'Showstopping' set-pieces have audience 'in raptures' on first stop of global tour 

There is probably only one sung-through musical that could fill the Glasgow Hydro for one night, said Allan Radcliffe in The Times, let alone sell out the 12,000-capacity venue for four in a row. And that musical is "Les Misérables", which in its new, super-sized incarnation is in the UK as part of a global arena tour taking in some 15 countries.

Generating "an atmosphere somewhere between a rock concert and a football match", the show is truly spectacular, with thrilling lighting design, "seamless" choreography, a full-sized orchestra "floating serenely above the stage", and vast screens broadcasting the performers' faces. Yet for all the bombast, the evening is "at its most hypnotic in its virtuoso moments", such as the "showstopping rendition of 'Bring Him Home'" by Alfie Boe, as Jean Valjean.

It's a "gargantuan" staging, said Mark Brown in The Telegraph, yet there's minimal stage scenery. Instead, light shows – sometimes so over-the-top they're unintentionally comic – are left to do a lot of the work; and it can sometimes feel an awkward mix of concert and dramatic performance. Where it works best is in the "big, set-piece numbers" by solo performers: these are "universally fantastic", and bring the "enthralled" audience to its feet. Channah Hewitt has a glorious voice, and her "emotive rendering of Fantine's great song, 'I Dreamed a Dream', had the sold-out Clydeside audience in raptures". Michael Ball is superb as Javert, while Gavin Lee and Bonnie Langford are brilliantly wicked, and funny, as the Fagin-esque innkeeper Thénardier and his sarcastic wife.

What is remarkable, said Charles Pring in the Glasgow Times, is that even in this large venue, the passion of the performers shines through. Yes, the sheer scale of the production does make it that bit harder to feel the emotional connections between the characters. But this is still a "fantastic" show, "exhilarating and life-affirming" – and "precisely as spectacular as advertised".  

P&J Live, Aberdeen, 17-20 October (then touring to 5 January)

by Alan Hollinghurst    

Alan Hollinghurst's novels tend to appear at "spacious intervals of six or seven years", said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian. His latest – his first since "The Sparsholt Affair" (2017) – is a "compellingly fresh" bildungsroman, narrated by a gay, half-Burmese actor named Dave Win, who is looking back on his life from late middle age.

We first glimpse Win as a 13-year-old, visiting the posh family that has funded his scholarship to a public school in Berkshire. Next, we meet him aged 14 on a summer holiday in Devon, mesmerised by the "parade of known and unknown men".

Subsequent episodes recount undergraduate days in Oxford, early "theatrical triumphs" in London, a passionate relationship with another actor named Hector, who "leaves Dave behind", heartbroken. And there's a "tender" portrait of his "intensely private" mother, Avril. Through it all, what stands out is Hollinghurst's "capacity for appreciation": this is a novel that luxuriates in "the inexhaustible particularity" of people. It may be his "finest" yet.

As you'd expect, there are many "brilliantly observed" scenes, said Simon Schama in the Financial Times. No writer is better than Hollinghurst at evoking the "feel of things", and his eye for social comedy is "almost Austenian". Yet ultimately, "Our Evenings" suffers from being not much more than a "sequence of episodes". Over its 500-odd pages, Win's self-portrait becomes "oddly anaemic".

I disagree, said Valentine Cunningham in Literary Review. There is "narrative magic" in Win's recollections. A "wonderful example" of what Hollinghurst has always been good at, this novel also adds a welcome "new note": a moving sense of "time's depredations, and the inevitability of ageing and mortality". 

Free-spirited country music star who studied at Oxford 

A hard-drinking singer-songwriter with an outlaw spirit, Kris Kristofferson transformed the country music scene in the 1970s by bringing lyrical sophistication, and a "rarely heard candour and depth", to the genre, said The Irish Times. His songs were "steeped in a neo-romantic sensibility", and explored "freedom and commitment, alienation and desire, darkness and light". He recorded them all himself; but his vocals were raspy, and many were bigger hits when covered by other artists – from Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Gladys Knight to the Grateful Dead and Michael Bublé.

Notably, he wrote "Me and Bobby McGee", with its resonant refrain "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose/ Nothin', don't mean nothin' hon if it ain't free", which became a posthumous No. 1 hit for Janis Joplin (with whom he had a brief affair).

Charismatic and ruggedly good looking, Kristofferson then fell into acting. He was Billy the Kid in Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid", and the washed-up musician, opposite Barbra Streisand, in the 1976 version of "A Star Is Born"; but any hopes he had of becoming a leading man were dashed by his involvement in the career-tarnishing mega-flop "Heaven's Gate" (1980).

With his unkempt beard and habit of keeping a bottle of whisky tucked into his boots, he lived the life of a musical vagabond, said The Telegraph. Yet there was little in his background to suggest that career. Born in Texas in 1936, he was the son of a major general in the US air force, and was expected to follow suit. In high school, he excelled academically and at sport. He played rugby and American football at college before winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he earned a boxing Blue, wrote his thesis on William Blake, and made a fruitless attempt to launch a pop career.

Returning to the US, he married his first wife, Frances Beer, in 1961, and enlisted in the US air force, where he became a helicopter pilot. But in 1965, he turned down a post at the West Point Academy to try his luck as a songwriter in Nashville. This came as a blow to his wife, and precipitated their divorce; and proved the last straw for his parents, who disowned him. "Not many cats I knew bailed out like I did," he reflected in 1970. He'd been surprised by his parents' reaction: they'd known he wanted to be a writer. There again, he said, "I think they thought a writer was a guy in tweeds with a pipe." Struggling to sell his songs, he found work as a janitor at Columbia Recording Studios, where he recalled emptying ashtrays and wastepaper baskets as Bob Dylan recorded "Blonde on Blonde".

When his second child needed expensive medical treatment, he started flying helicopters again, for the oil industry. Legend has it that, in desperation, he landed one in Johnny Cash's back garden, and handed him a tape of his music. Cash was impressed, recorded one of his songs, and invited him to perform with him and his wife, June Carter Cash, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969, which kickstarted his career. Back in Nashville, he married the singer Rita Coolidge, with whom he recorded three duet albums, and teamed up with other songwriters including Willie Nelson. It was an exciting, creative period, he said – "kind of our Paris in the 1920s". He and Coolidge divorced in 1980. He was a great man but a rotten husband, she said. Around that time, he quit drinking, fearing that he was heading the same way as the whisky-sodden musician he'd played in "A Star Is Born".

From the 1980s, he used his music to promote left-wing causes; and in 1992, he famously defended Sinéad O'Connor after she caused uproar by tearing up a photograph of the Pope to protest against clerical sex abuse. "Maybe she's crazy, maybe she ain't," he wrote in his song "Sister Sinéad", "but so was Picasso, and so were the saints." By then, he was mainly performing with The Highwaymen, a country supergroup that he'd formed with his friends and fellow Nashville veterans Cash, Nelson and Waylon Jennings. He is survived by his third wife, Lisa, to whom he was married for the final 40 years of his life, and his eight children.