Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

“I have always conscientiously tried not to do the same thing twice,” American composer and song-writing legend Stephen Sondheim once told the New York Times Magazine. In his final ever musical, conceived over a decade ago and executed after his death aged ninety-one in 2023, Sondheim has once again, like a magician, conjured surprise. Here We Are is many things and it isn’t always successful. But this maverick musical is wildly original — not least in suspending the songs themselves almost entirely for the second act.

In 2001, at the age of fourteen, Sam Lipman-Stern dropped out of high school in New Jersey and started working at the now defunct Civic Development Group (CDG) as a telemarketer. He stayed for seven years, calling up citizens to ask for money on behalf of police charities. It turned out to be a massive scam.  More than two decades later, Lipman-Stern, now thirty-six and a seasoned filmmaker, has exposed not only CDG — which underhandedly kept 90 percent of the proceeds it raised — but the entire industry in his frenetic, rip-roaring investigative HBO documentary Telemarketers.  Co-directed by Adam Bhala Lough and produced by the Safdie brothers, the three-part docuseries is a wild ride, largely due to Lipman-Stern’s archival footage.

Nestled in the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx are a series of vultures, who lurk, grotesque and yet strangely beautiful, among the greenery.  The birds number in their hundreds, are larger than life and glint with glitter in the sun. They aren’t real, of course, but part of Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson’s expansive show, ...things come to thrive... in the shedding... in the molting... Works in the exhibition range from cast-glass leaves and body parts — including severed feet — peeking out from the plants to the imposing sculpture “… fester …”, a ten-foot wall covered with more than 1,500 red gloves on one side and tassels, beads and tapestry on the other.

The Sign in Sidney Brunstein’s Window — set in the blustering world of 1960s New York bohemia — deals with so many hot-button issues it is hard to keep up. Patriarchy, anti-Semitism, gay rights, slavery, sex work, suicide, drugs, adultery, racism. It’s all there.  But as I watched Anne Kauffman’s superb, and at times transcendent, Broadway revival, it dawned on me that one theme unites them all: corruption.  The play’s moment of truth hangs on the revelation that a local Manhattan politician who preaches progress is actually a crook. But on a smaller, equally devastating level, it is also about the corruption of marriage, of bodies, of values, of morals and of hope.

Georgia O’Keeffe is beloved for her oil paintings on canvas showing flowers and animal skulls: the first all soft, sensual openings; the second, spiky points and hardness.  Her works on paper are less well known. Yet, as MoMA’s exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time, argues, paper played a key role in her early experimentation and art. As she told Alfred Stieglitz, the influential art gallerist and photographer who became her husband, “Why — it’s just like scrap paper. I throw it in the scrap heap and go on to something else.”  Paper is the beating heart of this retrospective, which shows 120 of O’Keeffe’s works from fifty-eight separate lenders, and which range from charcoal sketches to candy-colored pastels, rich watercolors to grainy graphite.

The opening scene of Camelot is stark. White snow covers the floor, drifting past a gray sky; on stage, beneath curvaceous stone arches, stands a bench and a tree, shorn of leaves. It is a mood that is prescient of what is to come: an experience that is beautiful but empty.  Camelot first premiered in 1960, adapted from T. H White’s novel The Once and Future King. For this lavish revival, Aaron Sorkin has created a new book, departing from Alan Jay Lerner’s original, and teamed up with director Bartlett Sher. But, despite the retention of many of Frederick Loewe’s easy-to-the-ear songs, Camelot doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a frivolous comedy? A lovelorn tragedy? A study in good governance?

When I mentioned to friends that I was reviewing Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the new film based on Judy Blume’s hit 1970 novel of the same name, I was hit by unabashed enthusiasm. This is a coming-of-age story about an eleven-year-old girl as she navigates school, puberty, religion and boys. My peers couldn’t wait to see it.  “‘We must, we must, we must increase our bust!’ was my mantra growing up,” gushed one new mom in her mid-thirties, referring to Margaret and her friend’s group chant as they try, unsuccessfully, to grow breasts.  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Are You There God?

In the thriller Inside, an art thief named Nemo (Willem Dafoe) breaks into the New York penthouse of a renowned architect and collector. Once there he is all business, liaising with an unseen collaborator via walkie-talkie rather than stopping to admire the art.  It is no accident that the paintings he is there to steal, by the Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, depict tortured souls, with emaciated frames and paper-thin skin. By the end of the movie Nemo will be a physical manifestation of Schiele’s works: a man living in wretched limbo, psychologically tortured and physically deplete.  Directed by Greek filmmaker Vasilis Katsoupis, Inside is a reworking of the one-man survival drama, at once euphoric and painful to watch.