recent posts

about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Books

  • Authors Night/ Paula Abdul at SHE Summer Hamptons Evening

    Famously, you cannot get near the famous authors at the yearly event of the season, Authors Night to benefit the East Hampton library. For books by Misty Copeland, Robert Caro, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Paulina Porizkova, the lines are long. No matter, writers in abundance are just happy to schmooze with one another. Susan Isaacs sat…

  • Patricia Field Inspires Happy Clothes at Tribeca

    Invited to a party to celebrate designer/ costumer Patricia Field and the fine documentary about her life and career premiering at Tribeca, one ponders the question: what to wear? After the Tribeca screening of Happy Clothes: A Film About Patricia Field directed by Michael Selditch, a colorful romp through her decades-long career in the business…

  • Fat Ham: A Backyard Wedding Leading to the Tony Awards

    Fans of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet will find James Ijames’ audacious reimagining, Fat Ham, a hoot. Set in a backyard barbeque, the play starts with a white-suited jive ass (Billy Eugene Jones) arriving in a whirl of sulphurous smoke to tell his son, a juvenile brooder called Juicy (Marquis D. Gibson in the performance I attended),…

  • The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Final Season: Tits Up! 

    In fact, two tits up! The stunning final season makes for a picture of life as a stand-up comic for Mrs. Maisel and her agent Susie, or Susan, depending on your history with her. Our heroine is now gainfully employed: she’s a writer on the evening’s popular celebrity television talk program, The Gordon Ford Show.…

  • Guild Hall Celebrates Peter Marino: Renaissance Man

    “I hate it,” architect Peter Marino exclaimed surprising even himself, as he noted Gotham Hall, a cavernous former bank on Broadway, decorated for the 350 guests arriving for a tribute to him, and to art collectors Tom Roush and LaVon Kellner. This was Guild Hall’s winter gala, celebrating too the venerated East Hampton art institution’s…

  • Kurt Vonnegut Remembered at Birdland

    The iconic American satirist Kurt Vonnegut might seem an unusual inspiration for a jazz suite but composer/ pianist Jason Yeager brought the Slaughterhouse Five author live in a musical homage at Birdland this week. Originally performed in tandem with Vonnegut’s centennial year at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indianapolis in November, the show…

  • Andre Royo in Drinking in America: Heads of a Bygone Era

    A glass of wine with dinner, or a joint if you are so inclined, might be a good idea before meeting the array of characters who so imbibe in Eric Bogosian’s award-winning one-man tour-de-force, Drinking in America, a production of Audible at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Performed to wiry perfection by Andre Royo, the assorted…

  • Jessica Chastain in A Doll’s House: Ibsen for our Time

    Revolving on the barren Hudson Theater stage in an expansive orbit for 20 minutes before the first words of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House are spoken, Jessica Chastain as Nora Helmer sits stationary as she in her chair marks the periphery. The edgy blacks and whites are not the way you imagine this classic Ibsen…

  • Charlie Mackesy’s Journey: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse

    Jet-lagged as you might expect for a British writer/illustrator just arriving from L.A., having promoted his film, and looking as you might imagine a mad scientist crossed with Gene Wilder, Charlie Mackesy held forth at a luncheon at the Whitby Hotel, signing cupcake boxes, posters, copies of his book, and telling a story about how…

  • August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson: Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks, John David Washington in an Homage to Ancestors

    The piano at the center of August Wilson’s wise play The Piano Lesson is an object of beauty and resilience. Carved of a family history, this piano is a remnant of slavery, of ancestors being bought and sold, children separated from parents and siblings. Which is why the fight between Boy Willie (John David Washington)…

  • Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt: Again, The Holocaust

    Those of us marked by a personal Holocaust history may be damaged by this cataclysmic event’s long shadow. Playwright Tom Stoppard evaded this essential legacy, as Hermoine Lee spelled out his background in her excellent recent biography. Beautifully staged at the Longacre Theater under Patrick Marber’s fine direction, Tom Stoppard’s fictional telling of his family…

  • Neil Diamond on Broadway in A Beautiful Noise: Portrait of the Performer in Treatment 

    Fans and first-nighters greeted Neil Diamond as he emerged from a black town car on West 44 Street at the Broadhurst Theater for A Beautiful Noise’s opening with a rousing “Sweet Caroline.” Who doesn’t love Neil Diamond? Well, it turns out from this jukebox musical about his life, he doesn’t. As it begins, an old…

