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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Events

  • Five Came Back on Netflix: Hollywood and the Second World War

    “We still have not come to grips with World War II,” asserted newsman Tom Brokaw, the author of several books on the subject. “It was the largest event in the history of mankind.” Moderator of a panel on Monday night following Netflix’s preview screening of its series, Five Came Back, at Alice Tully Hall, Brokaw…

  • Jessica Chastain in The Zookeeper’s Wife: The Myth of the Good German

    A genuine Holocaust era heroine, Antonina Zabinski could charm a tiger. Now her story is a major motion picture: The Zookeeper’s Wife, based on Diane Ackerman’s 2007 book on this historic figure has everything: animals in mortal danger, an excellent cast led by Jessica Chastain as Antonina, Daniel Bruhl as Lutz Heck, Der Fuhrer’s chief…

  • Lynn Nottage’s Sweat: A Backstory for our Trump Troubles

    For those still pondering how we got to Trump in the White House, “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage’s play just opened at Studio 54 for this Pulitzer Prize winner’s Broadway debut, and a prescient view of our collective political plight. “Sweat” gives poignant voice to a disenfranchised microcosm of the American heartland, as if Michael Moore’s Flint, Michigan had…

  • Suzanne Vega at the Café Carlyle: Lover, Beloved

    The inspiration for Suzanne Vega’s show at the Café Carlyle is decidedly literary, the Southern writer Carson McCullers, author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Vega, a consummate songstress known for her signature songs, “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner,” crosstown and far from the Carlyle on 112th Street and…

  • Laura Osnes and Tony Yazbeck in Surprise Performance at the Guild Hall Gala

    If you are going to honor Susan Stroman for her achievement in performing arts, as Guild Hall did this week at their annual gala at the Rainbow Room, you may expect, aside from the usual clip reel, some real live Broadway stars. Laura Osnes, a sublime Cinderella, now preparing for the opening of Bandstand, sang…

  • Cries from Syria on HBO: Assad’s War Against his Country’s Children

    Cries from Syria, a documentary on HBO, tells such a horrific story, unfortunately the one you know if you’ve been paying attention to Syria, its government’s military efforts against protestors, use of chemical weapons on its citizens, and general violation of human rights. The regime claims it is protecting the country from terrorists. Most often…

  • Marcelo Mastroianni’s Presence at Rendez-Vous With French Cinema

    A photo exhibit at the Film Society of Lincoln Center features color stills from the set of Fellini’s 8 1/2, the maestro’s last film in black & white. Photographer Paul Ronald shot them as an aside while he was shooting black & white production stills, and of course, as these things go, the cache was…

  • Sidney Torres: In CNBC’s The Deed, Reality is Real

    Starring a charismatic New Orleans based investment mogul, Sidney Torres’ new series on CNBC, The Deed, shows how to invest in real estate. In the second episode, a building contractor named Russell, the son of a real estate agent, wants Sidney to invest in his project, but does not want to follow his advice. Sidney…

  • Sally Field Glows in Candlelight: The Glass Menagerie

    In the stunning revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie at the Belasco Theater, Sally Field’s smothering St. Louis Depression era mom Amanda Wingfield, exudes the nervous energy of a woman in compulsive command. Her son Tom, Joe Mantello, our narrator, is the butt of verbal abuse. We can see why her husband left this…

  • 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…

  • Sweeney Todd: The Barber of Fleet Street’s Revenge Tragedy

    It is a tribute to the brilliance of Stephen Sondheim’s art that two so different productions of his work are now staged in New York. Uptown on Broadway, Sunday in the Park with George illuminates the creative mind of Georges Seurat, and downtown on Barrow Street, at the Barrow Street Theater, The Tooting Art Club’s…

  • Angelica Page’s Anxiety of Influence: Turning Page

    At the outset of her one-woman show, Turning Page, perfectly staged in the intimacy of Dixon Place on Chrystie Street, Angelica Page explains why her mother’s spirit keeps calling out to her. For one thing, Geraldine Page was an Academy Award winning actress who rose to fame in several Tennessee Williams’ plays, and despite the…

  • Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford in Sunday in the Park with George

    Art isn’t easy. So say the characters in Sunday in the Park with George, now in a stellar revival at the newly renovated Hudson Theater. Part heady yet playful art history, part love story, the imaginative creation of painter Georges Seurat and his muse Dot from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, has as its central…

  • John Lloyd Young at the Café Carlyle: Here For You

    Some men just don’t get old: Dark glasses do not hide John Lloyd Young’s prom date good looks. He may be hiding from his girly fans’ swoons, but on the night we attended his Café Carlyle run, the audience was passionate about another side of this Jersey Boys’ career, his efforts to lobby for arts…

  • Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812: The Musical/ The Book

    The wild party at the Imperial Theater known as Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is not your usual samovar affair. This entertainment, referencing 70 pages of Tolstoy’s masterpiece War & Peace, has its own backstory: two downtown versions had the performers mingling among the guests, diners at a banquet. While that novelty…

  • Sting and J. Ralph: Working Together on the Oscar-Nominated “The Empty Chair”

    Sting and J. Ralph composed the song, “The Empty Chair” for the documentary Jim: The James Foley Story. As you see the clip of Sting performing that song at Bataclan, the historic Paris theater, for its opening one year after ISIS terrorists gunned down 89 people there, you cannot help but register that in “The…

  • Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard: “The Greatest Star of All”

    A musical of outsized passions as only Andrew Lloyd Webber could compose, Sunset Boulevard trades in hyperbole. “The greatest star of all,” in the words of Max, her homme d’affaires, Norma Desmond is camp drama queen extraordinaire. With Glenn Close in the role, reprising her Tony-winning performance of 22 years ago at the Palace Theater,…

  • A United Kingdom: It’s Good to be King

    David Oyelowo, so brilliant in a recent theater production of Othello, playing the king against Daniel Craig’s Iago, is now a king again in Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom. Groomed to take the throne of Botswana, Seretse Khama is studying in London where he meets an office girl, Ruth Williams (the lovely, angelic Rosamund Pike).…

  • YEN at the Lucille Lortel Theater: Children Raising Themselves

    It’s a given: boys left to their own devices can come to no good. In the fine MCC Theater  production of YEN, a British import, at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the unformed men in question are brothers by the same mother, one static, almost comatose in front of a tv when we meet him, the younger…

  • Lena Dunham in HBO’s Girls’ Final Season: Ink, Thighs, Neurosis and All

    After you have seen more of Lena Dunham’s body than that of any other serious actress, there’s always the question of how you will greet her in the flesh, clothed and social, as at the spectacular HBO party thrown for the dynamic Girls quartet at Cipriani 42nd Street this week. Guests had just come from…

  • Isaac Mizrahi at the Café Carlyle: A Gift That Keeps on Giving

    Calling his Cafe Carlyle show, “Does This Song Make Me Look Fat?” Isaac Mizrahi signals surreal leaps of fancy from music, to looks, to insecurities. Who could ask for more from an evening? Multitalented, the fashion designer/ entertainer croons cabaret standards backed by a great band, his act sprinkled with self-mocking quips recalling Joan Rivers…

  • 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…

  • Mr. Gaga: Going Gaga Over Ohad Naharin 

    Israeli filmmaker Tomer Heymann gesticulates wildly talking about Ohad Naharin, a much-awarded choreographer, the artistic director of the Tel Aviv based Batsheva Dance Company. In town in early January with his exceptional, evocative documentary, Mr. Gaga: A True Story of Love and Dance, a highlight of this year’s Jewish Film Festival, Heymann exudes, “Ohad is…

  • 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…

  • August Wilson’s Jitney in its Broadway Debut: A Review

    Now, a dozen years after his death, August Wilson is on a roll. Maybe the wide release of the movie of his stage play Fences will bring him a posthumous Oscar for Best Screenplay, but more, because Denzel Washington has vowed he would see all 10 plays of this bard of Pittsburgh’s Hill District produced.…