Brits have made a good showing in the nominations for the Tony Awards, announced earlier this week with six shows that originated in London (or Chichester) picking up nearly a third of the total number of nominations to take 35 nods (out of the 112 in all). But with thirty more shows produced overall on Broadway in the season that the announcement of the nominations now brings to an end, that actually proves the disproportionate influence and quality of Brit-originated shows and/or personnel, that I previously noted on a Guardian blog here.

In fact, with ten other locally-produced new shows this season entirely snubbed in the nominations, the remaining 77 nominees are spread amongst the remaining 20 non-British born productions, though several of them again go to Brits in them, like Eve Best for The Homecoming and Ben Daniels for Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

But the frontrunners are Broadway’s own.

In the fourth act of Pygmalion, Colonel Pickering complains, “Well, I feel a bit tired. It’s been a long day. The garden party, a dinner party, and the opera! Rather too much of a good thing.” And I realised, hearing this line at yesterday’s matinee, that he might have been talking about my sort of day, one had actually led me - for the first time in memory - to actually be late for that performance.

I’m usually obsessive about time-keeping — and particularly about curtain up times — so I invariably aim to arrive at the theatre at least half an hour before a performance is due to start; turning up late for a performance as a critic is like getting late to the office for others. But of course everyone does it, from time to time; there was one occasion when the Telegraph’s Charlie Spencer was browsing in a record shop before a Donmar Warehouse press night, only to realise his watch had stopped - and he’d missed the first half hour!

It’s one thing, though, for the audience to be late, but quite another for the actors.

Is there an original pop musical in the world stuffed with better melodies than Chess? I can’t think of one - yet it has never become the megahit onstage that the score, at least, promises. It’s ironic that, a decade to virtually the day that the original production of Chess closed at the Prince Edward Theatre (on April 8, 1989, after a run of a month short of three years), another musical that also featured songs by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus should open at the same theatre, on April 6, 1999, and still be going strong in London and around the world nearly yet another decade later: that show, of course, is Mamma Mia!, and indeed partly owes its very existence to Chess, since its producer Judy Craymer first met Benny and Bjorn when she worked on the development of Chess with that show’s original producer Robert Fox.

But whereas Mamma Mia! already had a truckload of established pop hits to accompany its passage to the stage, Chess had to establish its own, and lyricist Tim Rice - at whose instigation the show had been written, and whose inspired idea it had been to invite Andersson and Ulvaeus to collaborate with him on it - followed a route that had served him well with his earlier collaborations with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita: a concept recording was made first to introduce the score to the world, and created two fast hits, ‘I Know Him So Well’ and ‘One Night in Bangkok’. And then, in 1984, two years ahead of its stage premiere, a concert version was taken on the road.

For the last two nights at the Royal Albert Hall, the show has now come full circle and was once again a celebrity powerhouse concert - a format in which it has never been bettered.

It was the critics who are universally blamed for the original fate of The Birthday Party, when - after a couple of encouraging regional dates in Cambridge, then Oxford - it came to what was then the Lyric Opera House in Hammersmith on May 19, 1958, and abruptly closed just eight performances later after a run of only a week. Pinter himself wrote later that year to the editor of a university paper, “The response given to The Birthday Party in Oxford and Cambridge was most stimulating, involving a high degree of participation on the part of both audiences…. The remarkable difference in reaction to The Birthday Party on the part of the London daily critics and the audience in Oxford and Cambridge constitutes for me one of the most interesting features of the progress of the play. (There was, of course, no audience in London; the abstention counselled by nine or eleven critics was heeded sufficiently to bring about the abrupt closure).”

But it was also, of course, a critic who famously made people think differently about it, too.

London was in glorious weather this weekend; and I was in (mostly) glorious theatre for much of it. Even the Barbican Centre becomes nearly palatable in the good weather: though the lakeside terrace may be an entirely man-made oasis in the midst of the bleakly (dys)functional urban cityscape it is part of, but at least you get the illusion of nature. And on Friday night, going there to hear the premiere of a new Dominic Muldowney piece being presented as part of a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert, I met the reason for me going to it at all out on the terrace: Philip Quast was mingling informally with his family, before it began.

