Front Row

Surprising musicals: new musicals are packing in audiences - and some with quite unlikely subjects. Whilst the classic Broadway musical, like 42nd Street, Guys and Dolls, and Oklahoma!, remain as popular as ever, there’s now a musical based on Bake Off, and the plot of Operation Mincemeat is itself a plot - to hoodwink the Nazis with a corpse in disguise. Critic David Benedict, Natasha Hodgson, co-writer of Operation Mincemeat, and Matthew Iliffe, Assistant Director of Assassins, discuss what’s happening with the musical.Eric Whitacre is one of the world’s most popular living composers. He specialises in choral music and is a virtual choir pioneer, uniting thousands of singers all over the globe. He talks to Samira Ahmed about Home, his new album with acclaimed vocal ensemble Voces8.Plus, the Women’s Prize For Fiction. In the last of our interviews from authors on the shortlist, we speak to Laline Paull - whose novel Pod explores sealife in the Indian Ocean, with themes of war and migration under the shadow o