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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Music

  • Sophie B. Hawkins: A Free Spirit at Café Carlyle

    Sophie B. Hawkins is the real deal: she composes her own songs and sings her heart out. At Café Carlyle, she channels Janis Joplin, whipping her mane around for a medley of “Ball & Chain /Piece of my Heart,” and goes nasal for Bob Dylan’s “I Want You.” Promising only one cover, she performs George…

  • Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry at the Jewish Museum

    Florine Stettheimer had a charmed life, to judge from the expansive, colorful, and grand exhibition at the Jewish Museum. An artist born to wealth, she painted her milieu: “Spring Sale at Bendel’s,” “Asbury Park South,” parades, parties, picnics, groups together enjoying life, and portraits like the one of Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy, or her…

  • Bernadette Peters Goes to the Library: The New York Public Library Spring Dinner

    Among the many joys of this year’s New York Public Library Spring Dinner held in the Celeste Bartos Auditorium of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the spacious hall where Salman Rushdie, while still in hiding, gave a reading and talk, and where French intellectual Bernard Henri Levy beseeched some brave woman to have sex with…

  • Antonia Bennett’s Sings Songs of Love at Café Carlyle

    Touring with her father Tony Bennett since she was a little girl, Antonia Bennett learned a thing or two about performing. For her impressive debut at the Café Carlyle, she sings classics from the American songbook backed by a first rate jazz band, with Spike Wilner on piano, especially good on a jazzy “Tea for…

  • Chita Rivera 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…

  • Bandstand’s Untoward Heroics on Broadway

    The new musical Bandstand at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater opens with the sounds of war and a pivotal scene that recurs in the story of Donny Novitzki, a returning soldier who forms a band. Longing to return to life as it was, he is tasked to look in on the wife of a friend…

  • Aretha Franklin at the Tribeca Film Festival Opening Night: Celebrating Clive Davis

    Music mogul Clive Davis is so beloved, one of his premiere stars Aretha Franklin, complaining of upper respiratory problems, came out in full vocal force to celebrate him at Radio City Music Hall for the opening of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. What a night! First the screening of the documentary, Clive Davis: The Soundtrack…

  • Amelie: Cornering Cute on Broadway

    Based on the 2001 hit movie from France, Amelie, brings original music and distinctive whimsy to the Walter Kerr Theater.  (“Hoping to see you/ In Macchu Picchu” is one tickling lyric. What’s not to love?) Characters may don fish heads and in one incredibly silly bit, an Elton John sequined suit, but it’s all to…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Jill Kargman Climbs a “Stairway to Cabaret” at the Café Carlyle

    Not sure whether or not Jill Kargman would riff on the Led Zepplin classic “Stairway to Heaven,” I had to admit, the comedienne, creator of Bravo’s Odd Mom Out, and author of Sprinkle Glitter on my Grave brought something different to the Café Carlyle. The set list, for example, featured only eight songs. Kargman is…

  • Steve Tyrell at the Café Carlyle: Home for the Holidays

    Now in his twelfth year performing at the Café Carlyle, Steve Tyrell exulted in the packed house and sold out nights for the holidays. No wonder he seemed so comfortable and set the mood with “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” and “You’d be so Nice to Come Home To.” David Mann on flute…

  • Judy Collins at Café Carlyle: Leonard Cohen’s Legacy

    Judy Collins ended her set at the Café Carlyle yesterday with Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” a bittersweet homage to the Canadian novelist, composer, and performer—as it turned out. Of course “Suzanne,” from her 1966 album In My Life, is a standard part of her repertoire; it was only after her opening night that guests learned of…

  • Ana Gasteyer: So Hip at the Café Carlyle

    Fans who loved Ana Gasteyer’s Saturday Night Live teacher trip with Will Farrell will find her cabaret show at the Café Carlyle a reminder, it’s just acting, or maybe just acting out. In the intimacy of this premiere supper club, located, as Gasteyer redubbed the neighborhood SoDal, that is South of Dalton, invoking the city’s…

  • Christine Ebersole at Café Carlyle: After the Ball

    Broadway diva is one name for Christine Ebersole, and at her sublime performance in the intimacy of the Café Carlyle, call her “working mom.” Her medley of “Inchworm,” “Autumn Leaves,” “(Have I Stayed) Too Long at the Fair” suggests a big-hearted view of love that could embrace children. She has three, adopted, and now finds…

  • HBO’s Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds Premieres at the New York Film Festival: New Meaning to the Word “Swing”

    Carrie Fisher made a wildly entertaining show about her story of growing up the child of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher: Wishful Drinking also became a popular HBO film. A casualty of her parents’ divorce with a sharply bracing sense of humor, Carrie Fisher now stars with her mother in a new documentary, aptly named…

  • Kelli O’Hara Sings “If You Knew Susie” at Hope Rising Benefit

    Best known for her leading roles in recent Broadway revivals The King and I, South Pacific, and Nice Work If You Can Get It, Kelli O’Hara sang at a dinner to benefit the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration (AFTD) at the Pierre Hotel last week. Of course she sang “I Have Dreamed” and “I Could Have…

  • Laura Benanti Off-Broadway at the Café Carlyle

    With more than a wink, the poised Laura Benanti portrays herself as a child show tune nerd recounting highlights from her stellar career with comedic flair. You could say this Tony Award winner’s show at the Café Carlyle, Tales from Soprano Isle, glimpses her life backwards: songs from her recent hit musical, She Loves Me,…

  • Spamilton: An American Parody at the Triad: Getting Off on Broadway

    You don’t have to see Hamilton to have side-splitting fun at Spamilton. All that is required is that you love Broadway. In fact, a running gag in this 70-minute spoof goes: you are not snagging tickets to Hamilton, even if you are Bernadette Peters or Liza! Yes, when it comes to the democracy of Hamilton,…