recent posts

about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Events

  • Survival in Pre-Civil War South: 12 Years a Slave Honored at the Lotos Club

    The subject of race was addressed head on at a luncheon celebrating the film “12 Years a Slave,” easily the film of the year in an awards season gathering momentum. “I’m a black man, as if you didn’t notice, and part of the global identity of slavery” said director Steve McQueen on a panel led…

  • Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ to Tell You on HBO

    Among the many ways the pioneering comedienne Moms Mabley was a pioneer was that she performed at the Apollo in 1939, five years after the Harlem theater opened. In her signature hats, mismatched housedresses, and gummy lips, she was a hoot, although her jokes consisted mostly in telling the truth. Her deadpan was killer. She…

  • Hillary Rodham Clinton at MoMA’s White Gold Premiere

    Even by Peggy Siegal’s usual high celebrity quotient, the event was a coup: Hillary Clinton’s introduction of a short documentary, White Gold, at its premiere at MoMA. Last Wednesday, she addressed a packed screening room: Candice Bergen, Christie Brinkley, Chuck Close, Albert Maysles, Barbara Kopple, Lawrence O’Donnell, David Schwimmer, and many others. The film’s subject,…

  • How Jewish Is It? Art Spiegelman at the Jewish Museum and Lost Childhood opera in Bethesda

    Puffing vigorously on a cigarette substitute, Art Spiegelman addressed journalists at the Jewish Museum at a recent opening of an exhibition “Co-mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps.” Referring to his most potent inspiration for subversive art, “Mad Magazine,” he jokes, he’s convinced, the Viet Nam War protests would not have happened had it…

  • The Great Beauty: The Glory That is Rome:

    In The Great Beauty, a gorgeously shot picture of contemporary Rome, albeit fictional, it is refreshing to see that this tourist mecca of monumental historic significance has a shallow center just like all the other important world cities of note. You could say this movie whose central character is a writer of one novel so…

  • Saving Mr. Banks Singalong at The Four Seasons

    Disney scores again! First it was multi-Oscar winning Mary Poppins, now Saving Mr. Banks, a biopic of Mary Poppins writer P. L. Travers. In the person of Emma Thompson she’s stern, a bit of a frump, Britishly out of step, yet endearing as she comes around giving Walt Disney the rights to make this classic…

  • Mink Stole and Penny Arcade in The Mutilated

    If you could mate John Waters with Charles Ludlam, the offspring might be Mink Stole and Penny Arcade, lead performers in a new production of Tennessee Williams’ “The Mutilated.” First seen in 1966 as a one-acter on Broadway, coupled with “The Gnadiges Fraulein,” the program entitled “Slapstick Tragedy,” the play has been relegated to a…

  • Bob Guccione in Filthy Gorgeous

    When Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione died on October 10, 2010, the obituaries dwelled on him as pornographer. That got the attention of filmmaker, Barry Avrich, a documentarian who specializes in the dramatic arc of moguls who peak and fall as a result of their own hubris: his Show Stopper told the story of theatrical producer…

  • After Midnight: Resurrecting Harlem in its Heyday

    Old Harlem is celebrated in Harlem, and on Broadway in After Midnight. Last weekend, a ribbon cutting at Minton’s, Richard Parson’s supper club, marks the return of a legendary Harlem jazz joint, where large photos of Duke and Dizzy, Ella and Billie grace a renovated dining room and all eyes lead to a small back…

  • Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Double Premiere in Brooklyn

    First to say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the newly built Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, is jaw-dropping great. When you tell its creator Julie Taymor, she shrugs and says, Well, it’s Shakespeare’s play. Uh, yes, but what Taymor has done with a work you know so well is utterly astounding, melding storytelling…

  • The Book Thief: Death’s Sultry Allure

    Death has a sweet-tongued tone, like a benevolent grandpa narrating the movie of Markus Zusak’s much beloved novel, The Book Thief, as he picks off characters on the large canvas of small town Germany during World War II. Yes the citizenry suffered bombings, conscription into the army, and deprivations of all kinds. But at least…

  • Older Men in Last Vegas

    When we first meet them in this laugh out loud comedy Last Vegas, Robert DeNiro, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline, and Michael Douglas look like they might have wandered off the set of a movie called Bad Grandpas. But then, as they go off to Las Vegas for a wild pre-nuptial blast for Billy (Douglas), all cleaned up,…

  • The Broken Circle Breakdown and Belgian Beer

    The lovers in Felix van Groeningen’sThe Broken Circle Breakdown, Belgium’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar, live and love so intensely, you know from the start that something has to give. It was too good to last, says Elise (Veerle Baetens), a tattoo artist as her marriage to Didier (Johan Heldenbergh), a banjo…

