THERE's just a week to go before the hit musical Miss Saigon finishes its successful run at the Wales Millennium Centre, which has proved it can host a West End show for more than the customary fortnight offered by theatres in the provinces.

Cameron Mackintosh's new production of the Boublil and Schonberg tearjerker has bedded in well at the Principality's great new venue, one member of the company telling me it was the best performing space he had worked in.

The love story about a GI's relationship with a Vietnamese woman as Saigon prepares to fall to invading forces in 1975 has echoes of Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, but only echoes.

Tickets from £10 to £35 are available at the box office on 08700 402000.

Cut along to the Riverfront at Newport tomorrow night for One Night of Shakespeare with the BBC and the Shakespeare Schools Festival.

Schools will stage their own half-hour Shakespeare production in 100 theatres simultaneously across the UK. Using abridged half hour scripts, four will present their work in Newport at the same time as 396 other schools across England and Wales.

Soliloquys begin at 7pm - box office 01633 656757.

Sinfonia Cymru's first visit to the Riverfront on July 10 will involve a change of programme from the one advertised. BBC Young Musician of the Year Guy Johnston, the cellist, has cancelled all his engagements for the time being and will not appear.

However, youth will still be to the fore, as this orchestra was created to provide young professional musicians with orchestra experience at the start of their careers. If their first Newport concert is well-supported, Sinfonia Cymru, conducted by Gareth Jones, could make the city its local performing base.

The revised programme will be Haydn's Symphony No. 88, Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and Richard Strauss's suite from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

The concert starts at 3pm.

A few concerts at the Riverfront have involved members of Keith Little's Hot Six, all of whom will appear at Caldicot Choir Hall on July 10 at 8pm in a gig to raise funds for the town's jazz festival in September.

Tickets are £5 on the door on the night, but for further inquiries phone 07708 023401. Still with jazz, singer Tina May and her Trio grace the summer programme of concerts at the Nimbus Records headquarters at Wyastone Leys, Monmouth, tonight from 8pm to 10pm.

But the event also includes dinner (7pm) and a bar, so tickets are £30 for the whole bash. Phone them now on 01600 891090.

The Monmouth series continues on July 9 with a performance by Red Hot Baroque, who perform with dramatic staging and lights, and on July 15, when pianist Jeremy Menuhin is soloist and director of the English Symphony Orchestra in a Mozart programme.

Not to be missed is the current visit by the Peter Hall Company at the Bath Theatre Royal until September 3, with Noel Coward's Private Lives, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Shaw's You Never Can Tell and Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Actors include Edward Fox Greta Scaachi and Alan Dobie - box office 01225 448844.