There is no shortage of theatre spaces in London, of course, of all shapes, sizes and all-too-often, states of disrepair. Some of this is being addressed - subsidised houses from the Royal Court to the Royal Opera House and London Coliseum, have been able to draw on a combination of lottery funds and private fundraising to invest handsomely in their futures, while next week sees the unveiling of Cameron Mackintosh’s latest privately-funded refurbishment to one of his theatres, Wyndham’s.

But while another of Mackintosh’s schemes to create a new studio space above the Queens’ Theatre that he was going to call the Sondheim Theatre seem to have been put on hold, we have a major vacuum in the West End for mid-scale commercial houses that could be the equivalent of off-Broadway in offering the sorts of seating capacities that could allow shows to run profitably for limited runs, but not require the full financial commitments of the West End proper. (The smallest West End theatres, from the New Ambassadors and Duchess to Fortune and St Martin’s, have each become gridlocked by long-running hits that show no signs of shifting now, thus taking them out of the availability pool).

ATG’s Trafalgar Studios was the first major intervention of a West End theatre chain to create this kind of interim space.

It’s an occupational hazard of going to the theatre professionally that you’re going to have bad nights from time to time; but at least I can remind myself that I’ve not paid for my tickets to add a waste of money to a waste of time and compound the disappointment. And I might be able to do some good, too, and try to spare others the pain by reporting on it.

But it’s also always a matter of degree. As I came out of the Shakespeare’s Globe opening last night of Glyn Maxwell’s Liberty, I ran into the FT’s Sarah Hemming and said to her, “That’s the worst night I’ve ever spent here.” She replied, “Did you not see We the People? That was far worse!” I did indeed miss it — luckily for me (and lots of other critics), there was a first night clash with a production of Odets’ Awake and Sing! at the Almeida that night, so as I reported here, I dodged a theatrical bullet.

There was no such luck last night for a strong showing of first night critics, including Michael Billington, Charles Spencer, Paul Taylor, Quentin Letts and Susannah Clapp,

I like to think of this blog as my daily fibre: something that anchors my journalistic day by its regularity. But as well as writing here, and for other websites, too, from playbill.com to occasional Guardian blogs, I am a voracious consumer of online content, in a way that I once used to of newspapers (and still am, to a degree, especially on weekends, when I routinely buy four or five Sunday papers). At least online you are, electricity usage apart, being green - as long as you don’t print any of it out.

But while most of the national press are excellent at posting their content online - with occasional anomalies, like the fact that the Telegraph fail to post their Sunday arts content there - and keeping it current, it’s an inevitable fact of life that elsewhere, blogs and sites born in the initial enthusiasm of their creators, gradually fall into disuse and disarray. Of course, for many if not most of them, they are an unpaid hobby - or a shop window of links for paid work they do elsewhere (like the one that the excellent Scottish theatre critic Mark Fisher keeps here).

So I’m not about to hound them.

You may be forgiven for thinking that the summer never arrived at all, but now that August 31 - the last official day of summer, according to meteorologists — has come and gone, at least we can stop hoping for a better one to finally materialise now. In 2007 the papers shouted headlines that trumpeted the “worst summer in living memory”, and this year things have been little better: as The Times reported on Saturday, “Official figures show British summer was dull and wet (as if we didn’t know)”. Though the full month’s statistics were yet to be analysed, the story pointed out that “Met Office statistics show rainfall this summer is already up to 50 per cent higher than normal and August is on course to have the fewest hours of sunshine since records began.”

But this isn’t, of course, a weather blog but a theatre one - except when you’re in Edinburgh and can’t avoid getting regular soakings, as I discovered the moment I arrived there in August and five of the wettest days I’ve ever spent there followed, or are heading to the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, as I blogged here when I was heading to the opening night of GIgi. At least I had to only worry for a single night, and it all turned out all right on that night; I can only imagine how Timothy Sheader must be feeling to wake up to days like this morning’s downpours, when Gigi still has a fortnight to run.

But if it’s time to officially write off the summer, in every sense, September always sees the official start of the new theatre season, on both sides of the Atlantic.

I don’t usually post a second daily entry here, but the news of the premature death yesterday of theatrical visionary Ken Campbell, at the age of 66, means that my own rule needs to be broken. But then Campbell broke the rules all the time; the Guardian’s Michael Billington once called him “British theatre’s antic visionary”, while the headline to the same paper’s obituary labels him “one of the strangest people in Britain.”

