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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Aretha Franklin at 29 Stars in Amazing Grace: “She Turned Your Ears into Eyes”

    Amazing GraceAt the New York premiere of the documentary Amazing Grace, the recording session for Aretha Franklin’s historic 1972 gospel album, Clive Davis told an audience of many who knew the iconic singer, she invited him to dinner 40 years ago and asked, Could she be a hit?

    From this auspicious beginning, at a screening room near the Freedom Tower, Dr. Amos C. Brown, pastor of the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco, provided a context for the church concert, backed by the Southern California Community Choir led by Anthony Hamilton, with James Cleveland accompanying Franklin at the apex of her singing chops: “People escaping lynching in Mississippi, at the height of despair, got the gift of music from Aretha Franklin.”

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  • Tigerland on Discovery Channel: “Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright”

    TigerLand
    When filmmaker Ross Kauffman pitched the idea for Tigerland, his latest documentary film to air on the Discovery Channel, he proclaimed to producers, including Fisher Stevens, that he did not want to make another The Cove, fine as it was, another doc about the poaching of animals in the wild. Oops, Stevens had produced the Oscar-winning film about the endangered dolphins. Kauffman got the job anyway. Tigerland does address the diminution of the world’s tiger population, now only about 3400 in the wild, but as is this documentarian’s special skill, he gives the story a human face, focusing on the individuals, one in India, another in Russia, key figures who do the work of keeping the tiger species alive.

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  • Beetlejuice: The Musical on Broadway, At Last

    BeetleJuice
    If you tell Alex Brightman, the star of Beetlejuice on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theater that he was born to play this exuberant, over-the-top part, he says, Oh sure! I was born to play this dead, Jewish, crazed, demon from the Netherworld! As if to say mockingly, that’s no compliment! When, in fact, it is! Brightman brings the fast-talking giddy mania that he played so well in School of Rock, as if it had been a dress rehearsal for Beetlejuice, adding of course the black & white Escher-like optics. For the opening preview this week, fans of all ages mobbed B-way and 50th street, dressing up for the occasion. The composer of the historic “Day-O,” Irving Burgie, wouldn’t miss it. At 94, he exuded, “The song always turns them out.”

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  • Sunset: An Interview with Director Laszlo Nemes

    Sunset3Director/ writer Laszlo Nemes won the Best Foreign Film Oscar for his 2015 debut, Son of Saul, a daring fiction feature set in Auschwitz. I met him as he was making the rounds during the award season. On one memorable night, he faced a most anxious moment, meeting Elie Wiesel, the novelist who wrote about his experience in Auschwitz, including watching his father die. Of the dwindling generation of survivors, Wiesel (87 at the time) was a Holocaust elder statesman, an eloquent witness and not one to suffer fools gladly. He found the film a powerful representation of his experience of the place, a murder factory, and important. Before his death in 2017, he was dedicated to keeping the memories of genocide alive as a deterrent to future atrocities. That night, I asked Nemes what he was planning next: a film set in Budapest at the dawn of World War I, from the point of view of a woman. In Sunset, Irisz Leiter, an orphaned woman, tries to get a job at a hat emporium that used to belong to her family. From there, Nemes sets her plight against the larger historic moment, again, as in Son of Saul, in allegory. I had a chance to speak to Laszlo Nemes about Sunset on the phone from his home in Budapest.

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  • Mary Wilson Reigns Supreme at the Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations Opening Night

    Temtations
    Of course the story of the Temptations, the R&B group topping the charts with hits like “My Girl,” and yes, “Ain’t Too Proud,” would have to acknowledge the girl groups of the era. As the Temps rose to fame, so too did The Supremes, and in the glorious musical Ain’t Too Proud at Broadway's Imperial Theater, they do get their cameo singing a medley of their hits. Rivals and perhaps romantic interests, the Supremes had their own dramatic story, limned by the hit musical Dreamgirls, but here they round out the men’s tale of collaboration, friendship, beautiful sound, and the business of making music for black men in America. As part of Dominique’s book, Mary Wilson gets a bit more than a shout out, and there she was in the audience on opening night, not minding a bit that the history is tweaked. On that, Mary Wilson “ain’t too proud.”

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  • Tierney Sutton’s Homage to Alan and Marilyn Bergman at the Café Carlyle

    AaaPhoto: David Andrako

    From the very first jazzy note, you can tell she loves them. Tierney Sutton’s residency at the Café Carlyle is a tribute to the songwriting couple, Marilyn and Alan Bergman is an awe-fest to their music, and to them as a couple. Sutton goes through their romance and collaboration: to this day, after 61 years of marriage, they mostly occupy the same room, and when they call, they both call, speaking on extensions, inviting her to dinner or to test out a new tune. And as Sutton goes through this history, through their work with composers Michel Legrand, Dave Grusin, Marvin Hamlisch, John Williams and more, you realize, they’ve written the lyrics to songs you know and love, such as “Nice and Easy,” for Frank Sinatra, his first album’s title track, and “The Way We Were,” with Marvin Hamlisch, best known for the movie with Barbra Streisand.

