Your temporary UK arts correspondent travelled south from Manchester to the “other” English capital city this week — the one the ancient Romans called Londinium. One is barely 200 miles closer to the equator than the other, but the ebb and flow of British heatwaves made it feel like a trip to a subtropical desert. Or a journey to the centre of the earth. Or perhaps a descent into hell.London has been hot. Humid and hot. But what is a tourist to do? You soldier on through the heat and the sweat; you see the sights, you hit the museums, and you catch the shows.The hottest ticket in town right now is one that will get you into Hamilton: An American Musical. You can’t obtain such a ticket for love or money. The Victoria Palace Theatre is sold out for weeks, with Hamilton fans from all over the globe gathering to watch Leslie Odom Jr reprise his role not as the title character (made famous by the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda) but as “the damn fool that shot him”, Aaron Burr. Walk a West End minute down the road to the Apollo Victoria Theatre, however, and you might just be lucky enough to pick up a ticket to Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz. I did, on the back of the film versions starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, and was pleasantly surprised by a “British” Oz, with Emma Kingston as the wicked witch Elphaba and Zizi Strallen as Glinda the Good.This clever and moving retelling of The Wizard of Oz is primarily a tale of unlikely friendship. But it touches on various themes, including the time-honoured and shameful human activity of scapegoating. The narrow-minded people of Oz, from the Munchkins to the denizens of the Emerald City, don’t like Others: outsiders, those who look different to them, or any creatures that they consider inferior or dangerous. They resent Elphaba because she is green. They fear animals because the Wizard tells them to.The animals of Oz, previously equal cohabitants with the humans, are being locked up and chased away, prevented from speaking until they lose the capacity for speech. The last remaining animal faculty member at Elphaba and Glinda’s college, Doctor Dillamond (a goat), is their history teacher. He explains when the trouble started: there was a drought, and the competition over resources that followed gave the Wizard a pretext for his anti-animal campaign.Parallels have been drawn to Nazi Germany, but this allegorical component of Wicked fits the pattern of xenophobic populism as it rears its ugly head around the world today — not least, sadly, in South Africa.In the UK, where everyone seems to have accepted that after Andy Burnham has had a stint as prime minister, it will be the turn of arch-populist and charlatan Nigel Farage, it does seem necessary to make the point wherever and whenever possible that socio-economic problems are not caused (to adopt the Wicked paradigm) by green-skinned Elphaba or by talking animals, but by the chief imposter himself: the Wizard. Those who believe that the key threat they face is illegal immigration via the English Channel in small boats should be forced to watch Wicked.Or perhaps one could take them down to the River Thames, just alongside the bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge next to the National Theatre, where creative arts hub the Southbank Centre is displaying the results of its “Imagine the Future” project. This brilliant collaboration between people’s poet Lemn Sissay and about 2,300 schoolchildren from across London, Manchester and Birmingham has produced Gift to the Future, a poem that brings beauty from the world as we have known it into the unknown that awaits us.Part innocent encouragement, part elegy, the poem suggests what travelling to the future will be like and may even require: leaving Earth and venturing into “the whole entire sky”. Crucially, among the familiar and cherished things of the present (a kind of cosmic padkos) are a “kebab as hot as Ecuador”, a “Somali pancake” and “Palestinian dates”. The best bits of “here” (in this case the UK) have often come from elsewhere. That seems like a good fact to take into the future.Business Day