That obituary, by Michael Coveney, calls him “was one of the most original and unclassifiable talents in the British theatre of the past half-century. He was a writer, director and monologist, a genius at producing shows on a shoestring and honing the improvisational capabilities of the actors who were brave enough to work with him”.

Disney’s High School Musical may have finally evacuated the Hammersmith Apollo yesterday after its London summer run there, though we probably shouldn’t be too relieved: it’s bound to be back, and even if it isn’t, a separate touring production is still on the road, with dates currently booked to May 2009. And if we’re yet to see High School Musical 2 transferred to the stage, next month sees the cinematic release of High School Musical 3, so the franchise is far from running out of steam. It’s what Disney, of course, do best: they create a money-making property, and drain it for every financial opportunity going. (High School Musical is even a Playstation karaoke game - though as Metro recently blissfully reported, the lyric booklet that accompanies it apparently printed “counterpart” as “cunterpart” to the song “Fabulous”, which is simply fabulous).

I previously blogged here about how seeing the opening of High School Musical at Hammersmith made me feel as if I was having an out-of-body experience. As I admitted then, “the audience were tuning into something that I simply wasn’t on the same wavelength of.” It even made me rashly declare that I suddenly felt sympathy with Tim Walker of the Sunday Telegraph when he declared that he’d “never really understood why critics are supposed to go to musicals…. What is more, it is inhumane to make us go.”

We are undoubtedly blessed in London to have some of the greatest theatre buildings in the world. It is an amazing heritage it is sometimes easy to take for granted, and a heritage that sadly isn’t always being honoured by their gatekeepers — the people who actually own the buildings and are happy to cash in the profit they generate, but not re-invest it in maintaining them, which has sadly become a regular hobbyhorse of mine.

Of course there’s a big difference between the buildings held publicly and those owned privately - the public ones have been able to draw on lottery funds to assist their refurbishment and redevelopment plans. But that is as it should be; they are using public money to properly resource buildings that have variously become vibrant public spaces. Head to the National, day or night, for instance, and it has long been open to all comers, with coffee bars, bookshops and exhibitions to visit even if you haven’t got a ticket for a show.

And there are plenty of shows that don’t even need tickets.

Musical theatre is a powerful muse. As Franklin Shepherd, a composer tells his lyricist collaborator Charley Kringas as they start out on their career writing musicals together in Merrily We Roll Along (which in fact happens at the end of the show, since the action travels backwards in time), “Musicals are popular. They’re a great way to state important ideas. Ideas that could make a difference. Charley, we can change the world.”

Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the score to Merrily, may not have changed the world - but his shows have certainly changed musical theatre. And though Merrily was one of his most notorious Broadway flops when it first premiered there in 1981 (and ran for just 16 performances, some seven more than the even bigger flop of Sondheim’s 1964 show Anyone Can Whistle), it has found an extended life far beyond it, not least when Michael Grandage staged it at the Donmar Warehouse in 2000. Merrily comes from the inside track of the pain and pleasure of creating musicals - both in its story of the fractured relationships that lie behind them and the show’s own fractured journey towards claiming its place as an essential part of Sondheim’s repertoire. It is therefore a testament to the fact that flop shows can be reclaimed - and proves that different ideas about producing them can make a difference, too.

I thought of some of this as I watched last night’s premiere of a major new touring production of The Witches of Eastwick, another musical that had a difficult birth.

No, I’ve not been on a plane for a while. And I’m not in a hurry to do so again, either, after seeing Charlie Victor Romeo on the Edinburgh Fringe this year, an utterly terrifying recreation of the ‘black box’ conversations from the cockpit of planes that have crashed, most of them with fatal results. As Chris Wilkinson wrote in a Guardian blog, it was quite possibly the greenest show in Edinburgh, at least in terms of its impact: “Ironically, the show that might actually have the most positive impact on reducing our carbon footprints, is Charlie Victor Romeo a piece that doesn’t mention the environment once… It’s a bleak, depressing bit of work - and once you have seen it, you are not going to want to set foot in a plane anytime soon.”

But if a theatre show is striving to keep me out of aeroplanes, aeroplanes are about to become the latest frontier for getting punters into the theatre. According to a story in Variety, flight attendants may soon be prowling the aisles in the sky asking, “Coffee? Tea? Tickets to Broadway?”