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  • Real Estate Mogul/ Film Industry Impresario Charles S. Cohen Honored at the French Consulat

    Award
    This week Charles S. Cohen was presented with the insignia of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor at the Payne Whitney mansion, home of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. Gerard Araud, Ambassador of France, conferred the honors, proclaiming, “I’m an ambassador so I’m not supposed to be funny.” Yet, he was. Following a speech by Mayor Bill De Blasio celebrating Cohen as a great New Yorker, Araud explained his levity, this was his last such ceremony as he was leaving office. Filmmaker Agnes Varda sent salutations via video, and Isabelle Huppert, currently in The Mother, an off-Broadway play, mingled with a delegation of French filmmakers and Unifrance, dedicated to promoting French culture on these shores. Unifrance partnered with the Film Society of Lincoln Center this week for the annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. The best thing about Charles S. Cohen vis a vis film: he has good taste.

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  • Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Opens with Pierre Salvadori’s The Trouble with You

    RondavewFrenchCinima
    The annual fete de films, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, a collaboration between Unifrance and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, opened this week with a comedy, The Trouble with You. Director Pierre Salvadori introduced the film noting that most filmmakers in France are French New Wave influenced, but he is more inspired by Hollywood. “It’s more about my love of stories, of fiction, of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder,” he explained. “My film is funny and sad. Feel free to laugh and cry.”

    And so when the Trouble with You opens with a violent police action, the movie seems a startling homage, until the realization hits: a police procedural is appropriated for farce as only the French can do. Salvadori brought with him his leading man, Pio Marmai, with whom he has worked in the past. In fact, the last time he came to New York to promote a Salvadori film, he—in a drunken state— got a tattoo, the word for fighter misspelled.

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  • Transit: From There to Here in Cinema

    Transit
    What does exile look like? What does geographic displacement do to identity, and to the psyche? These were dilemmas addressed in much midcentury fiction, found in the writings of William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, and others. Now Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel Transit is brought to the screen from the German filmmaker Christian Petzold. When we meet Georg (Franz Rogowski) he is on the move, a witness to war, blood, and death. Unwittingly taking on the identity of a dead writer, he lands in the port city of Marseille, an “Interzone” of sorts, as part of France’s “free zone,” Marseille interchangeable with Tangier, another evocative port city where people hung out waiting for papers, exit visas, boat tickets, “transit.” Cue Casablanca, the classic film an illustration of Tangier’s midcentury international zone.

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  • My Fair Lady: Transformation in our Trans-Age

    My Fair Lady2
    Even if Lerner & Loewe’s My Fair Lady were not one of the most crowd-pleasing musicals, the revival at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater would be a must-see. Featuring Broadway royalty, not only the amazing Laura Benanti as Eliza Doolittle whose voice alone is worth the price of admission, but the exquisite Rosemary Harris, who, at the performance we attended did not get the customary applause upon entrance. Her subtleties as Professor Henry Higgins’ mother may have caused her to slip by the notice of the attentive crowd in ways that Danny Burstein’s Alfred P. Doolittle, Eliza’s attention-grabbing drunk dad does not. But these great stars, joined by Harry Hadden-Paton as the stern, conceited Higgins, Christian Dante White as the besotted Freddy and Allan Corduner as the deliciously impish Colonel Pickering, under the consistently good direction of Bartlett Sher, make for a great night at the theater.

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  • John Lloyd Young Sings Songs of Love at the Café Carlyle

    John Loyd YoungPhoto: David Andrako

    “You’re just too good to be true,” goes the lyric of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” a signature hit for John Lloyd Young. Now in his eighth residency at the Café Carlyle, the line, the first of the night, also describes his dreamboat performance. Some men just don’t get old: Dark glasses cannot hide John Lloyd Young’s dimple-chinned prom date good looks, but then again, his music does not age either. Just ask his fans who follow wherever he plays, and return to the Carlyle night after night.

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  • Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards: Seeing Red on Heart Disease

    WomensWorld
    “I see a sea of red,” became the cliché of the night at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room for the Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards. Indeed, red was encouraged for stars on the red carpet, Angela Bassett, Susan Lucci, and everyone else, and it seemed a giant homage to Valentine’s Day and the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration all wrapped in one. But the unifying image was the heart, meaning heart health for women. Lucci, the queen of soap operas, told a story of being the picture of health and suddenly feeling pressure in her chest in October, averting a heart attack. Bassett, the queenly Ramonda in Black Panther, lost her mother in 2014 to heart disease. She wanted to create awareness for the link between Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease. Each speaker, and including doctors Dr. Sharon Hays and Mary N. Walsh, had a message: these episodes are preventable.

