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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Theater

  • Paramour: Hollywood Glitz and Glamor on Broadway

    Verna, a beautiful young woman from Grand Rapids, Indiana wants to be a star in Paramour, the Cirque du Soleil/ Broadway show at the Lyric Theater, conceived and directed by Philippe Decoufle. AJ, a Hollywood director (Jeremy Kushnier) discovers her and renames the redhead Indigo (Ruby Lewis), but he’s a devil and his attentions come…

  • Jon Stewart’s Twitter War with Donald Trump at Stand Up for Heroes

    In its tenth year, Stand Up for Heroes remains one of the great nights, with Bruce Springsteen performing an acoustic “Dancin’ in the Dark” spiced with dirty jokes. And after a decade of working it, Bruce’s comic timing is almost as good as his philanthropy. After Bob Woodruff was nearly killed, embedded with troops in…

  • Nathan Lane Leads a Star Studded “The Front Page” at the Broadhurst Theater

    Wisdom has it, according to my dentist, the more star power a play has, the less it shines. Not so in the case of The Front Page revival at the Broadhurst Theater. Superbly cast with major Broadway veterans, Nathan Lane, Robert Morse, and Jefferson Mays, luminaries of stage and screen, John Goodman and Holland Taylor, and fine…

  • 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…

  • Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt in Heisenberg: A New Science of Uncertainties

    In the age of Internet dating sites, Manhattan Theater Club’s staging of Simon Stephens’ play Heisenberg, newly arrived to the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway after a successful off Broadway run, offers a unique point of engagement. Georgie (Mary-Louise Parker), a wacky, damaged young woman impulsively kisses a man on the neck on a…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Judith Light in Neil LaBute’s All the Ways to Say I Love You: WOW!

    “What is the weight of a lie?” asks Judith Light in Neil LaBute’s dramatic monologue, All the Ways to Say I Love You, at the Lucille Lortel Theater. The question weighs in like The Merchant of Venice’s pound of flesh in this MCC theater production: it refers to an outsized guilt in this one woman…

  • Remembering Edward Albee in Montauk

    This weekend, just after Edward Albee’s death at 88, the Montauk Library displayed books of his prodigious work in theater: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Zoo Story, Three Tall Women, Seascape, A Delicate Balance, volumes of the collected plays, to name just a few. A longtime resident of Long Island’s East End, Albee had a…

  • 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,…

  • Rolling with Laughter at Bedlam ’s Sense and Sensibility

    Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility provides the source for the hilarious, entertainment,Sense and Sensibility, in a sassy theatrical production at the Gym at Judson. The gossipy world of Austen’s 18th century English shires is fraught with shrewd news of who will be engaged to whom, scandal aside, and most important, at what level of financial…

  • My Fair Lady at Bay Street Theater: Eliza Finds “A Room Somewhere”

    Based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 Pygmalian and Gabriel Pascal’s 1938 film, the Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady gets a smart revival under Michael Arden’s expert direction at Bay Street Theater. You know the story: a lowly flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, morphs from guttersnipe to goddess aided by the elocution lessons of one Henry…

  • Troilus and Cressida in the Park: Manly Men Make War Not Love

    Projectile blood is just one spectacle in Shakespeare’s problem play, Troilus and Cressida, as staged at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, a fine Public Theater production directed by Daniel Sullivan. Written around the same time the bard penned his most famous tragedy Hamlet in 1602, T&C features warriors waging battle in the Trojan War, and as…

  • Caroline Hirsch on the phone: Taking Comedy Seriously at Guild Hall

    The name Carolines is synonymous with comedy. All year, Caroline Hirsch produces shows at her club Carolines on Broadway, several comedy festivals and some one-off shows such as her upcoming evening Carolines @ The Beach at Guild Hall on August 5. On a recent Friday, I caught up with Caroline by phone, en route to her…

  • Hamptons Journal: Robert Wilson: Art with Edge at the Watermill Center / Adrian Nivola at The Drawing Room

