioning units dotted around the auditorium desperately trying to cool the place before the show planned to heat it up again.

So instead of hearing me speculate on the latest producing disaster at the Arts Theatre - where All Bob’s Women had only recently already come and quickly gone after some of the most lethal reviews in recent memory — you can read about the fate of Jay Johnson’s The Two and Only for yourself on his personal blog.

And it makes for extremely illuminating reading. For, unlike All Bob’s Women, this is a show which arrived in London with a Tony-Award winning Broadway pedigree and though it had not been reviewed very widely (and for that the difficulty must come from the fact that that the show fell into a black hole somewhere between theatre and comedy critics), those that did have been favourable, notably including a four-star rave in The Guardian. But on the same day that The Guardian review appeared last Tuesday came the fatal blow.

As someone with a foot in both camps - so to speak - and was name-checked as such in the feature for, it is of course something I am watching closely. In fact, most critics are watching our backs a lot of the time - not just for the fear of a knife being plunged into it by an aggrieved theatre practitioner (or reader, if we have any) that disagree with us, but also because it has reminded us of our accountability.

Unlike last year’s Manchester International Festival, which made an immediate splash on the artistic consciousness (in an admittedly much more concentrated time period) - and which sees one of its hits, the Damon Albarn scored Monkey - Journey to the West come to the Royal Opera House later this month - Liverpool has felt, at least from afar, as if its concerns have been more about local branding. It feels like there’s a lot of brightly-coloured packaging, but not a lot inside.

But yesterday I went to Liverpool and unwrapped a perfectly-formed gift inside that packaging.

I see that Lyn Gardner made similar points in her Guardian review, and also compared it to The Lion King and Dirty Dancing at the same time: “Julie Taymor’s stage version of The Lion King took the movie and gloriously reinvented it; High School Musical Live on Stage merely tries to cash in on demand. In effect it is a piece of live merchandising. It’s a product, not a production, and one which has a pile it high and flog it cheap mentality…. Will the deficiencies stop this being a spectacular success? No. Because like Dirty Dancing this show isn’t designed for anyone other than those who already have the movie and have bought the I Love Troy T-shirt from the Disney store. It’s not about art, but about artfully parting you from your cash. “

At least I wasn’t parted from my cash - only my time.

Yes, I know that I’m hardly the target audience for it, being roughly 30 to 35 years too old for its intended tweenage audience of 10-15, and it’s true, too, that I was feeling waves of nausea even before I sat down in the Apollo Hammersmith last night, having returned from Gran Canaria the day before with something of a fever, so perhaps I need to make allowances (yes, even critics are human sometimes!). But from the moment the curtain went up to literally deafening screams from the overwhelmingly youthful audience, I felt like a complete outsider.

But if I’ve been away from London theatre and my blog, it’s been fascinating to catch up, vicariously, with the annual theatrical marathon of New York Times chief critic Ben Brantley, who is in London for a month and filing a daily blog of his own about what he sees (and sometimes, who he sees - Ralph Fiennes was just down the row from him at Major Barbara at the National - and even what he eats: he has “bad and restless dreams” after seeing Anthony Neilson’s Relocated, adding, “and I don’t think it was just from eating a comforting slab of Fortnum and Mason treacle fudge”).

This isn’t the first year that Brantley has been blogging from London - he did it last year, too.

Things are more confusing on the Evening Standard where, in the absence of Nicholas de Jongh, another Nick - Curtis - pops up at some of the bigger openings, instead of the “official” deputy Fiona Mountford.

All of this is by way of explaining that I am away from today to this time next week, so I will not be appearing in this spot until tomorrow week, Tuesday July 8.