Wigmore Hall, London
Joyce DiDonato’s theatrical skills enabled her to feminise the cycle in a particularly original way, before Strauss’s Morgen! gave us all hope

Joyce DiDonato doesn’t just sing Winterreise. She acts it too. This is not as rare as you may imagine. The desolated lover’s winter journey is an accommodating masterwork. Actor-singers including Håkan Hagegård, Mark Padmore and Simon Keenlyside have performed staged versions too, establishing for all except diehard purists that a traditional male voice and piano recital need not necessarily be the only way with Schubert’s bleak setting of Wilhelm Müller poems.

DiDonato takes this a step further by inhabiting the songs from the standpoint of the woman whom the poet has deserted. Many women, including Alice Coote , have performed these songs with searing authenticity, but DiDonato’s theatrical skills bring something more. Costumed in black mourning, she sings each song from the poet’s journal, giving her voice to the verses within. Only at the end, in Schubert’s totemic final song, Der Leiermann (The Organ Grinder), does she put the journal aside and own the song outright, and with it the whole cycle’s pain, as her own.

Octagon, Bolton
Sarah Brigham’s new production is beautifully designed but struggles to capture the drama’s claustrophobic tension

Before it got into the hands of readers, John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella Of Mice and Men first got into the jaws of the author’s dog. The dog would find less to get its teeth into with this muted theatre adaptation .

A pair of itinerant friends find work at a ranch in the Great Depression-era US south. George is brashly confident and protective over timid Lennie who has a mental disability that’s stigmatised by the workers. In Sarah Brigham’s production, Lennie is played by Wiliam Young, who has learning disabilities. There is a softness to his Lennie, calling George’s name like a squeak. His dangerously nervy, busy hands constantly brush his beard or arms, while the production uses puppets for the animals he pets. His posture mirrors theirs: drooping like a sack of barley, folding in on himself.

Of Mice and Men is at the Octagon, Bolton, until 12 April

A night of violence exposes the dynamics of race, masculinity and privilege at play in America’s schools

The Marabar caves in A Passage to India represent the breakdown of order and communication as well as provoking the terrible accusation that drives EM Forster’s story. Sameer Pandya plays with a similar plot device in his compelling US-based novel, including an epigraph from Forster’s classic.

It is set in southern California, where three teenage boys on the brink of adulthood – stars of their high school American football team with promising college careers ahead of them – attend a party at an abandoned house in the hills. Vikram is an Indian American, while Diego, who is Latino, lives with his academic mother. MJ is white with wealthy parents. Part of the pleasure of Pandya’s writing lies in his unravelling of identity politics – a theme explored in his debut, Members Only .

Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

Ono was blamed for splitting the Beatles and taking John Lennon from his true calling. Let’s hope things are getting easier for women who date famous musicians

More than 50 years after John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 bed-in, protesting against war, Ono finally gets her love-in. David Sheff’s biography Yoko , published last week, seeks to put the record straight about her stellar achievements as an internationally renowned conceptual artist.

In recent years there have been retrospectives, including one at London’s Tate Modern . Kevin Macdonald’s docufilm , One To One: John And Yoko , is released in the UK next month. Ono, 92, is seeing reputational rehabilitation on a global scale, and all a long time coming.

After a $220m five-year renovation, the New York museum is set to showcase a trove of European masterpieces

Can masterpieces of European art help smooth over the fissures between the old world and the new? It’s a hope, say officials at the Frick Collection in New York, which reopens next month after a five-year, $220m (£170m) renovation.

Axel Rüger, the director of the museum, which began with a trove of European masterpieces including Rembrandt and Vermeer, hopes that its art could be a reminder of US-European ties in these turbulent political times.

Equity union says filming scenes at home amounts to unpaid labour and reinforces elitism

Actors seeking their next role are now routinely asked to “self-tape” their auditions, a practice that amounts to unpaid labour and reinforces elitism in the creative industries, the union Equity has warned.

Before the Covid lockdowns, self-tapes were a fallback for anyone unable to make an in-person casting – for example if they were working abroad. But during the pandemic they became the norm and have remained so ever since.

Sadler’s Wells; Paul Hamlyn Hall, Royal Opera House, London
Athletes and dancers meet each other halfway in Rachid Ouramdane’s latest. And Pam Tanowitz taps into Covent Garden’s past while reaching out to the future

It’s a rule of life that dancers can do anything with their bodies. In Rachid Ouramdane’s new work, Outsider , made with the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, they slide across the stage like oil, tumbling and curling like acrobats, swinging one another around like supple dolls. One woman falls and rises like a pendulum across a mass of bodies that gently push her from side to side.

The stage, in Sylvain Giraudeau’s stark design, is crisscrossed with a cat’s cradle of taut climbing wires held on gantries. French-Algerian choreographer Ouramdane’s stroke of magic is to introduce four extreme sport athletes who hang aloft seamlessly in semi-silhouette, their weightlessness contrasting with the gravity-bound dancers beneath. When they walk the tightrope, their arms wobble gently as they seek balance.

The beautiful and hardy herds of the Welsh valleys act as a counterpoint to three decades of change in photographer Ken Grant’s images

Ken Grant’s Cwm: A Fair Country , a collection of nearly 30 years of landscape photography in the South Walian valleys, begins with a moving prologue. It mentions a painting he’s known since his Liverpudlian childhood, still sitting above his 92-year-old father’s mantelpiece: “Dapple-bruised Welsh horses, painted in a loose herd, are imagined beneath a sky that promises rain.”

From 1998, on commutes from Liverpool to the University of Wales, Newport (where he led a documentary photography degree), he noticed similar horses – completely by coincidence. “I didn’t seek them out at first, but on my drives, I soon got aware that they were there. Sometimes up a valley’s road, you’d see packs of 40 or 50.”

The former Vanity Fair editor on how #MeToo changed Hollywood, what Christopher Hitchens would make of the US today, and the value of a handkerchief

Graydon Carter, 75, is a Canadian-born journalist. He co-created the satirical magazine Spy , edited the New York Observer , and from 1992 until 2017 was the editor of Vanity Fair . In 2019 he founded Air Mail, an online newsletter for “worldly cosmopolitans”. His memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines , has just been published. He lives in New York with his third wife, not far from the Waverly Inn, the restaurant he co-owns, and has five children. Donald Trump has called him a “dummy” and “a real loser” who has “no talent and looks like shit”.

Before we talk magazines, as a Canadian-born non-fan of Trump, how’s the view over there?
Well, I think very highly of Mark Carney [the new Canadian prime minister]. He’s not going to take any grief. But the sad thing is that in two months, Trump has made [the US] the enemy of the world. If there was another 9/11 this week, I don’t think the world would rush to support us in the same way.