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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Theater

  • Chita Rivera 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…

  • Oslo at the Vivian Beaumont Theater: Can We Talk?

    The great achievement of the Oslo Peace Accords, on which the entertaining drama Oslo is based, was bringing to the table Israelis and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Anyone who has ever been to the Middle East, knows the hostility in the air, with Jews worried about security and the future of the Jewish state, and…

  • Bandstand’s Untoward Heroics on Broadway

    The new musical Bandstand at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater opens with the sounds of war and a pivotal scene that recurs in the story of Donny Novitzki, a returning soldier who forms a band. Longing to return to life as it was, he is tasked to look in on the wife of a friend…

  • A Doll’s House, Part 2: Nora’s Return to Broadway

    Lucas Hnath’s sequel to Ibsen’s classic of world literature, A Doll’s House, titled A Doll’s House, Part 2, suggests that every work in the canon should have a follow-up. Unless they die at the end, like Anna Karenina, it would be great to catch up, after all the sturm und drang. At the Golden Theater,…

  • Cynthia Nixon and Laura Linney in The Little Foxes: Southern Women

    In Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, the lives of Southern women don’t look too shabby, but they most certainly have their limits. Regina Giddens (Cynthia Nixon in a recent matinee) and her sister-in-law Birdie Hubbard (Laura Linney—the stars alternate) define the parameters in the superb MTC production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, the first being…

  • Paula Vogel’s Indecent on Broadway: Is It Good For the Jews

    Indecent dramatizes the epic journey of the Jews in Europe and America in the early part of the 20th century. Staged with utter brilliance through the story of the staging of a single play, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, here is an event at the Cort Theater that brings that controversial 1907 work back to…

  • Frida Kahlo in Andrea Dantas’ One-Woman Show at BAM

    Perhaps Frida Kahlo, a singular artist, could only be portrayed in a one-woman show. Voices of her parents, Diego Rivera, Nelson Rockefeller, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others supply the illusion of an outside world. Playing with her dolls and stuffed monkey, or her paints, Brazilian actress and Flamenco dancer Andrea Dantas, who also wrote Fragmented Frida, inhabits…

  • Kevin Kline in Present Laughter: “ I Am Always Acting”

    Kevin Kline descends a staircase, not nude, but hung over, his leg making a fancy ballet over the bannister. As the suave, debonair stage actor in his twilight, Garry Essendine, in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter in a charming production at the St. James Theater, he doesn’t remember the cute fan Daphne (Tedra Millan, truly adorable…

  • Amelie: Cornering Cute on Broadway

    Based on the 2001 hit movie from France, Amelie, brings original music and distinctive whimsy to the Walter Kerr Theater.  (“Hoping to see you/ In Macchu Picchu” is one tickling lyric. What’s not to love?) Characters may don fish heads and in one incredibly silly bit, an Elton John sequined suit, but it’s all to…

  • Lynn Nottage’s Sweat: A Backstory for our Trump Troubles

    For those still pondering how we got to Trump in the White House, “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage’s play just opened at Studio 54 for this Pulitzer Prize winner’s Broadway debut, and a prescient view of our collective political plight. “Sweat” gives poignant voice to a disenfranchised microcosm of the American heartland, as if Michael Moore’s Flint, Michigan had…

  • Suzanne Vega at the Café Carlyle: Lover, Beloved

    The inspiration for Suzanne Vega’s show at the Café Carlyle is decidedly literary, the Southern writer Carson McCullers, author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Vega, a consummate songstress known for her signature songs, “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner,” crosstown and far from the Carlyle on 112th Street and…

  • Laura Osnes and Tony Yazbeck in Surprise Performance at the Guild Hall Gala

    If you are going to honor Susan Stroman for her achievement in performing arts, as Guild Hall did this week at their annual gala at the Rainbow Room, you may expect, aside from the usual clip reel, some real live Broadway stars. Laura Osnes, a sublime Cinderella, now preparing for the opening of Bandstand, sang…

  • Sally Field Glows in Candlelight: The Glass Menagerie

    In the stunning revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie at the Belasco Theater, Sally Field’s smothering St. Louis Depression era mom Amanda Wingfield, exudes the nervous energy of a woman in compulsive command. Her son Tom, Joe Mantello, our narrator, is the butt of verbal abuse. We can see why her husband left this…

