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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Music

  • Jazzy Norah Jones Illuminates Montauk’s Lighthouse

    Perhaps with a nod to her legendary father, the great Ravi Shankar, pop music superstar Norah Jones, attired in an India-inspired sequined tiger on her green jacket, performed on Long Island’s East End to benefit the Montauk Lighthouse. You cannot beat this yearly event, especially for bringing together a warm community, contributing to the Montauk…

  • Wynton Marsalis Swings at Guild Hall

    “Let’s swing,” exclaimed Wynton Marsalis from the rear of the Guild Hall stage, leading into a stellar night of sublime sound featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra. Of course, this was Wynton’s triumph—a recognition of jazz as American classical music and the final stop in a U. S. and Canada tour. The 90-minute set…

  • Jack Kerouac: A Vision of an Alt-America Screens at the Tribeca Film Festival

    Midcentury author Jack Kerouac is the least dead of dead writers. When he died in 1969 at the age of 47, he left behind unpublished manuscripts and an untoward legacy as the so-called “King of the Beats.” His most famous novel On the Road, a road trip, a bromance, a linguistic tour de force, went…

  • Let’s Dance: Anticipating the Chita Rivera Awards on Broadway

    “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than in a roomful of dancers,” Bebe Neuwirth quoted Chita Rivera, legendary Broadway dancer, Anita in the original “West Side Story,” the star of many other classics. At Bond 45, in a roomful of notable talent from this year’s great shows, Chita Rivera would have felt quite at home. The…

  • Susan Stroman: A Smash on Broadway, and at The Rainbow Room

    “It’s meta, it’s very funny, about a bunch of creatives trying to put on a musical about Marilyn Monroe,” said choreographer/ director/ theater legend Susan Stroman about her current Broadway musical, “Smash.” “It’s really about what it takes to create something—whether it’s a musical or something in life.” That’s the energy Stro –as she’s called–…

  • The Jonathan Larson Project: His Words, His Music Downtown

    A new musical revue, The Jonathan Larson Project, at the Orpheum Theater on Second Avenue is proof of a simple fact: there’s never enough Jonathan Larson. Sure, opening night was a fan fest, with many having sampled the work the writer/ composer left behind after his truly untimely death on the eve of his Rent’s…

  • White Lotus in Rajasthan: Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright 

    The fictive White Lotus resort in Thailand, the locus of Mike White’s mega HBO series in its third season, has nothing on the Six Senses wellness retreats in India. Seeing the staff line up to greet guests arriving by boat in episode one recalled entrée into the extraordinarily fabulously fashioned Six Senses Fort Barwara in…

  • Sebastian Stan, Timothee Chalamet, Adrien Brody: Among Leading Men at the Gotham Awards 2024

    Old Hollywood likes their leading men handsome and debonair—think Cary Grant, Rock Hudson—but with this year’s Gotham selection of A DIFFERENT MAN for the top prize, Best Feature, a new look grabs at your attention. You have to love an awards season that starts with a celebration of –well, difference. A hit at the New…

  • Hollywood Film Mavens Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, and Doug Liman Praise Gaucho Gaucho: Reinventing Documentary

    Documentary filmmakers Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck had a shoutout of praise for their 2022 film, THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS –from Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks. These veteran filmmakers, the FORREST GUMP team, are not the only fans. For their latest doc, GAUCHO GAUCHO, about Argentinian cowboys, making the rounds of film festivals to great acclaim,…

  • Tammy Faye: Finding Religion on Broadway

    Before becoming the pioneering televangelist power couple, Jim Bakker and his enterprising wife Tammy Faye Bakker sold God using puppets out of the back seat of a car, creating an industry and an empire. Religion, as we know, is big business. Limning their rise—and fall– in fame and fortune, the new Elton John musical, Tammy…

  • Remembering Paul Morrissey 

    From the edgy look of his movies—FLESH, TRASH, HEAT, to name a few–you would never think of Paul Morrissey as deeply religious. With his friend and partner Andy Warhol, a fellow Catholic, he made art, collaborating on many cinema-verite films and other ventures including the purchase of cliff-high acreage in Montauk overlooking the Atlantic. The…

  • Luca Guadagnino’s Queer at the New York Film Festival: Daniel Craig Looking for Love

    The novels of William S. Burroughs may be difficult to adapt—just ask David Cronenberg—but in the able imagination of Luca Guadagnino, the transformation of Queer to film is a triumph. The packed audience at the recent Alice Tully Hall premiere, a high point at this year’s New York Film Festival, went wild as the creative…

  • Hamptons Journal: McArthur Binions at the Peter Marino Foundation, the LongHouse Gala, and Daniel Humm at Guild Hall

    The work is detailed and geographic, tonal, you might say, like bop graffiti on brick in a Detroit abandoned building. The artist, McArthur Binions, in fact, comes from Detroit but spent a lot of time in New York meeting Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis, moving on to Chicago where he now lives and works. Artist…

