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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Theater

  • Elisabeth Moss as Feminist Heidi Holland in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles

    Remember the old feminist adage: A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. It is in that antique spirit that The Heidi Chronicles in a new production at the Music Box Theater follows art historian Heidi Holland (a pitch perfect Elisabeth Moss) through decades of social and political change with the…

  • Helen Mirren in The Audience: Glimpsing Royalty on Broadway

    If you have never been to Buckingham Palace, you can now have an intimate view in The Audience, starring Helen Mirren as the Queen, imported across the pond to Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. However much conjured in your imagination, the room in which Queen Elizabeth meets with her Prime Minister every Tuesday (with one exception)…

  • Multicultural Movement: Malpaso Dance of Cuba at the Joyce

    Having seen a rehearsal for the Malpaso Dance Company on a recent trip to Havana, a highlight of our cultural tour, we were eager to see the New York Joyce Theater’s full production. Guest choreographer Trey McIntyre,   from Idaho, was on hand, enthusing about working on “Under Fire” with this talented group founded in 2012…

  • The Nether’s Shades of Gray at the Lucille Lortel Theater

    If art has the freedom to display human foibles in the extreme, the “ick” factor of Jennifer Haley’s play The Nether, the MCC production that opened this week at the Lucille Lortel theater is through the roof. On first view, the stage is a somber gray, an interrogation room where an investigator named Morris (Merritt…

  • Christopher Wheeldon: On Choreographing Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale for the Big Screen and Directing An American in Paris for Broadway

    Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, one of the bard’s problem plays with its themes of wrong-headed leadership and outright cruelty, may not seem a likely source for a ballet, but choreographer Christopher Wheeldon thought otherwise. In the play, King Leontes’ (Edward Watson) jealous rage leads to the deaths of his young son, his wife Hermoine (Lauren…

  • Benjamin Scheuer’s The Lion at the Lynn Redgrave Theater and Williamstown Theater Festival Gala

    When Benjamin Scheuer walks onto the Lynn Redgrave Theater stage, picking up an acoustic guitar, announcing he’s 10 years old, you believe him. He is about to tell his story in song, accompanying himself with several guitars, instruments he mastered at his father’s knee. His one-man show, The Lion, follows him through a Freudian mind…

  • Texas in Paris: The Odd Couple at Saint Peter’s

    Paris may be exotic to many, but two visitors touring with their music in 1989 had opposite takes: for Osceola Mays, (Lillias White) untrained singer from Dallas formed by gospel at church and a history of slavery, Paris was a place that did not discriminate for her color. She never wanted to leave. For John…

  • Cheyenne Jackson Celebrates Sobriety at the Café Carlyle

    The big question when it comes to Cheyenne Jackson is whether or not the intimate cabaret stage is enough of a venue for this dynamic multi-talented performer who does Elvis complete with swiveling hips. At last night’s opening at the Café Carlyle, this Broadway star finessed the space with flair; you would think he was…

  • Moving “Merch:” (t-shirts and CDs) Sandra Bernhard at Joe’s Pub

     “We like to make it intimate here at Joe’s Pub,” says Sandra Bernhard, illustrating her trademark penchant for frank talk, “You don’t need that Broadway Waspy Albee bull–.” Arriving onstage in a sequined Suzy Wong number and silver go-go boots, Bernhard sings, “Where am I going?,” delighted that she’s right here, accompanied by her long…

  • Every Brilliant Thing at the Barrow Street Theater

    Jonny Donahoe walks around the theater dropping notes on the audience members’ laps as you are seated for Every Brilliant Thing. “Oh, you are the star, right?” observed a man picking up his paper. “I am the play,” said Donahoe. Well, not quite. I hope it is not revealing too much to say that his…

  • Side Show’s Sad Demise

    That Side Show will close its run at the St. James Theater on Broadway is sad news. After an ebullient first preview in late October, the revival had a meet & greet at Sardi’s. Many of the show’s producers had not yet met the musical’s stars, Erin Davie and Emily Padgett as the Hilton sisters,…

  • Joe Biden at the Golden: A Delicate Balance

    Okay. It was my fault. I was late for last night’s evening performance. Heavy rain. Snarled traffic on 8th Avenue. By 6 minutes for the 8 o’clock curtain. And was herded into the Golden Theater’s foyer to wait 45 minutes till the first intermission for Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance. Twenty-five others waited too, with…

  • Thanks For the Memories: An Interview with Richard Zoglin on Bob Hope

    In his long dynamic career, Bob Hope’s story resonates as a cultural history of the last decade: a rags-to-riches immigrant, he was a pioneer in vaudeville, inventing stand up as we know it: he worked in movies and on television, and entertained the troops abroad. Not only was his profile, a ski slope nose, a…