    Against a wall proclaiming “Make America Great Again” in blood red, an electric chair did not seem out of place. Not for nothing was the Watermill Center’s annual gala called “Fada: House of Madness.” Created by Pussy Riot, the work augured the ironies of installations throughout Robert Wilson’s foundation’s ample grounds. Even though rain threatened…

  • Leona Lewis in Cats: Welcome Back to the Junkyard

    Comparisons to the original long-running 1982 musical, Cats, will be inevitable, but even if you have never seen Cats before, as I have not, the revival of Cats at the Neil Simon Theater is simply splendid. I remember when it opened back in the day and so many viewers pondered, what’s the story? Just cats…

  • Classical Theater of Harlem Does the Scottish Play: Macbeth in the Park

    As you contemplate US leadership in this election process, it is essential to check in with the bard: in play after play he asks, what makes for a solid, dependable ruler? Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a towering character, shows more flaws and foibles than any tyrant in the public eye; fear and paranoia abound in his psyche.…

  • Hamptons Journal: Nona Hendryx Pays Tribute to Bowie at LongHouse Reserve Jubilee/ Richard Mishaan’s Design at Guild Hall, and the East Hampton Historical Society

    Jack Lenor Larsen’s LongHouse Reserve, home to a spectacular sculpture garden including Yoko Ono’s “Wishing Tree,” became the site of great music, food, and art, in “serious moonlight,” its 25th year celebration. As maidens in midnight flowy frocks danced around a reflecting pool, partiers slurped oysters and sipped peach bellinis, gathering for a piano recital by…

  • Sandra Bernhard at Guild Hall: Feel the Bernhard

    Funny woman Sandra Bernhard joins this week’s list of funny women performing at Guild Hall. There was Kathy Griffin, and if you count the many personae of Charles Busch, this Friday night makes the third for her show titled, “Feel the Bernhard.” A few days before, Sandy interrupted her viewing of Venus Williams’ tennis match…

  • Ralph Fiennes as Richard III at the Almeida Theater in the Time of Brexit

    Onstage, gravediggers at an excavation site discover a crooked spinal cord. That could only belong to one figure, Richard III. Flashing back to Shakespeare’s play, his history, in the person of Ralph Fiennes unfolds in the Almeida Theater’s stunning production under Rupert Goold’s direction, the image of the misshapen bone only begins to tell you…

  • Lena Hall at the Café Carlyle: “Oh! You Pretty Things”

    A whiff of David Bowie hung over the air at the Café Carlyle as Lena Hall opened her two-week run. Whipping her head punk style, Hall treated her audience to her bad girl history with boys as a way of explaining how a nice girl got here, musically. “I’m pretty sure no one has done…

  • Halley Feiffer’s “A Funny Thing Happened . . .” at the Lucille Lortel Theater

    As anyone who has ever spent time in a hospital room knows, the laughs are few. On opening night of Halley Feiffer’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City” at the Lucille Lortel Theater on Tuesday, the audience filing in…

  • Stars in the Alley: A Smorgasbord of Broadway

    Running up to the Tony Awards, a special lunchtime event celebrated Broadway last week: Stars in the Alley, that’s Schubert Alley fitted with a special stage and eats by Junior’s. Moderated by Sean Hayes and Mo Rocca, two comedians of the first order who kept things funny and zipping along, this show comprised of bits…

  • Jessica Lange in Long Day’s Journey into Night: “I Like Dark Places”

    Movie icon—and lately best known for her role on American Horror Story— Jessica Lange has performed on Broadway only twice before, in two Tennessee Williams masterpieces, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, and now she’s in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. As Mary Tyrone, morphine addled matriarch of the Tyrone family,…

  • Skeleton Crew Makes its Move

    It would be great to think of 2008 as a bygone past, and the dire consequences for workers phased out in a bad economy yesteryear’s news, but the play Skeleton Crew, an Atlantic Theater Company production at the Linda Gross Theater, Dominique Morisseau’s powerful look at Detroit autoworkers, now moved to the, registers a cycle that’s still out…