  • Steve Van Zandt: Disciple at the Tribeca Film Festival: It’s More Than Rock ‘N’ Roll

    Wearing orange leathery skinny pants and his signature bandanna, Steve Van Zandt, greeted guests as they attended the premiere of Bill Teck’s documentary about him, Steve van Zandt: Disciple, to air on June 22 on HBO. Many were friends and family, and many knew him simply as Bruce Springsteen’s guitar partner in the E Street…

  • Bernstein’s Wall: Leonard Bernstein Uptown

    An elite group gathered this week for a special screening of BERNSTEIN’S WALL, a documentary about the great composer/ conductor/ educator, a fixture of 20th century American cultural history. Well-timed, the riveting documentary comes after Bradley Cooper’s success with MAESTRO, his Oscar nominated biopic of the legendary artist. But here, with Leonard Bernstein’s own words…

  • Alicia Keyes’ Hell’s Kitchen and Sufjans Stevens’ Illinoise: Coming of Age on Broadway

    Tales of young people reaching their first rung of wisdom is a potent motif. On Broadway, two musicals, vastly different, feature that story in song and dance. At the Shubert Theatre, Hell’s Kitchen, not quite the coming-of-age of its creator, Alicia Keyes, but close enough, takes place in Manhattan Plaza, housing for artists in Hell’s…

  • Eddie Redmayne in Cabaret: How Kinky is It?

    The musical Cabaret was always a window into the years leading up to the atrocities of World War II based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. Landmark productions starring Joel Grey and Alan Cumming as Emcee at the fictional Kit Kat Club allowed us to glimpse a decadence we could never imagine. Can you ever top…

  • Bernadette Peters’ Joke: Posh Meets Borscht Belt as Guild Hall Returns to the Rainbow Room

    Guild Hall Academy of the Arts President, the painter Eric Fischl got to hone his comedy chops at this year’s spring gala, fashioning a speech on a string of cliches—thanks to A. I. That set the night off in good spirits, against The Rainbow Room’s customary spectacular panoramic views of the city now fogged in,…

  • Water for Elephants: An Awesome Spectacle on Broadway

    This circus show comes with no disclaimer. No animals were hurt in Water for Elephants, opening this week at the Imperial Theater. Some human characters, yes! But if you know the story from the movie and the book on which it’s based, you know that certain bad leaders get their just desserts. The animals, so…

  • Christine Lahti in Russian Troll Farm: Jesse Tyler Ferguson Honored at the Vineyard Theater Gala

    Any lingering doubts about how the 2016 election went the way it did, Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy, now ending its run at the Vineyard Theater, offers a hilarious, clever, chilling spectacle of our nightmares come true –especially horrifying as we move toward the 2024 elections. Set in a cold office space,…

  • Jennifer Holliday at the Carlyle Café

    Tony award winning Jennifer Holliday makes her debut at the Café Carlyle, not far from where she starred on Broadway as Effie in 1981 in “Dreamgirls.” Singing “I’m Still Here,” Holliday channels ancestors—Barbra Streisand among them– in a set that features selections from the American songbook. But more, she evokes a prior Café Carlyle resident,…

  • Carey Mulligan’s Surprise Appearance at New York Philharmonic’s Evening of Maestro’s Music

    Director/ Producer/ Co-writer/ Star Bradley Cooper introduced a special concert at the newly refurbished Geffen Hall, featuring the NY Philharmonic performing Leonard Bernstein’s music for his film MAESTRO. That his subject Leonard Bernstein had begun his career in this very place, conducting the Philharmonic at age 25, gave the evening extra resonance. Fervidly researching, Cooper…

  • Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James’ Menage a Trois in Days of Wine and Roses

    When the new Broadway musical, Days of Wine and Roses, was announced, Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s voluptuous classic song from the movie swelled in my mind’s ear. That was a lot to let go, as the new show at Studio 54 drew near. Featuring Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James as the lovers in…

  • Chita Rivera Remembered at the Café Carlyle: Putting on her Vamp

    Broadway musical legend Chita Rivera takes the narrow strip of stage at the Café Carlyle, maneuvering her sequined body strategically so she won’t end up in your vodka tonic. Nobody moves like Chita Rivera. The consummate showwoman, she gives a great, not to be missed night, starting with “A Lot of Living to Do.” For…

  • Isaac Mizrahi’s Snazzy Reboot of Prokoviev’s Peter and the Wolf at the Guggenheim

    Prokoviev’s classic Peter and the Wolf is reimagined at the Guggenheim Museum, an ingenious recreation from Isaac Mizrahi. The fashion designer cum cabaret performer has worked costuming for theater for decades, and for the Guggenheim’s program of “Works and Process” the Peter and the Wolf story is set, where else, but in the neighborhood, in…