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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Theater

  • Eddie Redmayne in Cabaret: How Kinky is It?

    The musical Cabaret was always a window into the years leading up to the atrocities of World War II based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. Landmark productions starring Joel Grey and Alan Cumming as Emcee at the fictional Kit Kat Club allowed us to glimpse a decadence we could never imagine. Can you ever top…

  • Bernadette Peters’ Joke: Posh Meets Borscht Belt as Guild Hall Returns to the Rainbow Room

    Guild Hall Academy of the Arts President, the painter Eric Fischl got to hone his comedy chops at this year’s spring gala, fashioning a speech on a string of cliches—thanks to A. I. That set the night off in good spirits, against The Rainbow Room’s customary spectacular panoramic views of the city now fogged in,…

  • Alex Bornstein at the NYWFT Muse Awards: “You Are Enough.

    “Do not fuck with a woman from NYC,” exclaimed comedian/actress Alex Bornstein, accepting her award for The Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment Made in NY Award at this year’s NYWFT Muse Awards. The “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” star reminded 700 guests seated for a sumptuous steak dinner at Cipriani 42nd Street this week, she was…

  • Water for Elephants: An Awesome Spectacle on Broadway

    This circus show comes with no disclaimer. No animals were hurt in Water for Elephants, opening this week at the Imperial Theater. Some human characters, yes! But if you know the story from the movie and the book on which it’s based, you know that certain bad leaders get their just desserts. The animals, so…

  • Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People

    If the players were not dressed in late 19th century fitted jackets, and the Circle in the Square stage not set as the interior of a fine Norwegian home with old school furnishings, you might think An Enemy of the People was a pandemic era drama of science vs. profit. Jeremy Strong–vulnerable as he was…

  • Amy Ryan, Liev Schreiber, Zoe Kazan in A Superb Revival of Doubt: A Parable

    In the revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable at the Todd Haimes Theater, Amy Ryan as formidable, grim-faced Sister Aloysius is the kind of no-nonsense nun so fearful—under her eye, the consequences of actions good or bad are the same; you definitely don’t want to be caught. As directed by Scott Ellis, a…

  • Christine Lahti in Russian Troll Farm: Jesse Tyler Ferguson Honored at the Vineyard Theater Gala

    Any lingering doubts about how the 2016 election went the way it did, Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy, now ending its run at the Vineyard Theater, offers a hilarious, clever, chilling spectacle of our nightmares come true –especially horrifying as we move toward the 2024 elections. Set in a cold office space,…

  • Jennifer Holliday at the Carlyle Café

    Tony award winning Jennifer Holliday makes her debut at the Café Carlyle, not far from where she starred on Broadway as Effie in 1981 in “Dreamgirls.” Singing “I’m Still Here,” Holliday channels ancestors—Barbra Streisand among them– in a set that features selections from the American songbook. But more, she evokes a prior Café Carlyle resident,…

  • Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James’ Menage a Trois in Days of Wine and Roses

    When the new Broadway musical, Days of Wine and Roses, was announced, Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s voluptuous classic song from the movie swelled in my mind’s ear. That was a lot to let go, as the new show at Studio 54 drew near. Featuring Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James as the lovers in…

  • Chita Rivera Remembered 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…

  • Sarah Paulson in Appropriate Makes for Sensational Theater

    If you see a plantation, the ghosts of slaves must be haunting. That’s the complicated plot of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play Appropriate at the Hayes Theater in a nutshell. As Toni, the eldest sibling preparing the property for sale, Sarah Paulson is perfection, plucked from her mean-as-can-be role in Steve McQueen’s award-winning movie, 12 Years a…

  • Isaac Mizrahi’s Snazzy Reboot of Prokoviev’s Peter and the Wolf at the Guggenheim

    Prokoviev’s classic Peter and the Wolf is reimagined at the Guggenheim Museum, an ingenious recreation from Isaac Mizrahi. The fashion designer cum cabaret performer has worked costuming for theater for decades, and for the Guggenheim’s program of “Works and Process” the Peter and the Wolf story is set, where else, but in the neighborhood, in…

  • ORIGIN Premieres at Alice Tully Hall: A Docu-Drama of Ideas About Societal Divisions

    At the swank premiere of Ava Du Vernay’s new film ORIGIN at Alice Tully Hall last week, made evident: this director is fearless. Taking Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a 2020 best-selling book by Isabel Wilkerson, DuVernay created her own genre, taking the lessons of the book, folding them into the narrative of the…

