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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Theater

  • Screaming with Laurie Anderson at Guild Hall

    In honor of Yoko Ono’s birthday this weekend, Laurie Anderson led guests at Guild Hall in a face-reddening scream. The occasion was a talk between Anderson, who now looks remarkably like Christopher Walken with spiky hair and otherworldly pallor, and curator Christina Strassfield, who is putting together a show of Anderson’s work at Guild Hall…

  • Flight: Dreaming of Bruce Willis, Action Hero

    The McKittrick Hotel is well known for unusual theatrical events—cue the long-running immersive Sleep No More. Now fresh from Edinburgh’s International Arts Festival comes Flight, a much-awarded incomparable narrative art installation. Plucked from the headlines of refugees fleeing war, Flight tells the story of two brothers on a journey escaping Afghanistan, adapted by playwright Oliver…

  • Liz Smith: Remembering a “Natural Blonde”

    AAt the Majestic Theater last week, Renee Zellweger called her Blondie and Tommy Tune sang “The Way You Look Tonight” with pictures of him dancing the “East Texas Push” with her, but that was not the showstopper at Liz Smith’s memorial: The distinction went to a video of Liz crooning “I’m an Old Cowhand, from the…

  • Pick a Card. Any Card. Belinda Sinclair, Magicienne

    Do you believe in magic? The first thing magicienne Belinda Sinclair tells you at her Hell’s Kitchen salon where she conjures, misdirects, fans cards and sets fires in her highly entertaining magic show, is that she cheats. Believe her. Even as your eyeballs are a few feet away, she’s able to find your card in…

  • School Girls at the Lucille Lortel Theater: What Price Beauty?

    The Lucille Lortel Theater has been sold out for weeks, ever since the MCC production of School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play arrived with its stellar cast of young women. Set in 1986 Ghana, Jocelyn Bioh’s play can be seen as an African variation of Tina Fey’s Mean Girls, with the action unfolding…

  • Sandra Bernhard Returns to Joe’s Pub in “Sandymonium”

    For her new show at Joe’s Pub, the latest in her New Year’s tradition of guiding her fans into the future, Sandra Bernhard has turned “Sandyland” into “Sandemonium,” registering our current political times. As she told me in a recent phone conversation, her new Sandy show, from December 26 through 31, is a nod to…

  • Tina Fey and Don Katz Honored at the New York Stage and Film Winter Gala

    Comedian Tina Fey and Don Katz founder and CEO of Audible, Inc. were honored by New York Stage and Film at their winter gala this week. Attending the dinner at Pier Sixty with the hope of scoring some tickets to Hamilton—yes, still—I was soon apprised that the bidding for them started at $4,000. I could…

  • The Band’s Visit: Middle East Peace on Broadway

    In The Band’s Visit, eight members of a police band from Alexandria, Egypt, uniformed in powder blue, peer out from the Ethel Barrymore theater stage looking for their airport bus connection. As in the 2007 movie on which this delightful musical is based, through miscommunications, humorous language blips, the band ends up in the wrong…

  • Jessica Molaskey and John Pizzarelli at the Café Carlyle

    Guitarist John Pizzarelli and singer Jessica Molaskey are man and wife, and married in music. Headlining the Café Carlyle this week, their act is a sublime mix called “The Little Things You Do Together” after a Stephen Sondheim tune; they perform standards such as Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields’ “A Fine Romance,” a Joni Mitchell…

  • Lois Smith in Marjorie Prime: History in the Making

    In Marjorie Prime, in a not so far away future, humans will have primes, that is, hologram avatars of our deceased loved ones, enabling us to continue to work out the dicey parts of human relationships. This is the hopeful premise of Jordan Harrison’s award winning play Marjorie Prime, on which the movie of Marjorie…

  • Duncan Sheik at Café Carlyle: No Exit for Confessional Rock

    Duncan Sheik, composer of the musical, Spring Awakening, a huge hit on Broadway in 2007, takes the Café Carlyle stage this week for a brief run of his original songs. You may remember, the musical is based on a 19th century play about teens discovering their sexuality, portraying rape, suicide and abortion. “If you think…

  • Some Enchanted Evening: Laura Osnes at Café Carlyle

    Laura Osnes is the consummate performer for large Broadway musicals, and at the Café Carlyle this week, she scales back her American sweetheart persona to the intimate stage, accompanied by Ted Sperling’s piano and extensive lore, and scene partner Ryan Silverman, amping up her considerable charm. The program entitled “Cockeyed Optimists: The World of Rodgers…

