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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Events

  • Guild Hall Hosts A Revived Reading of Tennessee Williams

    The works of Tennessee Williams are a goldmine for veteran actors, and Guild Hall has a rich history of producing his plays. At one such event, here’s how it went for a reporter and Eli Wallach. How old am I? asked Eli Wallach playfully. The occasion was a staged reading of works by Tennessee Williams…

  • Remembering Jerry Stiller

    Of course, everyone remembers Jerry Stiller as George Costanza’s father on Seinfeld. Festivus? Remember the holiday of Festivus famously celebrated by George’s dad? Way before that he was the Stiller of Stiller & Meara, one of the greatest comedy teams ever, with his wife Ann Meara. And, as if I were paying a shiva call…

  • Chiara Mastroianni in On a Magical Night/ Rendez-vous with French Cinema

    As of the beginning of March, Film at Lincoln Center was abuzz with plans for the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema, with On a Magical Night to screen, and filmmaker Christophe Honore, and his star Chiara Mastroianni to attend. The festival kaboshed, like much of everything, the film is now available: strandreleasing.com. The director and…

  • Remembering Michael McClure

    A West Coast beat, Michael McClure was less of a presence in New York than the seminal figures: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, but he was no less of a master poet, combining his love of nature with traditional forms such as villanelles, sonnets and sestinas. One of the last beat poets, Michael McClure (87) died this…

  • Felt Sad, Posted a Frog (and other streams of global quarantine): What is “Essential?”

    The writer/ editor Gordon Lish used to say, riffing off a groaner of a joke, “Everyone has to be somewhere.” For characters in isolation in a new play inspired by the moment, Felt Sad, Posted a Frog (and other streams of global quarantine), the location is all over the place. That, of course, is the…

  • Julia Garner in The Assistant: He’s Not That Into You

    Remember when the big news was the rampant sexual predation in our culture? Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, men who preyed on women seem like proverbial spuds compared to the current threat on all our systems. The movie The Assistant, about Jane, an aspiring film producer in her entry level job at a movie studio goes…

  • A Star-Studded Tribute for Stephen Sondheim at 90: He’s “Still Here”

    To fete beloved Stephen Sondheim at 90 in song for two and a half hours, an A-list of Broadway stars zoomed in. Sure, you don’t get the wow production, the pageantry, the costumes and sets of a live musical, but what you do get is that up close emotion that the internet allows, as if…

  • Mystery in Montauk: The Untoward End of Peter Beard’s Wild Ride

    The story of Peter Beard has a grim end: some 19 days after he disappeared, after search parties including helicopters had given up their trawling the rocky coast, the erstwhile adventurer has just turned up. Some thought he went into the sea, lunch meat for sharks, if there are such fish at these shores, but…

  • Remembering Hal Willner: Music Impresario and Literary Man

    Back in the early 1980’s, Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs grinned across the screen on Saturday Night Live, having just been introduced as the greatest living writer in America by supermodel Lauren Hutton. Usually writers don’t read from their work on television, but behind the scenes, Hal Willner made it happen. Willner, beloved music…

  • Remembering Bucky Pizzarelli at the Café Carlyle

    Among the many joys of New York night life, and jazz performances in particular was hearing Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar alongside his son John’s quartet at the Café Carlyle. This week the elder Pizzarelli (94) succumbed to the coronavirus. Through the years, John was a regular at the Carlyle, and seven years ago, his father…

  • Jesse Eisenberg in Resistance: Remembering Marcel Marceau as Holocaust Hero

    One of the last great New York nights was the opening of The Girl from North Country on Broadway, nearly a month ago. Among the guests crowding into the Belasco was Jesse Eisenberg. By coincidence I had just that afternoon seen his latest film Resistance, and still recovering from the power of this Holocaust survival…

  • Apropos of Nothing: Woody Allen’s View from the Top

    Back in the day, I knew a journalist who had a crush on Woody Allen, and joined a club with others similarly besotted. Witty and smart, this bespectacled nerd made them laugh, and that was sexy. Cut to Woody Allen today, a man in his ‘80’s trying to clear his name. His new book, Apropos…

  • Terrence McNally Remembered

    Inevitable that the current virus would claim the life of someone up close and personal. The pleasures of Terrence McNally’s work in theater have been a staple of New York’s Broadway and off experience for decades. In June 2019, I saw a revival of his Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, his writing…

  • Remembering Andreas Brown at the Gotham Book Mart

    On December 27, 2016, I posted a story about returning to the Gotham Book Mart site, reconfigured after the legendary literary hangout lost its lease. Its proprietor, Andreas Brown, a man wise to books, theater, and the theater of books, died this week at age 86. Among many discoveries, he was onto Jimmy Kimmel, telling…

  • A Quiet Place II: Shhhhhhh!

