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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Theater

  • The Oslo Diaries on HBO

    Peace in the Middle East feels like a mirage, a glimmering haze on a distant desert horizon. But in 1992, key figures from Israel and the PLO came together in a neutral place in Norway armed only with hope to frame a peace agreement on the fragile and beleaguered strip of land that is called…

  • Jane Lynch and Kate Flannery: Two Lost Souls at the Café Carlyle

    Photo: David Andrako Warming up with “When You’re Smiling,” the charismatic, jazzy backup band for Jane Lynch and Kate Flannery cued the Café Carlyle audience: we were set for a night of music and laughs. The “Two Lost Souls” came onstage, like a pair of Chaplinesque hobos, foils of one another, and funny. Reaching up,…

  • The Summit at Guild Hall: New Voices on a Traditional Stage

     “I am suffering!” That’s not a whine you hear often in East Hampton, but at Guild Hall, the plaint is cause for a visit to an emotional calibration center. When Guild Hall decided to commission new theatrical work from young artists, the move seemed radical. Over the summer season, the state of the art East…

  • Aretha Franklin: Accessorizing the Queen

    As the tributes to Aretha Franklin’s extraordinary career and legacy attest to the number of people she touched, and her incredible song list awakens our memories of decades of indelible music, it is good to remember her as a natural woman. Not only because she sang the song Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote for her,…

  • Evita at Bay Street: Don’t Cry for Me

    “I think it’s a masterpiece,” exulted Will Pomerantz after a performance of Evita at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. True, he is the director of this lively production with its mainly Latino cast, and he should have bragging rights for his fine work, but he was thinking larger on opening weekend. This very special production made many rethink the…

  • Carey Mulligan in Girls & Boys

    Riveting and poised as she recounts the most horrendous story, Carey Mulligan is the one-woman center of Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys at the Minetta Lane Theater, a superb Audible production and Royal Court Theater transplant. Minetta Lane must be ground zero for one-actor tours de force. Witness Billy Crudup’s brilliant turn as Harry Clarke.…

  • Frost/ Nixon at Bay Street Theater: The Power and the Media

    Imagine longing for Richard Nixon. Anything that smacks of “presidential” sparks pangs of pity for us in our current regime. As portrayed by Harris Yulin, with dignity and a yen for Italian style, in the Frost/Nixon revival at Bay Street Theater, Nixon seems human: he even detests golf. When he says he betrayed the American…

  • Sandra Bernhard Brings “Sandemonium” to Guild Hall

    Photo: Showbiz411 Topical and terrific, Sandra Bernhard brought her no-holds- barred mouth to Guild Hall this week for a one-night only tour de force performance. Reaching out to Melania in the wings, “You are in a safe space here,” she consoled her. And, “Ooh, I like your jacket.” Calling out to a college student in…

  • The TONY Awards: Party to Party

    Some like to watch mega award shows from the comfort of home, but the long night that is the TONY Awards is a worthy schmooze fest. Everything said from the rose festooned red carpet at Radio City Music Hall to its ample stage about the generosity, talent, commitment to decency of the theater community is…

  • Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, and Marilyn Monroe in Fellow Travelers, A World Premiere Kicks Off Bay Street’s Season

    A kittenish Marilyn Monroe in bed with director Elia Kazan, who then introduces the starlet to playwright Arthur Miller! This love triangle, the heart of playwright Jack Canfora’s Fellow Travelers in a world premiere that just opened at Bay Street Theater, is astonishing for more than the sex, who is having it with whom. These…

  • Joe Pintauro Finds Salvation at the Parrish Art Museum

    If Sag Harbor based playwright Joe Pintauro is serious about not always wanting to be identified as a former Catholic priest, he is going to have to stop focusing his consciousness on the human foibles of men of the cloth. While that is impossible, let’s hope he never does, because Pintauro’s work asks us to…

  • Lesley Manville in Long Day’s Journey Into Night at BAM

    In one scene in the excellent BAM’s Harvey Theater production of Eugene O’Neill’s epic-length, Long Day’s Journey into Night, you see Lesley Manville as Mary Tyrone preening in front of a mirror, as if she were in the fitting room of the movie, The Phantom Thread. The British actress was nominated for an Oscar for…

