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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Theater

  • With Jason Segel at Lunch at the Lotos Club: Celebrating of The End of the Tour

    By 1996, upon the publication of the gargantuan novel Infinite Jest, its author David Foster Wallace was the envy of writers. Touted in exalted ways, praised as brilliant, his work produced an “anxiety of influence” for the literary. The Rolling Stone reporter, novelist David Lipsky, asked editor-in-chief Jann Wenner to assign him to accompany Wallace…

  • Arthamptons Lifetime Achievement Award: Ruth Appelhof at the Maidstone

    Just prior to the Arthamptons opening, I met with Ruth Appelhof, Executive Director of Guild Hall, who will receive the Arthamptons Lifetime Achievement Award on July 5. Over eggs Benedict at the Maidstone in East Hampton, we talked about her background in the arts, accomplishments at Guild Hall over her 16-year tenure, how things get…

  • Of Good Stock: Come and Smell the Bacon

    Melissa Ross’ new play, Of Good Stock, a Manhattan Theater Club production, directed by Lynne Meadow, belongs to the genre of literature that illuminates family misery as unique, and universal. Three sisters, the Stocktons, daughters of a famous novelist, who has had at least one book that changed readers’ lives, converge on a Cape Cod…

  • Five Presidents at Bay Street Theater

    The fun of watching the new play, Five Presidents in its east coast premiere at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, is knowing the history moving forward from the momentous day, April 27, 1994 when the most exclusive club in the world, consisting of living presidents, comes together in a suite preparing for the funeral…

  • Sam Waterston: A Temperate Prospero in The Tempest in the Park

    A storm threatened. Not the one that opens Shakespeare’s late life play, The Tempest. On the evening I ventured into Central Park, to the Delacorte Theater for the always delightful experience of seeing Shakespeare under the night sky, rain was in the forecast. It would have been appropriate: not a downpour which would have cancelled…

  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Julie Taymor’s Splendid Shakespearean Romp in Film

    Julie Taymor’s latest triumph is the movie version of the play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she debuted in 2013 at the Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn. Her film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a mesmerizing and indeed, dream vision composed of the Shakespeare’s scenes and characters, made into a surreal at times,…

  • Alec Baldwin and Laurie Metcalf in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Guild Hall

    The first rate revival of Arthur Miller’s tragedy, All My Sons, at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater is a reason to celebrate theater out east. With a cast led by Alec Baldwin and Laurie Metcalf, under Stephen Hamilton’s direction, the drama moves quickly through the moral dilemma of an American family, post World War II.…

  • The New Sincerity at Bay Street Theater: The Revolution Will Not Be Sold

    Alena Smith’s smart play, The New Sincerity, in its world premiere at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, is perhaps the first drama to deal with the idealism of the Occupy Movement. Championed for its revolutionary goals, Occupy opened a dialogue about the ills of capitalism and social injustice. Many came to Zuccotti Park to…

  • Amanda Seyfried’s Theater Debut in Neil LaBute’s The Way We Get By

    Among the many reasons to see Neil LaBute’s latest exploration of sexual relations, The Way We Get By, in its Second Stage Theatre production, is to see the actor Thomas Sadoski fussing, and to glimpse Amanda Seyfried’s bare breast as she changes her tee-shirt. The two-hander involves a couple after a night in bed. Is it…

  • Anticipating the Tony Awards, with Alan Cumming at the Café Carlyle, the Astaire Awards, and Stars in the Alley

    Facing a crowd that included his mother and brother as well as Tony Danza, next up for a run at the Café Carlyle, Alan Cumming reminded everyone that he would be hosting the Tony Awards with Kristen Chenoweth on Sunday night, admitting that he was “freaking out.” That was hard to believe from the poised…

  • Michele Lee: Remembering Cy Coleman at 54 Below

    Michele Lee, of ‘80’s era soap opera Knots Landing fame, will perform Cy Coleman tunes in a tribute celebrating the composer’s birthday at 54 Below for three nights, June 11-13. A great and giving storyteller, Lee’s engagement should be a music fest, yes, but also anecdote-laden treat, with some tasty Broadway legend tidbits. The multi-talented…

  • Nice Girl at the Labyrinth Theater

    You can tell the play Nice Girl at the Labyrinth Theater is set in the ‘80’s because when a woman in a housedress enters the living room and flicks on the set, the television has Jane Pauley on the Today Show. Her daughter, Jo, follows, to make breakfast for her mother before going off to…