So the Olympics finally ended on Sunday, and now the baton has to be picked up by London. Since the television is hardly ever switched on in my house - except to watch DVDs of my current obsession, Curb Your Enthusiasm — my own enthusiasm for the entire Olympics story was distinctly curbed and I didn’t see any of it till it was very nearly over. But I finally tuned in on Sunday afternoon for the closing ceremony, since I was curious to see the much-heralded British contribution to them that I had even previewed here last week. But if I expressed the thought that “If the current Olympic victories are putting a smile on everyone’s faces, then Sunday’s closing ceremony is sure to keep it there”, I was definitely premature in those hopes.

The discrepancy between China’s seemingly limitless budget to stage the rest of its spectacular closing ceremony and how far we’ve got to go was cruelly demonstrated by this utterly feeble, eight-minute “handover” sequence and only proves that they’ve given us an immensely tough act to follow.

“There is something wrong when some of the best new British plays become no more than boutique studio events, only available to early bookers and insiders,” wrote playwright David Eldridge in The Guardian this week. It is exactly the same problem when some of the most anticipated classical productions, too, like the Donmar Warehouse’s Othello last year, inevitably sell out instantly, which its director Michael Grandage acknowledged in an Evening Standard interview “did turn into a bit of a bad news story because people couldn’t get in.”

But Grandage has rejected the claim that I made in a Guardian blog that the Donmar is “virtually a private members’ club, with membership and private donor schemes making tickets even harder to come by for the general public”.

I have just been sent a series of cuttings on theatre criticism by a friend, and in one of them the writer declares, “The biggest single obstacle to adequate dramatic criticism today is lack of space. Clement Scott had a column and a half at his disposal after an important first night. Now the allocation is one of two paragraphs or a weekly column to be shared among three or four plays. Under such conditions the dignity of dramatic criticism is difficult to sustain.”

No, this wasn’t written recently, but over 60 years ago, by someone called John W. Collier. So nothing has changed - and yet everything has changed. On the one hand, I am constantly fighting for space in my print outlets - sometimes I have as few as 110-120 words for a careful dissection of a major opening in, say, the London Paper or the American magazine Entertainment Weekly, but then the job becomes about making every one of them count; and even the weekly round-up I do for the Sunday Express often means cramming four or five shows into just 500 words.

On the other hand, I am always grateful that the theatre is covered at all in each of these places.

The front pages of every paper today are trumpeting the success of Team GB in China, and in particular that of triple gold medal winner, Edinburgh bike racer Chris Hoy. But there’s another British Olympic victory in the making, and it’s the off-track one of groups of young British actors, singer and dancers variously making their mark in Beijing’s cultural Olympiad celebrations.

The National Youth Theatre, who are now in the midst of their annual summer residency at Soho Theatre, have also been represented in Beijing as the only British company to have been invited by the Chinese Ministry of Culture to take part in the Chinese International Youth Arts Festival, where they presented a production of The Merchant of Venice for which 25 young actors from the UK were joined by 12 cast members from Beijing as part of a remarkable cultural exchange. And they’ll be represented again at Sunday’s closing ceremony, when the Olympic Flag is handed over from Beijing to London, to perform the National Anthem.

Of course anything and everything is a respite after Edinburgh; but after that massive, indigestible feast, we’re in the midst of a theatrical famine of theatrical openings in London. As always, it’s the lull before the September storm blows in again, so we should enjoy it while we can, I suppose; but it’s a perennial complaint on this blog that clashes in the first night schedules mean that we’re sent chasing our tails so often, yet right now the diary is more or less a blank, apart from the opening of three plays in the National Youth Theatre’s annual summer season at Soho Theatre this week.

It means, however, that there is time for a bit of catch-up - and a bit of relaxation, too. Last Friday, for instance, I finally got to the Scoop for this year’s free outdoor theatre season, now in its 6th year there, after I had to abort a previous attempt a couple of Sundays before owing to bad weather. And its amazing to see what a “commercial” success it is, at least in terms of bums on seats (or at any rate bums on hard stone, not much alleviated by the thin foam cushions they rent out for a pound each) - the place was packed, and though the play was Lorca’s difficult, overwrought Blood Wedding, most stayed with it, too, for the 90 minute duration.

But the most surprising thing of all is just how attentive, inclusive and eclectic this audience is, too.