The box offices on the avenue are clicking with transactions, audiences are quivering in anticipation of Derek Jacobi's gripping Don Carlos, which has just arrived from Sheffield, and Cameron Mackintosh has just opened a new cabaret venue. Suddenly, the West End seems hotter than ever and theatre is officially sexy. Even people not normally connected are eager to be involved.
We go for a family lunch with the columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who is about to start rehearsing her 70-minute, one-woman show on Shakespeare, which she is performing under the auspices of the RSC at the Soho Theatre. As a girl growing up in Uganda, she was fixated with the stage and adored acting, Shakespeare in particular. In a school production of Romeo and Juliet, an Asian/African version of the Montague/Capulet feud, she played Juliet against a black Ugandan Romeo. The show was acclaimed in a pan-African drama contest and Yasmin won Best Actress. The prize? A place at Rada in London.
She never took up the award. Her father was so furious about his daughter being on stage that he forbade any more notions of acting. He never talked to her again, bar a postcard she received a week before he died.
Understandably, Alibhai-Brown is more than committed to getting up in a theatre in London and speaking Shakespeare at last. She has already performed her show in Newcastle and Stratford-upon-Avon, where she could be spotted nervously pacing the streets, muttering her lines, several hours before she was due on stage.
The next day I have coffee with Ruby Wax, who is also about to star in a show in the West End, a production of Roald Dahl's The Witches. Wax is an RSC alumna, but at the opposite end of the blank-verse enthusiasm spectrum from Alibhai-Brown.
"I can't do Shakespeare, and I certainly couldn't when I was in the RSC," she confesses. "When I did Shakespeare, it wasn't comfortable. It's not my talent. I don't have the voice for it, and it was embarrassing. Whereas the witch sounds right. She has a great BIG voice and a little tiny voice, and sounds like she is from Vienna. Actually, she sounds like my mum. I think it will be fine. I have a whole gang of witches I use as my pets. Hopefully a lot of homosexuals will come. I appeal to homosexuals, you know."
Wax seems delighted to be ditching her outrageous television persona, at least for a time. "Ruby isn't me at all. I am tired of it. It's not who I am, and I'm bored of being her," she says. "In the beginning, when I did all my TV documentaries, going around Russia, things like that, it was fascinating. I just met interesting people and talked to them. Then I had to bump it up because the BBC said I couldn't do documentaries any more: I had to do celebrities."
Ruby certainly knows how to tell it like it is. "You want to make a living and you want to be famous, so you let it happen. I didn't say no. If they were to send me off to Afghanistan, I could ditch the goony persona, which isn't me anyway. But the BBC doesn't do documentaries any more, doesn't have time for that sort of thing any more. It's all about celebrity. And I can't do my televised dinner parties any more. I did them for four years and I ran out of A-list people. I don't mean A-list in terms of famous, I mean A-list in terms of smart. It happens."
