Kongo Christianity: The Intersection of Two Worlds - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dame Judi Dench has long made her feelings clear about Cats, the doomed 2019 adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. In an interview the year after release, she said she had so far declined to watch the movie – in which she played wise moggy Old Deuteronomy – and described the orange fur coat she had to wear as looking like “five foxes fucking on my back”. In her forthcoming memoir, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? Dench reflects further on her involvement in the movie, which was universally panned and whose director, Tom Hooper, has not made a film since. “Oh God, I can’t bear it,” she writes in the book, “and [Lloyd Webber] had waited so long for it to be made. What a waste of all that goodwill and talent. “I understand the critics were rather hostile to the film. I never saw the final cut so I can’t judge. All I’ll say is nobody sets out to give a poor performance or make a bad film.

Plus, a new Shakespeare play, Beatlemania in Aix-en-Provence, and other art world matters.

Little-known photographer John Baer captured everyday life before putting down his camera in 1954. His son discovered the images decades later after his death, and John Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary / A Memoir in Photographs, 1945–1954 marks their first public releaseLunch Hour, Bryant Park Photograph: John BaerTue 20 Oct 2026 12.00 BSTLouise Twice, 34th Street, ManhattanJohn Baer received his first camera, a 1938 Model II, from a German soldier. He traveled with it from Manhattan to Brooklyn to Westchester county. Boys with Guns, BarcelonaIn January 1942, when Baer was serving as the managing editor of the campus newspaper at Pennsylvania State University, he was drafted to fight in the second world war. Soldiers on a French Train Years later, in 1945, he took Soldiers on a French train, photographing soldiers during the first stage of their journey home. Couple in Washington Square Park In 1948, Baer and his wife, Louise, moved from Europe to New York City, where they rented a fifth-floor walk-up at 215 Second Avenue in the East Village. Shoeshine man, Third Avenue and 42nd Street, ManhattanBaer often captured scenes of New York City from his fire escape. O!