  • Sweeney Todd: The Barber of Fleet Street’s Revenge Tragedy

    It is a tribute to the brilliance of Stephen Sondheim’s art that two so different productions of his work are now staged in New York. Uptown on Broadway, Sunday in the Park with George illuminates the creative mind of Georges Seurat, and downtown on Barrow Street, at the Barrow Street Theater, The Tooting Art Club’s…

  • Angelica Page’s Anxiety of Influence: Turning Page

    At the outset of her one-woman show, Turning Page, perfectly staged in the intimacy of Dixon Place on Chrystie Street, Angelica Page explains why her mother’s spirit keeps calling out to her. For one thing, Geraldine Page was an Academy Award winning actress who rose to fame in several Tennessee Williams’ plays, and despite the…

  • Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford in Sunday in the Park with George

    Art isn’t easy. So say the characters in Sunday in the Park with George, now in a stellar revival at the newly renovated Hudson Theater. Part heady yet playful art history, part love story, the imaginative creation of painter Georges Seurat and his muse Dot from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, has as its central…

  • Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812: The Musical/ The Book

    The wild party at the Imperial Theater known as Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is not your usual samovar affair. This entertainment, referencing 70 pages of Tolstoy’s masterpiece War & Peace, has its own backstory: two downtown versions had the performers mingling among the guests, diners at a banquet. While that novelty…

  • Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard: “The Greatest Star of All”

    A musical of outsized passions as only Andrew Lloyd Webber could compose, Sunset Boulevard trades in hyperbole. “The greatest star of all,” in the words of Max, her homme d’affaires, Norma Desmond is camp drama queen extraordinaire. With Glenn Close in the role, reprising her Tony-winning performance of 22 years ago at the Palace Theater,…

  • A United Kingdom: It’s Good to be King

    David Oyelowo, so brilliant in a recent theater production of Othello, playing the king against Daniel Craig’s Iago, is now a king again in Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom. Groomed to take the throne of Botswana, Seretse Khama is studying in London where he meets an office girl, Ruth Williams (the lovely, angelic Rosamund Pike).…

  • YEN at the Lucille Lortel Theater: Children Raising Themselves

    It’s a given: boys left to their own devices can come to no good. In the fine MCC Theater  production of YEN, a British import, at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the unformed men in question are brothers by the same mother, one static, almost comatose in front of a tv when we meet him, the younger…

  • August Wilson’s Jitney in its Broadway Debut: A Review

    Now, a dozen years after his death, August Wilson is on a roll. Maybe the wide release of the movie of his stage play Fences will bring him a posthumous Oscar for Best Screenplay, but more, because Denzel Washington has vowed he would see all 10 plays of this bard of Pittsburgh’s Hill District produced.…

  • Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo in Othello: The Moor Goes Down

    At the much celebrated New York Theatre Workshop production of Othello, Andrew Lieberman’s austere set looks like the inside of a packing crate as the audience files in, taking seats on three sides; mattresses are strewn about the floor, as if we are inside a military barrack. Under the imaginative direction of Sam Gold, the play…

  • Ride the Cyclone: A Musical at the Lucille Lortel Theater

    Coney Island’s roller coaster known as The Cyclone was simultaneously alluring and terrifying. The Cyclone in Ride the Cyclone, a glorious MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater is no different with its premise of promising members of the Saint Cassian High School chamber choir wiped out on a single ride. Alluring, yes, terrifying, yes,…

  • Annette Bening: Honored at New York Stage & Film Gala/ Mother Writ-Large in Mike Mills’ Twentieth Century Women

    “If I were a woman,” Rob Reiner said in a video of congratulatory messages for Annette Bening at the Plaza Hotel where this sublime actress was feted at the New York Stage & Film Gala, “I’d be jealous.” Even those of us attending, with so many who worked with her or want to work with…

  • Dear Evan Hansen: A Review

    You’d think the death by suicide of a lonely teen would be a total downer. In Dear Evan Hansen, the play that opened at Broadway’s Music Box Theater on Sunday night after an ecstatic off Broadway run, we meet the troubled boy, Connor (Mike Faist), early on. He’s a bully and picks on the play’s…