  • The American Theater Wing @ 100

    You know what they say about show business! At Cipriani 42 Street this week the American Theater Wing celebrated its first 100 years with a great show. Tony Bennett took the stage, to speak the Wing's praises. Broadway stars Brian Stokes Mitchell, Norm Lewis, Rebecca Luker, Beth Malone, Natalie Cortez, Howard McGillin, and Santino Fontana…

  • Casting As You Like It at Bay Street Theater: Expect the Unexpected

    The third play of the Bay Street Theater season is Shakespeare’s As You Like It, featuring some theater royalty: Ellen Burstyn as the pensive Jacques and Andre de Shields, a show-stealer as Touchstone. They form the yin and yang of the bard’s comedy in this Sag Harbor staging under John Doyle’s direction, with Jacques pensive…

  • Michael Moore on Broadway: A Message To Trump, America Isn’t Big Enough For Both of Us

    Trump is Michael Moore’s #1 target in his Broadway debut, “The Terms of my Surrender.” “How did we get here,” he asks rhetorically. Forget all the pundits and prognosticators; it was just a year ago when we thought our president’s candidacy was merely a joke, or a publicity stunt, but Moore, with his ear to…

  • “Fly Into the Sun:” Cocktails at the Watermill Center 

    The grounds at Watermill Center, Robert Wilson’s art retreat on the east end are always difficult to navigate, what with slippery grasses and rock paths. It would have been good to follow Daedalus’ flight, as the evening’s theme suggested, flying high—but not too high– into the sun. Alas in myth, the sun’s heat melts his…

  • Intimate Apparel at Bay Street Theater

    Bring back the bustier! Fine lingerie takes center stage at Bay Street Theater where women (and a man) strip down to skivvies for the fine production of Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel. Kelly McCreary, from Season 10 of television’s “Grey’s Anatomy” stars as Esther Mills, and she is lovely, durable, and stoic, her character evoking a…

  • The Man in the Ceiling at Bay Street Theater

    Based on a children’s book by Jules Feiffer, the musical “The Man in the Ceiling,” premiering at Bay Street Theater, celebrates creativity, and more specifically the art of cartooning. From the perspective of Jimmy, a kid whose father only wants him to play ball like the other kids, this is also a story about following…

  • Bette Midler: Unstoppable at the 71st Tony Awards

    That Bette Midler would not sing at the Tony Awards made news in the week running up to the Tony Awards. As disappointing as that announcement was, it did not stop the hope that she might change her plan—maybe, we hoped–once the huge crowd filing into Radio City Music Hall on Sunday night saw the…

  • Running Up to the Tony Awards: Tony Honors and Stars in the Alley

    In an exceptional Broadway season, the anticipation for Sunday’s Tony Awards is palpable. This week, the Broadway League and American Theater Wing hosted a swank cocktail party at the Sofitel Hotel. So packed was a second floor banquet hall, waiters could not move their trays through the crush of Broadway elite: former Tony winners, current…

  • Matthew Perry’s The End of Longing at the Lucille Lortel Theater

    If Friends’ Chandler Bing had evolved into a martini guzzler he might resemble Jack, a character invented by Matthew Perry for his play The End of Longing, now in a snappy MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater directed by Lindsay Posner. From the start, at a L.A. restaurant where Jack tries to pick up…

  • Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry at the Jewish Museum

    Florine Stettheimer had a charmed life, to judge from the expansive, colorful, and grand exhibition at the Jewish Museum. An artist born to wealth, she painted her milieu: “Spring Sale at Bendel’s,” “Asbury Park South,” parades, parties, picnics, groups together enjoying life, and portraits like the one of Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy, or her…

  • Hamlet: Farsi Not a Prerequisite

    Few sights are as chilling as the ghost of Hamlet, Sr. in silhouette moving slowly through the arabesque in Waterwell’s excellent production of Hamlet at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture. Wearing a tall hat befitting an Arab prince, this figure has presence and authority, a Hyperion among satyrs, to riff on his son’s…

  • Bernadette Peters Goes to the Library: The New York Public Library Spring Dinner

    Among the many joys of this year’s New York Public Library Spring Dinner held in the Celeste Bartos Auditorium of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the spacious hall where Salman Rushdie, while still in hiding, gave a reading and talk, and where French intellectual Bernard Henri Levy beseeched some brave woman to have sex with…

  • Kate Hamill as Becky Sharp: Vanity Fair’s Scheming Non-Feminist

    The Bedlam Theater’s production of Vanity Fair at the Pearl Theater is a romp celebrating life’s vagaries, the ups and downs of fortune’s wheel. Kate Hamill is its mastermind, manipulating William Makepeace Thackeray’s words as playwright, and everyone else as Vanity Fair’s star Becky Sharp, down on her luck child who makes it big in…