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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Theater

  • Les Miserables: Singing For Supper

    Squalor, sewers, Dickensian suffering, a splendor of operatic riches! If you are director Tom Hooper, how do you follow the drama of last year’s multi-Oscar winning King’s Speech? A film of one of the most beloved Broadway musical epics, Les Miserables, set in the days of the French Revolution a la Victor Hugo might not…

  • Talking Back at Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

    It seemed a delicious idea, seeing Edward Albee’s Tony award winning play, Talking Back at Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf about George and Martha, a university couple whose marriage unravels over cocktails with a younger couple one night –with an audience of couples counselors. This riveting revival, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production at the Booth Theater for…

  • Bowling for Our Time and West Side Story on Broadway

    Among the many theater talents donning their bowling shoes at Lucky Strike on Monday night in support of Our Time—Paul Rudd, Steve Kazee, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Eve Plumb, Noah Emmerich, Mariska Hargitay, to name a few, one stood out: Julianna Padilla. A young woman who bravely introduced herself in a determined effort, illustrating a mastery of…

  • Grace on Broadway: Let Us Now Pray

    The play Grace, written by Craig Wright and directed by Dexter Bullard, takes stylistic liberties, showing the end at the beginning, and playing scenes in reverse, almost cinematically, so that the actor Paul Rudd walks backwards trying desperately to return to pre-cataclysmic grace. But as you can guess, some things you simply can’t take back, particularly…

  • Revisiting Death Row: The Exonerated and The American Theater Wing Honors the Redgraves

    To know that the American justice system is flawed, just say OJ. That name is invoked in the theater piece The Exonerated, now revived for its 10th anniversary at the Culture Project with its script by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, woven from court transcripts, interviews and testimonies of those jailed and sentenced to die for…

  • Hamptons Journal: Theater Out East

    Rounding his shoulders and shuffling his steps, Alec Baldwin does a sheepish, lowkey Justin Bieber. Strutting tall and leggy, Christie Brinkley does a bravura Miley Cyrus, explaining how the teen’s name morphed from Destiny to Smiley, to, well, you know, and how lucky she was when free tampons poured forth from a vending machine just…

  • Can She Sing? Big Maybelle: Soul of the Blues at Bay Street and Into the Woods at the Delacorte

    A fine new musical had its world premiere at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater last night, Big Maybelle: Soul of the Blues at Bay Street, based on Maybelle Smith, a blues singer from the early 20th century, who once opened for Billie Holliday and toured America in the perilous segregation era, plagued by diabetes, an unhealthy girth,…

  • Men’s Lives at Bay Street Theatre: Attention Must Be Paid

    In its current revival at Bay Street Theater, 20 years after it first played to sold out audiences, Joe Pintauro’s Men’s Lives, based upon Peter Matthiessen’s 1986 history of the Baymen on the East End of Long Island seems as weather beaten and vital as ever. Drew Boyce’s set features something of a shipwreck moored…

  • An Ardent Forest in Central Park: As You Like It

    For fans of romantic comedy, a play that ends with three weddings is the ultimate fantasy. As You Like It, this summer’s first Shakespeare in the Park offering in its 50th year, is a celebration from the first banjo strums to the dancing at end with Lily Rabe, (Rosalind/ Ganymede) so fine at company’s center. A…

  • Neil LaBute’s The Heart of the Matter to Benefit MCC Theater

    Barricades lined the streets in the West Village. President Obama was in town, dining at Sarah Jessica Parker’s for a fundraiser in his honor. Aretha Franklin was there leaving in a flash for the Songwriters Hall of Fame, according to my pal Roger Friedman. But this was also the opening of a night of Neil…

  • The Tonys and Other Theater Awards

    Everything in its time! The Tonys, the Oscars for Broadway theater, marks the end of an awards season as rigorous and varied as that for film, although one noteworthy difference is the absence of red carpet couture commentary; somebody should have been reporting on presenter Jessica Chastain’s glittery, lacy number. From the bleachers of my…

  • Art Real Estate: February House at the Public Theater

    Of the brownstone at 7 Middagh Street, the basis of a new musical, February House at the Public Theater, the composer/ writer Paul Bowles used to say he did not want to live in a place with another composer. He was referring to Lincoln Kirstein. When he heard the rent would be cheap, he moved…

  • Old Jews Telling Jokes at the Westside Theater

    Jewish jokes are so plentiful online: who hasn’t been blessed with multiple emails forwarded from friends, or visited the Youtube videos of real-life old Jews telling jokes? Now a fast-paced revue at the Westside Theater—where the beloved Love, Loss, and What I Wore held sway for many seasons– is unexpectedly fresh. Yes, the familiar tropes:…