  • Sarah Ruhl’s The Oldest Boy: Letting Go

    Sarah Ruhl’s beautiful new play The Oldest Boy at Lincoln Center is informed by a quiet release into Destiny. A mother faces an unthinkable choice: a Midwesterner, she is married to a Tibetan restaurateur. Now when a lama and monk (James Saito and Jon Norman Schneider) come to her apartment to claim her son is…

  • Sting’s The Last Ship: The Prodigal Son Returns

    If you’ve attended any of the packed previews of The Last Ship at the Neil Simon Theater, you may have noticed its originator and composer Sting lurking about. At your surprise to see him, he exclaims, “It’s my baby!” Indeed, this musical, with book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey, under Joe Mantello’s direction and…

  • Old New York in On the Town

    The sights and sounds of old New York are just a few of the marvels of the musical On the Town, newly revived at the Lyric Theater. If you see a subway sign marked IRT, you know you are in the right place. Three sailors on an overnight pass get to see the sights, “from…

  • Off Broadway: Neil LaBute’s The Money Shot at the Lucille Lortel Theater

    A Neil LaBute play is a genre unto itself, as illustrated by his new one, The Money Shot, an MCC production now deploying expletives at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Needless to say, the title relates to the range and depth of a particular sexual act, as La Bute one ups the tradition forged by God…

  • Explosion on Broadway: You Can’t Take it With You

    Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s Pulitzer Prize winning play staged like a Feydeau farce! Doors slam on a boisterous set aclutter with tchotchkes and eccentrics as fireworks go off from the basement. Where there’s smoke, there’s . . . No, no, not revolutionary bombs! Scott Ellis’ revival of You Can’t Take It With You…

  • Off Broadway: Uncle Vanya at the Pearl Theater and Almost Home at the Acorn

    The Pearl Theater’s revival of Uncle Vanya illustrates this fine company’s signature charm, and does one better, doing Anton Chekhov the good service of playing his tragicomedy for humor over gravitas. Christopher Durang’s Tony-winning Chekhov sendup, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, made it all laughs. At the Pearl, when the characters speak lines…

  • Classical Theater of Harlem’s Romeo & Juliet in Marcus Garvey Park

    The logical comparison to this Shakespeare-in-the-Park is not the Public’s more established revival of the bard’s genius at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. The Classical Theater of Harlem’s stunning Romeo & Juliet most resembles in theme the play Holler If Ya Hear Me, inspired by the demise of Tupac Shakur. Each has a clear message about…

  • Marlo Thomas’ Sins of Omission in Clever Little Lies at Guild Hall

    Marlo Thomas worked the homey sitting room at East Hampton’s Baker House on Saturday night: her husband Phil Donahue, Alec and Hilaria Baldwin, Bob Balaban and Lynn Grossman, Jordan Roth, his mom Daryl Roth, Blythe Danner and others ate sandwiches served on a silver tray by party planner Peggy Siegal. This was opening night of…

  • Richard Kind in Travesties at Bay Street Theater: Poetry and Politics on the Isle of Yachts

    Leafing through his well-worn script after a recent performance, Richard Kind enumerated the challenges of his role as Henry Carr in Travesties, a play replete with double entendres in every language you can imagine and then some. As fireworks rat-a-tatted in the background on the July 4th weekend, punctuating Kind’s grand kvetch about jokes that…

  • Emmanuelle Seigner in Venus in Fur: The Interview

    Most theater does not translate well into film. The film genre invites expansion and theater can feel claustrophobic. Unless claustrophobic is what you want as in the case of Roman Polanski’s adaptation of David Ives’ stage play inspired by Sacher-Masoch’s novel, Venus in Fur, a kinky two hander involving a theater director at the end of…

  • Sandra Bernhard: Provocateur at Guild Hall

    Sandra Bernhard makes me laugh. Her brassy, wild mouthed persona has always seemed an exaggeration of femininity, her humor bold, her image could be menacing as in her role in The King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese’s 1983 movie starring Jerry Lewis, out there as in a 1992 nude spread for Playboy, or mock kitten as in…

  • Greta Gerwig: Riding The Village Bike

    Greta Gerwig is a big girl: she’s tall, and gangly in an appealing way, and like the “Girls” on the HBO series, she’s emblematic of the new woman finding her way through life’s challenges. That was her appeal in Frances Ha, directed by Noah Baumbach, and that’s what she embodies as Becky in a new…