  • Tres Brooklyn: Jean-Paul Gaultier at the Brooklyn Museum and Tres Chic: Grace Kelly Celebrated

    Only some of the crowd greeting French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier at the Brooklyn Museum, wore his clothes, easily identified by the tab on the back. But many chose the occasion of the opening of a lavish exhibition, “The Fashion World of Jean-Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” to pay tribute, riffing on his…

  • In Memorium: Lou Reed (1942-2013)

    Rock icon and beat poet, Lou Reed had an edgy downtown presence. My Lou Reed stories: so engrossed in his music, head stuck to the ground under a table at the Bottom Line to get a better shot. I swear never to become a photographer. At St. Mark’s Church: Lou Reed and Allen Ginsberg mix…

  • Dressed to Die For: Mary-Louise Parker in The Snow Geese, Trudie Styler in an Anglo-Irish The Seagull, Marin Ireland in Marie Antoinette

    In Sharr White’s new play The Snow Geese at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Mary-Louise Parker as Elizabeth wears black, in mourning for her dead husband, but really she is attired in Jane Greenwood’s circa 1917 period detail, eh weeds, for a lost way of life. Under Daniel Sullivan’s direction, a family who thinks it…

  • Kenny Barron’s Piano, Sharon Clark’s Vocals and James Carter’s Horn at the 22ndAnnual Jazz Foundation of America’s Loft Party

    The Jazz Foundation of America’s loft party, an annual concert to benefit a vital organization that helps players with medical expenses, housing, recording, you name it, is wall to wall music occupying three large spaces simultaneously. It is hard to know which room to occupy,–choices must be made– but when we heard that Kenny Barron…

  • Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg: Kill Your Darlings Opens the Hamptons International Film Festival

    After much buzz on the festival circuit, including Sundance, Venice, Toronto, to name a few, Kill Your Darlings opens the Hamptons International Film Festival tonight. Before there was Neal Cassady to whom the writer Jack Kerouac was in thrall, there was Lucien Carr. A St. Louis friend of William Burroughs, Carr was a fast and…

  • AKA Doc Pomus: Documenting the “Save the Last Dance” Songwriter

    The songwriter of rock & roll classics like “This Magic Moment,” “Teenager in Love,” “Viva Las Vegas,”—yes, Elvis Presley’s hit– and “Save the Last Dance for Me,” Jerome Felder,  AKA Doc Pomus, was an American original. A Brooklyn boy, crippled by polio as a child, he was big hearted enough to charm the girl he…

  • Cate Blanchett Feted at the New York Film Festival

    She may have been jet lagged and slightly tipsy from a drink or two at a pre-Tribute dinner at the New York Film Festival evening in her honor, but that did not make Cate Blanchett babble like Jasmine, her character in the latest Woody Allen movie. Quite the contrary, articulate, generous, and funny, Blanchett fielded…

  • Sandra Bullock and George Clooney: Spaced Out in Gravity

    A buoyant crowd settled into lunch at The Explorers’ Club to celebrate Gravity. Producer David Heyman exulted about the beauty of the film, about two astronauts stranded in the weightless ether. Wow, “You should see the sun on the Ganges! It’s amazing!” This movie does what CGI, 3D, all the bells and whistles of movie…

  • Robert Reich Stands Tall: Inequality for All

    Just as the news seems bleak, a government shut down translating to national parks closing their gates to tourists, and workers home without pay, Google’s celebration of Yosemite’s anniversary seems especially ironic. The documentary Inequality for All turns its penetrating gaze onto another piece of evidence of meltdown: the vast gap between the 1% and…

  • Tom Hanks as Captain Phillips: Heroics on the High Seas for Opening Night at the New York Film Festival

    The New York Film Festival must have a thing for danger on the high seas. Last year’s opening night featured the fantasy ocean crossing Life of Pi: a boy on a raft with a tiger. This year: it’s the real life adventure of the Maersk Alabama with Captain Richard Phillips at the helm, invaded by…

  • Muscle Shoals Makes it Downtown for a New York Premiere

    The name Alabama has such beautiful assonance, its flow of “a” makes its own Southern comfort! So the sound of  “Sweet Home Alabama,” one song in a stellar soundtrack for the documentary, Muscle Shoals, is proverbial music to the ears, an anthem to the Southern rock that flourished in this idyllic spot. A mecca for…

  • Waiting for Godot in Yiddish?

    Oy vey is mir! Everything hurts but, thanks to a carrot and a hug, I’m still here. That kvetch could sum up Beckett’s classic tragicomedy in any language. In Yiddish, as performed in a new superb production, a collaboration of the Yiddish Rep with the Castillo Theater starring Shane Baker, Avi Hoffman, David Mandelbaum, and…