  • Not the Usual Four-Letter Word: Cock at the Duke Theater

    On a 42nd Street block that used to house peep shows, The Duke Theater is a resonant location for a play called Cock. For this four-actor drama, The Duke is entirely reconfigured as an arena where onlookers are up close and personal as if watching a cockfight, taking bets. Four characters spar. You could say, they…

  • Two by Tennessee: Streetcar Named Desire at the Broadhurst and In Masks Outrageous and Austere at Culture Project

    Rumor has it, Tennessee Williams used to sit in the back of the theater for performances of his Streetcar Named Desire, and laugh hysterically when in the end, Blanche would be escorted out on the arm of a doctor en route to the insane asylum. Following his lead, two Tennessee Williams plays in town, the…

  • Clybourne Park on Broadway: There Goes the Neighborhood

    Now on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater after a stunning debut two years ago, Bruce Norris biting Pulitzer Prize winning drama Clybourne Park begins in 1959 with a couple leaving their Chicago home after many years. Under Pam MacKinnon’s expert direction, Russ (Frank Wood) sits in a lounger eating Neapolitan; his wife Bev (Christina Kirk)…

  • Peter and the Starcatcher’s Uptown Voyage

    Perhaps the most inventively preposterous play ever to hit Broadway is the prequel to the Peter Pan story, Peter and the Starcatcher, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. Opening on the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, this fanciful lark features two ships at sea, two trunks, one filled with sand, the other, eh, you…

  • The Best Man: Gore Vidal’s Patriot Act

    While Republicans evaluate the electability of Mitt Romney vs. Rick Santorum, the revival of Gore Vidal’s witty 1960 play, The Best Man, comes to Broadway. At the Gerald Shoenfeld Theatre, dressed up as convention headquarters, this Cold War era take on how Americans nominate our presidential candidates, the man in gray, a mere shape behind…

  • Tracie Bennett: The Pot of Gold at Rainbow’s End

    Do not miss Tracie Bennett as Judy Garland. The petite frame, boyish chestnut do, twitchy gesture, agile thrashing, lusty bravado, pouting tantrums, and powerhouse voice, Tracie Bennett has the “Over the Rainbow” girl down. End of the Rainbow, coming to Broadway’s Belasco Theater upon the heels of Whitney Houston’s sad demise, illustrates with great verve…

  • Casting A Moon for the Misbegotten at Pearl Theatre and Miscasting to Benefit the MCC Theater

    In Eugene O’Neill’s 1943 play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, faithfully revived at The Pearl Theatre, the mores of the time seem antiquated but the performances by Kim Martin-Cotten as farm woman Josie Hogan, and Andrew May as her well educated yet drunken landlord Jim Tyrone, Jr. are pitch perfect. She, ungainly and with a rough…

  • Public Academic: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Follows Alex Haley’s Roots

    Admiring the television series Roots as a boy, Yale educated and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores a passion for genetics and genealogies in a new PBS series, Finding Your Roots, to start this Sunday. Featuring Mayor Cory Booker and Congressman John Lewis in the season premiere, a private screening wowed audiences at Lincoln…

  • Tribes: Triumphs on Barrow Street

    Meet the family at the core of Nina Raine’s smartly wise, well acted and subtle drama Tribes at the Barrow Street Theater: three grown kids and parents all living under the same roof. Opening on what might be a typical dinner for these upper class, articulate intellectuals, cacophony reigns as speakers clamor for attention; for…

  • Other Desert Cities’ Other Secret

    Getting to her parents’ house, a posh Palm Springs place in sand tones of bland and blander, Brooke Wyeth has to navigate past a sign that directs to “other desert cities,” but I don’t think the cities out west are the ones to keep an eye on in Jon Robin Baitz’s outstanding play, Other Desert Cities, now…

  • Why Quibble? The Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess Revived on Broadway

    A controversy over whether or not the original 1935 opera Porgy & Bess can work, pared down, cut in music and story, clouds over what should be a celebration. Filled with perhaps the most well known lyrics in the American songbook, Porgy & Bess in any variation is welcome. The current version at the Richard…

  • Wit’s Wit

    A conceit, an ironic barb, wit can be searing and funny. In the case of Margaret Edson’s Wit, the Tony winning play now in a Manhattan Theatre Club revival at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre under the fine direction of Lynne Meadow, Wit follows the journey of Vivian Bearing, a name that loosely translates to…