The Oscar‑winning director of The Artist spent five years creating The Most Precious of Cargoes. He talks about why he would never have made it as a live action movie

When the acclaimed French film-maker Michel Hazanavicius was approached by his parents’ best friend, the author and playwright Jean-Claude Grumberg, to adapt his fairytale The Most Precious of Cargoes (2019) into an animated film, he hesitated. The short book is a fable about the Holocaust, and the extraordinary acts of kindness that people are capable of. Although moved by it, Hazanavicius was initially reluctant: he had never made an animated film, and he thought he would never make a film about the Holocaust. The grandson of eastern European immigrants who came to France from Lithuania and Poland in the 1920s, Hazanavicius, 58, had felt that the subject was not his to tell. “It was more my grandparents’ and my parents’ story, not mine,” he says, speaking from his home in the 10th arrondissement, Paris, the sunlight streaming through the window behind him. “I was born in Paris in the late 1960s, and I had a wonderful, very happy childhood.” That period, however, coincided with when Holocaust denial began and survivors, who had until then remained silent, started to speak out about their experiences in the camps. “For many years, the priority [of those seeking to preserve the memory] was hearing testimony from witnesses. And I thought fiction on the subject was not appropriate.”

It was Hazanavicius’s wife, the actor Bérénice Bejo – who starred as Peppy Miller, an ambitious young actress in The Artist , Hazanavicius’s Academy Award-winning film about Hollywood’s black-and-white silent era – who changed his mind. Bejo told him he had not explained enough about his family’s Jewish history to his four children, now aged 26, 23, 16 and 13, and she persuaded Hazanavicius to take on the project, not only for them, but also for other people’s children. “[I realised] that if I hadn’t told my kids stories about my family – how they came to France and what happened during the war – it was likely that other [Jewish parents] hadn’t passed on [their heritage] either.”

Red Scare author Clay Risen sees parallels between 1950s witch-hunts and the right’s assault on government today

On 9 June 1954, in a Senate hearing room on Capitol Hill, Joseph Nye Welch made American history. With one question , the lawyer prompted the downfall of Joe McCarthy, the Republican Wisconsin senator who for years had run amok, his persecution of supposed communist subversives ruining countless lives.

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch said, as millions watched on TV , as he defended Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in McCarthy’s sights.

As the indie singer-songwriter and Boygenius star releases her latest, highly personal solo record, she talks of her weariness of AI and digital art, the pressures of being in a public relationship, and her anger and fears in Trump’s US

In the shadow of a Hogarth painting, accompanied by guitar and violin, Lucy Dacus is singing about disappointment. The painting depicts Thomas Coram, founder of the Foundling Hospital in London’s Bloomsbury district. A shipbuilder by trade, he is portrayed in full baroque garb, a style usually reserved for the aristocracy. But amid the classical architecture and rich fabrics, he is shown as he was: the thread veins on his face, his feet not quite touching the ground. The setting is apt for Dacus’s disquisitions on life and love, and the ways they can exceed, or fall short of, the expectations we place upon them: the moments that feel exalted, idealised, as well as the times when reality intrudes on the fantasy.

The Foundling Museum , the setting of tonight’s intimate show, also holds a deeper meaning for the singer-songwriter, who was raised in Mechanicsville, Virginia by adoptive parents; the mother who raised her was herself adopted from an orphanage at a young age. “I had nothing like this growing up,” says Dacus to the assembled crowd. “We don’t have the concept of a foundling in the US. It would have been cool if the other kids at school had known that was fine.” The previous day, after her photoshoot in the museum’s grand-looking court room, she is visibly moved upon learning about the building’s history, and its current work training care-experienced young people. She asks the organisers about inviting some of the trainees to the concert: it would, she says, be a way of showing them “hey, I’m doing cool shit – you can do cool shit.”

The O2, London
From rollerskating around the stage wearing a union jack suit to feeding cocktail cherries to women in the audience, Usher wears middle age incredibly well

Early on during the first show of Usher’s London residency, the audience is treated to the sight of the teenaged singer fantasising about playing London and “thousands of people shouting my name”. It’s presumably been flammed together for the occasion via the miracle of AI, but the point it’s making about succeeding beyond one’s wildest dreams is clear. More than 30 years into his career, Usher has sold out a staggering 10 nights at the O2: the crowd seems to be equally split between people old enough to remember his late 90s rise to fame and those you suspect may have first encountered his music through their parents playing it. As he skips between old-fashioned slow jams and the kind of EDM-influenced pop-R&B that temporarily held sway around 2010, you’re struck by the sense that his longevity might be down to his ability to neatly assimilate whatever’s currently vogueish into his own sound.

His current world tour follows on the heels of two Las Vegas residencies, and a distinct hint of Vegas lurks around the show, both in its desire to cram as many songs as possible in – there are well over 40 tracks, or at least parts of them – and in its penchant for glitzy spectacle. Like Vegas itself, it’s not really at home to subtlety. This is an evening in which Usher deploys his impassioned falsetto while rollerskating around the stage wearing a union jack suit; in which he underlines his loverman credentials by feeding ladies in the audience cocktail cherries; in which a pair of high-waisted trousers that appear to be made entirely out of studded belts teamed with a bare chest and a selection of chains and medallions Isaac Hayes might have considered a little de trop constitutes one of his more understated outfits. He wears it to perform one of the aforementioned old-school slow jams, Nice and Slow. “I’ve got plans to put my hands in places I’ve never seen,” he sings: lest anyone mistakenly believe that means he’s thinking of sticking them down the back of the radiator, he lubriciously caresses his privates, then pretends to have sex with his microphone stand.

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.