  • Remembering Aline Kominsky-Crumb

    The Crumb documentary is ruining my life, complained Aline Kominsky-Crumb in 1993, as Terry Zwigoff’s biopic about Robert Crumb, her husband, gained acclaim, becoming a darling on the festival circuit. “Next thing you know, we’ll be invited to the Jerusalem Film Festival.” All of this drama was played out in a comic strip that appeared…

  • Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans: Steven Spielberg’s Bildungsroman

    Taking liberally from his own biography, Steven Spielberg creates a portrait of the artist as a young man in his latest film, The Fabelmans. It is no accident that the word fable echoes within this title, nor that the child to adolescent to teen and adult depicted is on a journey to discover his unique…

  • Topdog/Underdog Revival at the Golden: History Does Repeat

    The stakes are huge for two brothers named Lincoln and Booth who live in a one-room fleabag joint with no running water. Carrying history itself, these brothers—well, living conditions are the least of their problems. Sibling rivalry aside, Topdog/ Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize winning play now in a superb revival at the Golden Theater,…

  • Nan Goldin at the New York Film Festival in Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

    At the NYFF press conference following a screening of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, photographer Nan Goldin seemed as surprised as anyone that Laura Poitras included footage of her family story, weaving together decades of her artistic risk-taking. From the time that she left her childhood home in the suburbs for a life documenting…

  • David O. Russell’s Amsterdam Premieres

    “I’ve gone epic,” exuded the director David O. Russell at the lavish premiere of this movie Amsterdam at Alice Tully Hall this week. Epic and a surprise, Drake, one of the producers, introduced the screening. Epic might also refer to the scope of the film, set in World War I, the so-called Great War, The…

  • Salman Rushdie in Public

    In one of the great Curb Your Enthusiasm vignettes, Larry David wanted to make a musical called “Fatwa,” the word itself giggle-worthy. But the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was no joke. Last week a lone, determined man got past light security at Chautauqua, a famous writers conference and knifed the author of Midnight’s Children and…

  • Ragtime at Bay Street Theater: Listen to Mother

    The heart of the dazzling revival of Ragtime at Bay Street Theater is Mother, a character of enormous compassion. As played by Lora Lee Gayer, she’s a lovely presence who saves an abandoned black baby and his mother Sarah (Kyrie Courter), and navigates her well-to-do New Rochelle family through the vagaries and scandals of early…

  • Anna in the Tropics at Bay Street Theater: On the Virtues of Adultery 

    Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy knew something about women’s discontent in marriage. One of his greatest creations, the character Anna Karenina in his classic novel of that name, fuels the animus felt in the family in Nilo Cruz’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize winning play, Anna in the Tropics, now in production at Bay Street Theater. Set in…

  • James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni: Lesson in Survival: 1971 at the Vineyard Theater

    A young poet, Nikki Giovanni interviewed an elder statesman of letters, James Baldwin, on television in 1971. Enacted, voiced onstage at the Vineyard Theater, Lessons in Survival: 1971, joins a series of plays produced at this downtown venue that makes use of actual words uttered in real life situations to create a theatrical experience: Tina…

  • Lost Illusions: A Classy Take on a French Classic

    The French can be vicious, bringing backstabbing to a fine art. Just look at les Liaisons Dangereuses. This year’s winner of seven Cesars, including Best Film, went to Xavier Giannoli’s adaptation of Honore Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a splendidly captivating romp through 19th century Paris via the extravagant “illusions” of a young, determined, and talented poet,…

  • Celebrating Guild Hall at Cipriani 42 Street

    Many revelers at this week’s Guild Hall winter gala remembered that before Covid locked everyone down, they were celebrating the premiere East Hampton cultural institution at its 2020 annual gala. And while much has changed in these two years—the venue was now the cavernous Cipriani 42nd Street—and, the 2022 honorees were Board Chair Marty Cohen…

  • Renee Zellweger in The Thing About Pam at the Whitby Hotel

    Her spindly legs over sky high heels, Renee Zellweger, both star and a producer on NBC’s series The Thing About Pam, commanded the stage at the Whitby Hotel this week after a screening of the first two episodes of the 6-part series. Based on a true-life crime podcast, already well known, about a 2011 murder in…

  • Freda Payne at The Cutting Room: What Love Could Be –And Is

    An apt locale for a book party for a famed pop singer, the Cutting Room filled with well – wishers for Freda Payne’s memoir, Band of Gold, last week. Co-writer Mark Bego flew in from Tucson, wearing the most outstanding jacket, a print of black & white with sparks of bold color. Yes, it was…