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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Books

  • Remembering Edward Albee in Montauk

    This weekend, just after Edward Albee’s death at 88, the Montauk Library displayed books of his prodigious work in theater: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Zoo Story, Three Tall Women, Seascape, A Delicate Balance, volumes of the collected plays, to name just a few. A longtime resident of Long Island’s East End, Albee had a…

  • Command and Control: An Interview with Filmmakers Robert Kenner and Eric Schlosser

    Attention must be paid: our nuclear arsenal may present a clear and present danger. In a new documentary Command and Control, filmmakers Robert Kenner and Eric Schlosser make a compelling case about a potential disaster that few are talking about, illustrated by the story of the Titan II near miss in 1980 in Damascus, Arkansas.…

  • Rolling with Laughter at Bedlam ’s Sense and Sensibility

    Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility provides the source for the hilarious, entertainment,Sense and Sensibility, in a sassy theatrical production at the Gym at Judson. The gossipy world of Austen’s 18th century English shires is fraught with shrewd news of who will be engaged to whom, scandal aside, and most important, at what level of financial…

  • Natalie Portman: Evoking “Slavic Melancholy” in A Tale of Love and Darkness

    Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, Natalie Portman, Jean Reno. Joel Grey, Molly Ringwald, Oren Moverman, Dani Dayan, Amir Tessler, Nicholas Britell, Yonah Schimmel,

  • East Hampton Library’s Authors Night: Poets, Parties, Pretty in Pink

    A fan of the foodie memoir, I was eager to find the book 32 Yolks at this year’s East Hampton Library's Authors Night. Needless to say, a formidable line had already formed in front of le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert, and his stack of books. Before asking for one for me, I decided to take a…

  • My Fair Lady at Bay Street Theater: Eliza Finds “A Room Somewhere”

    Based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 Pygmalian and Gabriel Pascal’s 1938 film, the Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady gets a smart revival under Michael Arden’s expert direction at Bay Street Theater. You know the story: a lowly flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, morphs from guttersnipe to goddess aided by the elocution lessons of one Henry…

  • Troilus and Cressida in the Park: Manly Men Make War Not Love

    Projectile blood is just one spectacle in Shakespeare’s problem play, Troilus and Cressida, as staged at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, a fine Public Theater production directed by Daniel Sullivan. Written around the same time the bard penned his most famous tragedy Hamlet in 1602, T&C features warriors waging battle in the Trojan War, and as…

  • Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon in James Schamus’ Indignation

    Bespectacled and bowtied, James Schamus introduced his movie, Indignation, his directorial debut from Philip Roth’s novel, at MoMA, with the observation that a premiere at MoMA makes up for not having had a bar mitzvah. Hold that Jewish joke. In fact, the film starts with a brief image of war, and a Jewish funeral, a…

  • Alec Baldwin: “I Crave the Movie Elephant” at HIFF SummerDocs Screening

    One of the many revelations in Jeff Feuerzeig’s riveting documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story, was that Laura Albert, the mastermind behind her fictive persona JT LeRoy, an author of some renown, also worked with director Gus Van Sant on his 2003 Elephant, a movie of a Columbine-like mass shooting at a school. She was…

  • Patti Smith and Marianne Faithfull Take in “The Beat Generation” at Centre Pompidou: Hipsters on the Continent

    What is beat? From down and out through saintly beatitudes, beat is an attitude. As a literary movement, the Beat Generation is an American phenomenon, but every geographic area that experienced it, takes ownership, and the French are no different. In Paris, at Centre Pompidou’s 6th floor neighboring a retrospective of Paul Klee, a vast…

  • What Price Kerouac? “The Joan Anderson Letter” Auctioned at Christie’s

    Two Joans were on display at Christie’s on June 16, one was the much-missed Joan Rivers with a sampling of her sequined gowns adorning mannequins in the auction house entrance, going on the block the following day. The other was the famed subject of a 1950 letter to Jack Kerouac from his pal, Neal Cassady, long…

  • Anderson Cooper’s Anxiety of Influence: Gloria Vanderbilt

    Depending on what era formed you, you can relate to a piece of Gloria Vanderbilt. If you are old enough, it’s the “Poor Little Rich Girl” headlines, or maybe it’s her dating Frank Sinatra, or the designer jeans with the swan logo. Women wore her name across their derrieres. She’s lived every era fully, and…

  • “This Place” at the Brooklyn Museum: Outsiders Photograph Israel

    In the fall of 2012, the French-born photographer Frederic Brenner took me to a swimming hole in the Bet Shean valley in Israel. Crowds sat on the edge of rocks waiting to jump in. Brenner exulted in the place, where the Romans, he told me, came in ancient times, a site I “dare not miss.”…