That’s the great thing about open spaces like this on warm sunny evenings: it democratises the concert going experience. (And the BBC Symphony chorus were also out of the terrace earlier, doing a group photoshot). But if it was a nice discovery to find Philip out on the terrace, it was, of course, even more special to hear him inside, taking on such a demanding new classical piece so commandingly.

The West End is forever in danger of being turned into a giant TV variety studio: three West End musicals, of course, have already had their original leads cast by public vote on reality television, with a fourth on the way; while The Sound of Music replaced its TV found star, Connie Fisher, with Summer Strallen, who was first introduced into the show not on the stage of the London Palladium but via a set up on TV’s Hollyoaks. Plays, too, are regularly cast nowadays from the ranks of inexperienced TV and film actors.

Last week’s opening episode of the new series of Channel 4’s Peepshow made surprisingly prescient fun of this. Mark and Jeremy arrange to go on a double-date to the theatre - and Jeremy assures his sceptical friend that the prospect of going to see a play wasn’t something to be afraid of: “It’s all different now,” he says. “They’ve moved on. They use proper actors, you know, Americans, and people off the telly, and they’re all based on films, so its fine.”

Since Jeremy is played by Robert Webb - who next week makes his West End debut in Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig, alongside My Family’s Kris Marshall and Gavin and Stacey’s Joanna Page - he is literally proving the point.

The last musical of the current Broadway season that opened officially on Tuesday night has also become the first to close: the opening night for Glory Days, that arrived on Broadway after premiering at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, was also its last night. Its producers said in a statement yesterday, “We adore Glory Days and everyone connected with this production. Sadly, given the over-night reviews and our low advance sales, we believe it is prudent to close the show on Broadway immediately.”

It was clearly less prudent to open the show there at all, and will mark the total write-off of the reported $2.5m capitalization that it cost to bring it there.

Even though the arrival of the summer, at last, means that we have to start suffering the curse of unventilated, non air-conditioned theatres again, we were at least spared one result of that yesterday: the shirt of the Evening Standard critic actually stayed on all day for the Henry VI trilogy at the Roundhouse. But that’s because it was Fiona Mountford, not Nicholas de Jongh, who was in the hot seat (in every sense).

Though Nick had reviewed the first half of the trilogy, it was Fiona who took over for the second half. (In another job share, Ian Shuttleworth was reviewing for the FT, whereas his colleague Sarah Hemming had reviewed the first half, though you’d have thought it would make sense for the same critic to review the whole experience since there are so many overlaps and parallels between them). Last summer, as in previous years, the moment the temperature went up, Nick’s shirt lost most of its buttons, as I noted here at the time; most of us stay resolutely buttoned-up yesterday, though I noticed Time Out’s Caroline McGinn sporting a shoulderless number, while Maxwell Cooter from Whatsonstage.com was wearing shorts.

In fact everyone in the audience noticed Max’s shorts, since in the middle play he was hauled onstage to act as executioner - a nice irony, of course, given that he was reviewing!

That headline, of course, is Mrs Lovett’s declaration to the customer that finally wanders into her shop after she hasn’t seen one for weeks - and discovers that even she thinks that she’s peddling “probably the worst pies in London.” Last week, I became that customer - no, I’m not referring to my experience at the Vodafone shop in Manchester, where you can’t afford to be in a rush or hurry, either, since even with just two other customers in the vast store (and counting a staff of at least seven) I still had to wait nearly 20 minutes to be served last Thursday. Rather, I became the onstage stooge to Maria Friedman as she sang “The Worst Pies in London” at the Menier Chocolate Factory on Saturday evening.

Of course, having seen the show before, I knew that someone gets chosen - and indeed, a friend who had also been before muttered as we returned to the theatre that some poor sod was about to be surprised. I naively thought I was safe because I was sat towards the back - directly, it turns out, in front of Trevor Nunn (who had directed Maria in her last West End and Broadway outing in The Woman in White). But Maria had spotted me in her second number, when she enters from the rear of the auditorium and had sung directly to me; so she honed in on me. After the show, I discovered from Trevor’s daughter, whom he had come with, that “dad thought she was coming for him!”

But Maria had nunn of that.

