recent posts

about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Books

  • Carla Hall Bucks Food Trends: Stirring the Pot with Florence Fabricant

    Carla Hall is all about cooking with love. Sharing her food notes and anecdotes with Florence Fabricant at Guild Hall’s popular series, “Stirring the Pot,” the two foodies could not agree more about the limiting nature of food trends. For example, who says that beets must always be served with goat cheese? Duh. Well someone…

  • Authors Night’s Brainfood: Shucked Oysters and Real Books

       This Authors Night featured its signature mix of celebrity and well established authors, such as Jules Feiffer, Geraldo Rivera, Robert Caro, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Patricia Bosworth, A. M. Holmes, Lee Child, with first time authors such as Elizabeth Flock who researched five marriages in Mumbai for her novel, The Heart is a Shifting Sea.…

  • Glenn Close Gets Her Closeup: The Wife

    When best-selling author Meg Wolitzer wrote her novel, The Wife (2003), she could not have imagined its current feminist resonance, nor the movie of the book, The Wife, soon to be released starring Glenn Close. The wife of a celebrated novelist as he is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Close's Joan Castleman is demure, even restrained as…

  • Arthur Miller: Writer, A Documentary Directed by his Daughter, Rebecca Miller

    Back in the day, Rose Styron, the writer and wife of William Styron, recounted the story of an American delegation of authors visiting Rio, among them her friend the playwright Arthur Miller. Local headlines focused on Miller, the husband of Marilyn Monroe. In this rich documentary of her father, Rebecca Miller addresses the matter of…

  • Waiting for Alec Baldwin at the Guild Hall Gala

    Yes, G. E. Smith previewed Guild Hall’s first annual guitar masters festival, to take place in July, but that was not the only music at this year’s winter celebration of Guild Hall. Honored for her career in the visual arts, Audrey Flack, brought her History of Art band to The Rainbow Room to perform her…

  • Screaming with Laurie Anderson at Guild Hall

    In honor of Yoko Ono’s birthday this weekend, Laurie Anderson led guests at Guild Hall in a face-reddening scream. The occasion was a talk between Anderson, who now looks remarkably like Christopher Walken with spiky hair and otherworldly pallor, and curator Christina Strassfield, who is putting together a show of Anderson’s work at Guild Hall…

  • Flight: Dreaming of Bruce Willis, Action Hero

    The McKittrick Hotel is well known for unusual theatrical events—cue the long-running immersive Sleep No More. Now fresh from Edinburgh’s International Arts Festival comes Flight, a much-awarded incomparable narrative art installation. Plucked from the headlines of refugees fleeing war, Flight tells the story of two brothers on a journey escaping Afghanistan, adapted by playwright Oliver…

  • Peter Hujar: Photographs of a Bygone Era at the Morgan Library & Museum

    At an opening at the Morgan Library & Museum celebrating exhibitions of Peter Hujar’s photographs and Tennessee Williams’ memorabilia, a gentleman in a maroon jacket marveled that the Morgan, known for collections of old master drawings and manuscripts would now show photography, especially of the type created by Hujar. While Williams’ scripts and Playbills form…

  • Annette Bening’s Mega Speech at the Museum of the Moving Image Tribute

    When Warren Beatty was honored by the Museum of the Moving Image last year, his wife Annette Bening, the star of Mike Mills’ Twentieth Century Women gave a speech. This year, with Annette Bening as tributee, Warren Beatty rose to the occasion, introducing the clip for Bening’s work in his Bugsy, which just happens to…

  • Call Me By Your Name: On Peaches and Paternity 

    Just announced, the movie Call Me By Your Name garnered six Independent Spirit Award nominations, more than any other film. On the same day, Andre Aciman and Luca Guadagnino, just back from Italy, spoke about the film at the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. “I hate the word adaptation,” said Andre Aciman, about, eh,…

  • NYPL Lions Gala: Where Writers are King

    At the New York Public Library Lions Gala on Monday night, a Who’s Who of writers –and readers—gathered to celebrate five Tom Brokaw, Michael Chabon, Carla Hayden, Colson Whitehead, and Robert Wilson. The gorgeously refurbished readers’ room on the library’s third floor was transformed into a book-lined palace dining hall, for Norm Lewis performing Cole…

  • Breathe! Salpeter Father and Daughter Create a Book for Teaching Yoga to Kids

    You are never too old to practice yoga—or too young. Nina Salpeter teamed up with her father, award-winning graphic designer Bob Salpeter to create a book Teach Your Child Yoga, to help parents teach yoga to children from one to six years old. Taking known positions, such as “downward facing dog” and “lotus,” to name just two,…