  • Jane Fonda at Caroline’s Comedy Club: Championing the Equal Rights Amendment

    Photo: Paula Schwartz Sunday night’s Superbowl may have been the focus for a majority of Americans, but a rival event took place at Caroline’s Comedy Club, with Jane Fonda as M. C., introduced by Gloria Steinem. Calling herself a quintessential late bloomer to feminism, Jane Fonda recalled that she really did not understand what it…

  • Bill Pullman Honored at the New York Stage and Film Gala: It’s Good to be King

    On screen Bill Pullman is that guy, rarely first choice for the girl, but you spend a lot of watching wondering exactly why not: see Sleepless in Seattle, or While You Were Sleeping; he comes late, back from the war, in the movie A League of their Own, and Geena Davis leaves baseball for his…

  • Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in Carol: Women Who Love Women

    The Oscar buzz around Todd Haynes’ new movie Carol may focus on the two women Cate Blanchett’s Carol and Rooney Mara’s Therese, but Phyllis Nagy’s adapted screenplay, from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, will surely garner an Oscar nod too. The story of two women, an upper class suburban housewife and mother, and…

  • Sting: Variations on The Last Ship

    A master storyteller in the tradition of medieval balladeers, Sting recounted a childhood experience at a celebration this week of his The Last Ship from the River of the Northern City, a handcrafted boxed edition of his Last Ship lyrics with woodcuts by “luminist” painter Stephen Hannock, published by Two Ponds Press. Growing up in…

  • The French Riviera in the Meatpacking: Dinner at Fig & Olive

    In celebration of their new cookbook, Fig & Olive: The Cuisine of the French Riviera, Francine and Laurent Halasz, mother and her devoted son, greeted dinner guests with glasses of Veuve Clicquot and warmth at the Fig & Olive restaurant in the Meatpacking this week. Laurent especially emphasized the work of his mother in creating…

  • Hamptons Journal: Food Glorious Food

    Out on Eastern Long Island, real food and real estate rule, somebody who knows recently told me. This wisdom was proven at a special dinner at the Pollock-Krasner House on the waterfront Springs site where the artist couple lived, and at Guild Hall’s annual Garden as Art tour featuring vegetable gardens at several spectacular estates.…

  • Stirring the Pot with Florence Fabricant:

    Last week, at Guild Hall’s series, “Stirring the Pot,” featuring conversations with “culinary celebrities,” Geoffrey Zakarian was not expecting to talk politics. Florence Fabricant, New York Times food writer, author of several cookbooks including Park Avenue Pot Luck, a compilation of recipes from friends, and host of this entertaining series—next up Dr. Oz and Lisa…

  • Authors Night 2015: Cooks, Cookbooks, and Others

    High profile authors like Nelson DeMille, Dick Cavett and Dr. Ruth Westheimer had stacks of books to sell under the Authors Night tent. Not surprising, the longest line was for author Ed Burns, yes that Ed Burns. The cover of this week’s Hamptons Magazine, creator of a new television series, Public Morals, for TNT, and…

  • With Jason Segel at Lunch at the Lotos Club: Celebrating of The End of the Tour

    By 1996, upon the publication of the gargantuan novel Infinite Jest, its author David Foster Wallace was the envy of writers. Touted in exalted ways, praised as brilliant, his work produced an “anxiety of influence” for the literary. The Rolling Stone reporter, novelist David Lipsky, asked editor-in-chief Jann Wenner to assign him to accompany Wallace…

  • Alec Baldwin Shows Up for Summerdocs: William F. Buckley vs. Gore Vidal on Television in Best of Enemies

    The first of three documentaries in the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summerdocs series hosted by Alec Baldwin, Best of Enemies was sure to be a hit with the East Hampton crowd. Featuring a historic event of verbal jousting between two well matched public intellectuals, men who could turn a phrase, the conservative William F. Buckley…

  • Billy Collins to read at Guild Hall: A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Dentist

    When I heard that Billy Collins would give a reading at Guild Hall, I wanted to talk to the U. S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003). I caught up with him in transit.  I hope I’m not interrupting anything. I am on the way to the dentist, so figure I have just a few minutes. I just…

  • Ornette Coleman and the Beat Generation Literati

    A Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur Fellow, jazzman Ornette Coleman died this week at age 85. Ornette Coleman’s extraordinary career as an alto saxophone performer dovetailed with several poetry movements in America including his friendship and collaborations with the Beat Generation writers. He made the soundtracks on David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991), based on William…