  • Permission: Spanking for Jesus at the Lucille Lortel Theater

    Whatever special kinks spice up your sex life, the particular coupling of spanking and faith in Robert Askins’ play, Permission, will having you laughing, and googling Christian Domestic Discipline (CDD) at intermission. Who knew this was a real life church sanctioned practice? In its world premiere at the Lucille Lortel Theater, under the direction of Alex…

  • Composer Elliot Goldenthal: American Ballet Theater’s Othello and Grounded at the Public Theater

    This week’s opening of the American Ballet Theater’s Othello at the Metropolitan Opera House, a spectacular version of Shakespeare’s tragedy about the warrior king who succumbs to the manipulations of an ensign, and murders the love of his life, marks ABT’s commitment to newer works. As part of its 75th anniversary ABT had been showing…

  • Megan Hilty: “Popular” at the Café Carlyle

    On night two of her two-week not to be missed run, the Café Carlyle was packed with fans for Megan Hilty. Surveying the scene, Hilty spotted a girl front and center, and asked her what her favorite Broadway show was, hoping she would say Wicked. A debut for Hilty back in the day when she…

  • Chita Rivera in The Visit: A Parable of Europe’s Lost Soul

    As Claire Zachanassian, the richest woman in the world Chita Rivera makes an outrageous demand in Friedrich Durrenmatt’s 1956 “The Visit.” Now a show at the Lyceum Theater, with Terrence McNally’s book, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s music, and choreography by Graciela Daniele, whether or not The Visit wins its Best Musical Tony, the show…

  • Adapting Wolf Hall: Mike Poulton Talks at the Morgan Library/ Contretemps at the PEN Gala

    Playwright Mike Poulton spoke to a British contingent at the Morgan Library last week about adapting Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall, for the stage. Tony-nominated Wolf Hall, parts I and II, about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, his wives and politics, is now wowing audiences at the Winter Garden Theater. Poulton said he…

  • Something Rotten!: An Omelette With Cheese

    In Something Rotten!, as in the famed line from Hamlet, “there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark,” two Bottom brothers, one a talented poet named Nigel (John Cariani) and the other Nick (Brian d’Arcy James), compete with Shakespeare (Christian Borle), the rock star of the Renaissance. You can tell by his codpiece, he’s got…

  • Josh Grisetti’s Broadway Debut in It Shoulda Been You

    In this comedy about a wedding, It Shoulda Been You, the “you” is a young man, the former boyfriend of the bride-to-be, played with gusto by Josh Grisetti in his Broadway debut at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. His Marty Kaufman is Jewish, so of course he’s perfect for the bride, who has instead chosen a…

  • Doctor Zhivago’s Sound

    The musical based on that Russian classic Doctor Zhivago inevitably evokes comparisons with the Omar Shariff-Julie Christie, David Lean 1965 movie, from Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel. A Broadway show with name recognition, Doctor Zhivago has played in Australia and South Korea—in Korean—and was much loved. Given its politics, that’s a coup. Les Miserables Russian style,…

  • At Lunch With Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts

    La Grenouille experienced a British invasion yesterday for a lunch celebrating the film Far From the Madding Crowd, based on Thomas Hardy’s beloved 19th century novel. Carey Mulligan, currently starring in Skylight on Broadway, plays Bathsheba Everdene, a strong-willed and occasionally wrong-headed heroine, a pre-feminist, you could call her. Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts portrays Gabriel…

  • The Enchantment of Finding Neverland

    At heart, Finding Neverland, now charming audiences at the Lunt-Fontaine Theater on Broadway, is about the creation of theater: this is the backstory to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Following closely enough to the Johnny Depp starred movie, the Broadway musical begins with J.M. Barrie’s colossal writing block when the playwright (Matthew Morrison) is past…

  • An American in Paris on Broadway

    As An American in Paris opens at the Palace Theater, a Nazi flag seemingly draped over an entire city, drops down and floats away. The city is Paris, its narrow streets dour until we get to a café, where an American soldier, Jerry (Robert Fairchild) meets an American composer, Adam (Brandon Uranowitz), and a Frenchman,…

  • Hilary Mantel: The Star of Wolf Hall

    Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived. School kids learn the fate of Henry VIII’s six wives in this chant. At the end of the daylong Wolf Hall Broadway premiere on Thursday, at the restaurants in Rockefeller Center where a lively celebration for the epic holding court at the Winter Garden Theater was underway, my hands…

  • Hand to God: It’s Only a Sock!

    Hand to God, a delightfully subversive, dark comedy opened this week on Broadway at the Booth Theater after successful productions downtown by MCC Theater and Ensemble Studio Theater. Featuring a puppet provocateur called Tyrone, wreaking destruction and devilish mayhem on a church schoolroom set, the actor Steven Boyer as Jason whose task it is to…