  • Always at the Carlyle: Then, Now, Let’s Hope, Forever

    The specialness of the Carlyle Hotel, as landmark and cultural shrine to old New York, cannot be overestimated. So says a documentary film, Always at the Carlyle, directed by Matthew Miele and executive produced by the Carlyle’s own Jennifer Cooke, that premiered this week at the Paris Theater, itself an old New York cultural shrine.…

  • Linda Lavin’s Debut at the Café Carlyle

    Beloved Broadway and television star Linda Lavin plays the Café Carlyle as if she is the most gracious host, inviting guests into her living room for an intimate soiree. One of those guests on the night we attended was Hal Prince who directed her in Candide, a reminder that though she’s known more for dramatic…

  • Helen Mirren Honored at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Gala:  Sashaying from Wild Child to Dame 

    “F-U-C-K,” Helen Mirren let out a primal scream from the stage of Alice Tully Hall, receiving her Film Society of Lincoln Center Chaplin Award from Jeremy Irons. “I just had to get that out of my system,” Mirren started the long version of her career history beginning with acting as the Virgin Mary at age…

  • Megan Hilty at the Café Carlyle: Incurably Soprano

    Introducing her song, “Popular,” on her opening night at the Café Carlyle, Megan Hilty quipped, ““Wicked” is about a beautiful blond who helps others.” Tweaking the theme of the popular Broadway musical, making her Glinda the star, was a glimpse into the humor and charm Hilty brings to her intimate supper club act. At the…

  • Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women: “Be Nice!”

    Playwright Edward Albee wrote many plays and won the Pulitzer Prize for three of them. When I asked him about these honors, he replied, “You never know why you get them, and why you didn’t.” Anyone who sees Three Tall Women from 1994, now elegantly revived at the Golden Theater, will understand why this three-hander…

  • Carousel: A Celebratory Revival

    The revival of Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s classic Carousel at the Imperial Theater is a vivid a reminder of what the Broadway musical can do, simply good storytelling in song and dance. Old school and fresh, Carousel has you in its grip from the moment you see an ornate canopy descend and umbrella into the carny…

  • Mean Girls: Tina Fey’s Great Chain of Being

    Everyone who loved the 2004 movie on which the new Broadway musical Mean Girls is based will be queuing up at the August Wilson Theater where Barbie pink reigns supreme. While you can never be sure about adaptations, you can count on Tina Fey’s witty words to lift even the most sophomoric subject to pure…

  • Billy Crudup as Harry Clarke at the Minetta Lane Theater

    When Billy Crudup played opposite Natalie Portman in the movie Jackie, as a reporter interviewing Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination, you saw the actor as he looks in most of his films, a handsome Clark Kent type. The extraordinary feat of Harry Clarke, his one-man show at the Minetta Lane Theater,…

  • Escape to Margaritaville: Last Mango in Paradise

    Brrr! It’s been so cold in New York, the tropical island in the new musical, Escape to Margaritaville at the Marquis Theater, is a vision of welcoming palm trees asway in a warm breeze. Who wouldn’t want to veg in Paradise, drink in hand, with hunks all around? But early on in this entertaining show…

  • Arthur Miller: Writer, A Documentary Directed by his Daughter, Rebecca Miller

    Back in the day, Rose Styron, the writer and wife of William Styron, recounted the story of an American delegation of authors visiting Rio, among them her friend the playwright Arthur Miller. Local headlines focused on Miller, the husband of Marilyn Monroe. In this rich documentary of her father, Rebecca Miller addresses the matter of…

  • Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo: Homelife & The Zoo Story

    Maybe all theater is behavioral study, characters in a petri dish. Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo is a pair of two-handers yoked together thematically with Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) a foil for two outsized personae; in the first, Homelife, his wife Ann (Katie Finneran) baits him in one way, and in the second,…

  • Relevance at MCC Theater: A Case of Righteous Victimhood

    Feminists come in all shapes and sizes. JC Lee’s Relevance, an MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater, presents a clash between a seasoned author and old school academic, Theresa (the formidable Jayne Houdyshell), and a freshly minted writer Mesmaji (Pascale Armand), given to texts, tweets, and social media. Age and looks aside, these two…

  • Hello, Dolly with Bernadette Peters: The Best of Old New York

    Now that’s a Broadway musical! One breathtaking moment in Hello, Dolly is Dolly, professional meddler, glamorous in red descending the stairs. As in the grand tradition of Dolly Levi before her, Bernadette Peters takes her turn in the superb revival of Hello, Dolly at the Schubert Theater, replacing the much-adored Bette Midler. At a recent…