Confession time: I have nothing to say today! And, just as shocking, I didn’t go to the theatre last night. So, in fact, the two might be related.

I’m not usually, as regular readers will know, lost for words, and there’s invariably something happening, somewhere, that I can turn into a column. But life - or what passes for my life, in the form of the theatre - hasn’t delivered today. Hopefully normal service will be resumed after the bank holiday. But I’m probably also grinding to a halt in anticipation of that weekend, which I’ve actually started already by coming up to Manchester for a couple of nights.

David Hare makes a particularly revealing comment in his programme note for the adaptation of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking that he first directed on Broadway last year and has now brought to the National Theatre (where it opened last night) about what he thought when he was first approached to do the job: “It was easy enough to spend a few hours reading a book about death which you could let flop in one hand while nursing a scotch in the other. But how would it be to spend months in the gruelling Broadway system - endless previews, needless hysteria, erratic critics - in the company of a 72-year-old first-time playwright whose agony of grief was plainly so raw? Wasn’t the prospect… well, rather austere? So it’s hard to explain my own reaction - the one you have before you can think - was that the whole thing sounded, in prospect, highly enjoyable.”

That apparent perversity - of seeing pleasure in dealing with pain - is also one that underpins the whole love-hate relationship that artists like Hare have with Broadway itself, and which he alludes to himself in calling it a gruelling system. But apart from the narcissism of seeing it as all about him - and why shouldn’t it be, I suppose, given that is writing about his choice of whether to take it on or not - there’s also his complaints about that system, which he promptly itemises.

In the musical 42nd Street, director Julian Marsh famously declares: “musical comedy: the most glorious words in the English language”. I often agree - but there are also four more that are also guaranteed to put a spring in your step when you go to the theatre: “90 minutes - no interval”.

On Monday night, the Bush opened a new play Tinderbox that was prefaced by the PR issuing the dreaded words, “two-and-a-half hours”, but at least he added, “we’re doing drinks in the interval”. It’s a long time to spend in a theatre if the play doesn’t deliver, and as Michael Billington wrote in his Guardian review yesterday, “While it is refreshing to find a young writer delivering a two-act play rather than opting for the comfort zone of 90 minutes, I can’t help feeling that she stretches her basic joke a bit too far.”

So it was a pleasure to go to the Royal Court last night and indeed be told that the opening of Martin Crimp’s The City would run for just 90 minutes without an interval.

Part of the point of the fringe is that it is always full of surprises. But it’s downright shocking that, hot on the heels of the makeover of the King’s Head that finally has seats that actually face the stage for the first time in my memory, the Bush has now also been completely overhauled, too.

Gone are the fixed, L-shaped seating on two sides; though a previous refurbishment that brought in benches that actually had backs to them was shocking enough, the new rows of benches are actually padded for comfort - even if, at the moment, one’s feet don’t entirely touch the ground.

That, Josie Rourke told me last night, was a design flaw that she assured me would be corrected for the next production; they’ve been constructed a little too high. But they bring with them the possibility of being entirely flexible in this space. For the current production Tinderbox, that opened last night, they were arranged in seven rows facing a pretty gilded proscenium arch that even had curtains hiding the stage! Yes, the Bush has turned itself into a miniature West End theatre!

It’s probably just an ironic joke, but whether we need another West End-shaped theatre, albeit one that only seats 80 people, is another question.

No, I’ve not gone all Pentecostal on you. But, at least according to the annual Sunday Times Rich List published yesterday, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber - the 101st richest person in Britain, with an estimated wealth of £750m - is richer than the Queen (264th in the list, £320m). So is Sir Cameron Mackintosh (£184th, £450m). So, there’s more money in theatre - or at least musical theatre - than a combination of inherited wealth and state-funded privilege. Perhaps, as I’ve urged before, His Lordship (as they quaintly refer to him on I’ll Do Anything) can use some of that accumulated wealth towards a proper refurbishment of his theatres.

The list is, of course, largely speculative - without direct access to the personal accounts of every individual listed, it cannot be otherwise - but it makes educated guesses to produce a 110-page glossy magazine for the rest of us mere mortals to gaze and gloat over. Of course, there’s always an irresistible fascination with other people’s money, but I’m fascinated by the overall absence of many other theatre people here.