    Introducing the next chapter to the hit horror movie, A Quiet Place, writer/director John Krasinski said he never wanted to make a sequel, and now he prefers the new one: “That’s for you to decide,” he said to the rapt audience at the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall premiere. Expect: the most successful franchise…

  • The Plot Against America on HBO: Democracy at Risk

    Showrunner David Simon took the stage at the 92nd Street Y carrying a giant-sized bottle of Purell following a preview screening of the HBO miniseries, The Plot Against America, to air on March 16. Certainly, Coronavirus was on his mind, a point of concern, even paranoia, while he was promoting his program, famously a Philip…

  • Girl From the North Country at the Belasco Theater: Dark Drama With Dylan’s Music

    The musical, Girl From the North Country, newly landed on Broadway at the Belasco Theater after sellout runs in London and at the Public Theater, imagines what you can do if you match up a brilliant storyteller, Conor McPherson, with a brilliant songwriter, Bob Dylan. And that’s without either one of them having met, spoken,…

  • All the Natalie Portmans at the MCC Theater

    A white girl in a black tutu pirouettes onstage in a dour apartment, a fantasy vision of Natalie Portman in Black Swan. Reminiscent of other works with movie stars in the name (Being John Malkovitch/ Searthing for Debra Winger), All the Natalie Portmans, an off- Broadway debut by C. A. Johnson at the MCC Theater,…

  • Salman Rushdie Commands The Rainbow Room at the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Awards

    Even against a gloomy sky, The Rainbow Room with its magnificent city views defied yesterday’s weather, an impending pandemic, democrats duking it out. At Guild Hall’s most festive winter celebration, honoring achievement in the arts and philanthropy, serenity reigned, although most honorees greeted guests and neighbors with fist bumps and elbows over the usual bear…

  • Remembering Rip Torn: R. I. P. Rip

    At the Greenwich House Theater for a memorial for Rip Torn, awesome clips revealed the evolution of this legendary actor’s astonishing film career from Baby Doll (1956) to Bible epics through roles as a good guy and then menacing bad ass, onto his Emmy winning television work on “The Larry Shandling Show” and “30 Rock”…

  • Oscars 2020: Parasite Upset

    Okay, we did see it coming. Parasite certainly made a big impression. A stylish hoot, the feature was the edgiest, artiest of the lot. Director Bong Joon Ho needed a drink after his writing win; maybe he thought his run would end after that, but the academy shed its love for him over top honors.…

  • The Times of Bill Cunningham: “We all get dressed for Bill”

    Mark Bozek’s documentary, The Times of Bill Cunningham, features a fresh look at his subject from a 1994 taped interview: Hard working and uniquely talented, Bill Cunningham eschewed the limelight yet pursued and promoted style, at celebrity functions and on the street, often perched on his bike on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th…

  • Incitement: New York Jewish Film Festival on a Roll

    Where is Quentin Tarantino when we need him? As we know, his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, now nominated for a Best Picture Oscar among many other awards, turns on the conceit of what if, the fantasy that the Manson murders on August 9, 1969 had a different outcome. Yaron Zilberman’s Incitement, a powerful…

  • Martin Scorsese’s Rat Pack

    Whatever else happens, no matter what other Oscar nominations The Irishman garners, Best Picture is guaranteed. The New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review, to name two groups, have already augured its success. But of course, winning is anyone’s guess. After decades of movies, Martin Scorsese seems to take the award season…

  • Quentin Tarantino’s “Iambic Quintameter” and other Rhythms at the 85th Annual New York Film Critics Circle Awards Dinner

    Back in 2012, when Brad Pitt received a Best Supporting Actor Award from the NYFCC, he proclaimed that he loved this award evening best of all because these awards will not be televised. Does that explain why this awards night breathes relaxation, friends awarding friends despite a gripe (from Adam Sandler) about mean reviewers? Not…