  • Rebel in the Rye: Explaining the Reclusive J. D. Salinger

    It is not easy to capture a writer’s creative process in a movie, especially when the artist was determined to stay out of the public eye. Danny Strong took on that task in his Rebel in the Rye, the story of J. D. Salinger’s coming of age as a writer, culminating in the publication of…

  • Author’s Night 2017: A Big Tent for All

    On Author’s Night, the yearly festive fundraiser for the East Hampton library, writers sit in rows under an enormous tent, alphabetically, or so the signs say. This year, with books by Alec Baldwin (Nevertheless: A Memoir) and Ann Coulter (In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!), the tent could not have been big enough. By…

  • Florence Fabricant Stirs the Pot at Guild Hall

    When I spoke to longtime New York Times food and wine writer Florence Fabricant just before her entertaining “Stirring the Pot” series resumes its residency at Guild Hall this weekend, she was deep into writing her fall preview of new restaurants. The August interviews with chefs, she notes with pride, “gradually built an audience,” hitting…

  • The Man in the Ceiling at Bay Street Theater

    Based on a children’s book by Jules Feiffer, the musical “The Man in the Ceiling,” premiering at Bay Street Theater, celebrates creativity, and more specifically the art of cartooning. From the perspective of Jimmy, a kid whose father only wants him to play ball like the other kids, this is also a story about following…

  • Kate Hamill as Becky Sharp: Vanity Fair’s Scheming Non-Feminist

    The Bedlam Theater’s production of Vanity Fair at the Pearl Theater is a romp celebrating life’s vagaries, the ups and downs of fortune’s wheel. Kate Hamill is its mastermind, manipulating William Makepeace Thackeray’s words as playwright, and everyone else as Vanity Fair’s star Becky Sharp, down on her luck child who makes it big in…

  • Sheila Nevins of HBO: Not Just Another Pretty Face

    Anyone who has heard Sheila Nevins introduce her hand picked documentarians at an HBO preview, knows: she is much of the show. Formidable and funny, even when she intros heart-wrenching work like Cries from Syria with a plea to stop the killing of children in that country, her lively personality blazes forth. Now she’s written…

  • A Doll’s House, Part 2: Nora’s Return to Broadway

    Lucas Hnath’s sequel to Ibsen’s classic of world literature, A Doll’s House, titled A Doll’s House, Part 2, suggests that every work in the canon should have a follow-up. Unless they die at the end, like Anna Karenina, it would be great to catch up, after all the sturm und drang. At the Golden Theater,…

  • Cezanne et moi: Breakfast with Daniele Thompson and Guillaume Gallienne

    Introducing her friend Daniele Thompson’s new film Cezanne et moi at a special screening at the Whitby Hotel last week, Diane von Furstenberg noted the painterly look, the sheer beauty of this movie. The audience of artists in all media could not have been more fitting: Marina Abramovic, Eric Fishl, Ahn Duong, Bennett Miller, Ellen…

  • At Lunch with Michelle Dockery at the Lotos Club: The Sense of an Ending

    The Sense of an Ending, a Man Booker prize winning novel by the British author Julian Barnes, has at center a protagonist, Tony Webster, an uninteresting man with a vastly interesting past. In Ritesh Batra's movie The Sense of an Ending, intertwining narratives of past and present meet at a point of mystery: a suicide haunts…

  • Elie Wiesel’s Night: Auschwitz Remembered

    Elie Wiesel wrote Night, you could say, for an evening such as Sunday night’s marathon reading of his Holocaust era memoir at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: To Remember. He knew that the history in concentration camps—Auschwitz was just one of many– was so bad, so bleak, so dark, so beyond belief, he had to…

  • Discovering John Cohen–Again

    At a wall-to-wall packed opening at the Grey Art Gallery, photographer/ filmmaker / musician John Cohen held court in front of a video installation of some vintage photographs he took at the heyday of artist owned galleries on 10th Street. Talk about a fascinating pocket of art history! “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York…

  • Remembering the Gotham Book Mart

      “That’s our trouble,” said my friend Roger, “everything used to be something else.” I had just told him about meeting my brothers and their families for the third Chanukah candle, 13 relatives in all, at a glatt kosher restaurant called Taam Tov in the Diamond District, on the very site of the legendary Gotham…

  • From Burroughs to Uncle Howard: An Interview with Aaron Brookner

    The new documentary Uncle Howard is an inspired compilation of recovered footage, interviews, a story of discovery by Aaron Brookner, a filmmaker who followed in his uncle’s craft. A passing of a baton, you could say, Uncle Howard reflects Aaron Brookner’s determination to ensure his uncle’s legacy. Aaron was seven when Howard Brookner, died of…