  • Harmony on Broadway: The Pre-Show Schmooze

    The Ethyl Barrymore Theater was abuzz: Michael Feinstein, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Lorna Luft were among the theater elite at Harmony’s opening night. Sutton Foster said she was ready to be evil, stepping in to bake meat pies as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd. Judd Hirsch sat with Marilu Henner, the Taxi team to appear…

  • Yoshiki at Carnegie Hall: The Unexpected Pleasures of Loss

    The international superstar, Yoshiki, celebrated a 10th anniversary “World Tour with Orchestra 2023 ‘Requiem,’” its final leg at Carnegie Hall this week. Displaying awesome musical chops at piano and drums in the separate genres of classical and rock, Yoshiki, clad in red lame coat, dedicated the tour to the passing of his beloved mother who…

  • Hamptons Journal: Bob Colacello at The Peter Marino Foundation/ Hanzhi Wang at LongHouse

    Writer Bob Colacello is the best kind of gossip; he observes people with a big heart and humor. In his latest book, an art volume of vintage New York photos by David Jimenez, accompanied by his text—a forgetting, as Colacello told a packed house at the Peter Marino Foundation in a conversation with Ivorypress publisher…

  • Mamie Gummer in Dial M for Murder: Bay Street Theater on a Roll

    At Bay Street Theater, bourbon glasses bear tell-tale fingerprints and lipstick traces. A husband and wife and her lover, in evening attire, converse in a London living room, the décor like the players, impeccably soignee. Murder scenarios foreshadow events to come. This is the opening of Dial M for Murder, adapted from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954…

  • Hamptons Journal: Double Helix at Bay Street Theater and Summerdoc’s The Eternal Memory

    Can science define a musical? Bay Street’s season opened with Madeline Myers’ Double Helix, starring Samantha Massell as Rosalind Franklin, one of the scientific researchers who discovered the DNA helix. As it starts out, tuxedoed men at a podium receive the Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking research. If you know the history, you know someone…

  • Unscripted: The 76th TONY Awards 

    The Writers’ strike was on everyone’s mind at the 76th annual TONY awards on Sunday night. Opening with a gorgeous dance number on the expansive United Palace Theater stage, the TONY show was its own Broadway show on upper Broadway that is, in the heights, Washington Heights. We do know that Lin-Manuel Miranda has enormous…

  • Fat Ham: A Backyard Wedding Leading to the Tony Awards

    Fans of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet will find James Ijames’ audacious reimagining, Fat Ham, a hoot. Set in a backyard barbeque, the play starts with a white-suited jive ass (Billy Eugene Jones) arriving in a whirl of sulphurous smoke to tell his son, a juvenile brooder called Juicy (Marquis D. Gibson in the performance I attended),…

  • The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Final Season: Tits Up! 

    In fact, two tits up! The stunning final season makes for a picture of life as a stand-up comic for Mrs. Maisel and her agent Susie, or Susan, depending on your history with her. Our heroine is now gainfully employed: she’s a writer on the evening’s popular celebrity television talk program, The Gordon Ford Show.…

  • The Fears: Triggers and Trauma in a Safe Space  

    In his theater production debut, Steven Soderburgh brings us Emma Sheanshang’s The Fears, performed off-Broadway at the Pershing Square Signature Theater. On trend, this ensemble work takes place in a room, with a window, and with hangings of the Buddha; this is a safe zone for the psychically injured, akin to a consciousness raising group…

  • It’s TONY Time: Meet the Nominees

    “Mazel tov.” You could hear Ben Platt in the Sofitel Hotel corridor congratulate Jessica Hecht, both nominated for Tony Awards. She was leaving the press room at the annual “Meet the Nominees” event, and he was entering. Starring in one of the two most Jewish plays on Broadway—Platt plays Leo Frank in the stunning revival…

  • Sean Hayes in Good Night, Oscar: Hallucinating on Demerol and Demons

    Unreliable and often hospitalized and drugged, if Oscar Levant hadn’t been a musical genius, he might have been a bum. At least that’s how he’s portrayed by a terrifically transformed Sean Hayes at the Belasco Theater in Good Night, Oscar. Themes of mental illness being all the rage right now, Levant is a dynamic subject,…

  • Ben Platt in Parade: Lynching a Jew in the American South

    Looking mild-mannered, even Evan Hanson-ish, Ben Platt plays the real-life historic figure Leo Frank, a Jew who was lynched in the early 20th century in Atlanta. Lynching, a gruesome act of violence performed in the American South, illustrated by Billie Holiday’s “strange fruit,” is not the customary way of doing away with Jews as we…