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  • Song of Parkland: Surviving the Valentine’s Day Massacre

    Song Of Parkland
    When we ran into Melody Herzfeld at the Tony Awards, she seemed stunned at the place history had taken her. This week at a special screening of Song of Parkland, an HBO documentary directed by Amy Schatz, she had her Tony Award by her side, still stunned, and feeling guilty. She would have preferred a prize for merit, she said. Instead she was honored for her heroism in a tragedy, coolly ushering 65 students into a back storeroom closet for two hours as a gunman murdered 17 at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida where she taught drama. At HBO, dozens of her former students attested to her epic qualities as a teacher. While she was not falsely modest, part of her charm is a self-effacing humor worthy of Joan Rivers. Then again, as she told us at the Tony’s, she was from these parts, from New Jersey.

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  • Eco Village is no Utopian Vision

    Eco Village
    Among the many fascinations of Eco Village, a new play by a gifted young playwright, Phoebe Nir, in production at the Theater at St. Clement’s Church, is a revision of communal life from the ‘60’s, reimagined for this generation of millennials. For many of us who remember our youthful era of sharing resources, it was an edenic time for those who had little to share, welcoming the bounty of those more prosperous. In Eco Village, that ethos takes on current trends, toward ecology, conservation, and respect for the earth. Keeping a small footprint, so to speak, is a goal. But humans being, well, human, loyalties shift among the fictive characters in this alternate world, in ways that make Eco Village register more cynical than utopian. But then again, how do you change the world?

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  • True West: Sam Shepard’s Bad Boy Pas de Deux

    TrueWest3
    I have always thought of Sam Shepard’s True West as a two-hander. The brothers at the center of this heated drama, the screenwriter Austin and ne’re-do-well Lee, are entwined physically and spiritually; it’s their tension that enthralls. At the American Airlines Theater in a thrilling Roundabout production, they are Paul Dano and Ethan Hawke respectively. Of course there is a producer, Saul Kimmer (Gary Wilmes) ably aiding, abetting, and underscoring their sibling dis-function, and their dithering mother (Marylouise Burke), at least one half of the source. The other is the unseen father, allegedly a drunk who some time ago receded from society into the Southern California desert. Needless to say, the fruit does not fall far from that tree.

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  • Beethoven for the Rohingya at Carnegie Hall—and David Amram

    Amram2How do you get to Carnegie Hall? It’s an old, corny joke, and here’s an alternate answer. Get the incomparable composer and ethnomusicologist David Amram to conduct. And then a world unfolds: The Concert of Solidarity for the Rohingya Refugees at Carnegie Hall this week featured an orchestra comprised of musicians from 33 countries, stellar soloists, and a chorus from Montclair State University. The orchestra performed Amram’s “Elegy for Violin and Orchestra,” and he conducted, featuring soloist Elmira Darvarova on violin. This divine performance was followed by Beethoven, “Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” culminating in “Ode to Joy,” with George Mathew conducting. The evening was to benefit the Rohingya refugees and the important work of Doctors Without Borders. Carnegie Hall was packed for this extraordinary night of music and moving accounts from Rohingya survivors.

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  • Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists on HBO: Virile Prose and the Value of Truth

    Breslin
    There aren’t any more Breslins or Hamills, exemplars of a masculine New York postwar street journalism. Now these superstars of newsroom culture star in a state of the art documentary, Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, to air this week on HBO. At a star-studded premiere at the Time Warner Center with dinner at Porterhouse, they were celebrated in high style—Jimmy Breslin died in 2017, and a frail Pete Hamill could not attend– even as the world they brought to life feels like a near forgotten memory of a bygone era.

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  • Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away Gets an Oscar Nomination 

    F
    Now that the Academy Award nominations are out, with Roma, Capernaum, The Shoplifters, Cold War and Never Look Away the academy’s picks for Best Foreign film, the winner in this category will be hard to predict. Opening in theaters this week, Germany’s Oscar entry, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away, provides a glimpse into an artist’s life against the backdrop of the Nazi’s declining power in Europe, and the advent of the Communism in Germany. Based loosely on Gerhard Richter’s career, his coming of age in Dresden, escape to the West, painting studies in Dusseldorf, and phenomenal professional and personal success, this epic length movie moves briskly through its three hours plus: it’s a love story with a potent villain played by Germany’s uber romantic hero, Sebastian Koch, with young lovers Tom Schilling and Paula Beer. Schilling’s Kurt makes his breakthrough discovery of collaging gauzy images of photos from the past. In a traditional movie narrative, this filmmaker depicts Europe’s destruction by the Nazis, euthanasia of mental patients, political loyalties and injustices and its aftermath. As in his Oscar winning The Lives of Others (2006), a potent message comes forward: Yes, Germans suffered too.

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  • Cinema Eye Honors: Are These Awards Predictors of Best Documentary Oscars?

    Cinima
    Non-fiction films take center stage at the Cinema Eye Honors, awards for the art of documentary filmmaking. At the Museum of the Moving Image this week, pioneers and newcomers to the field, gathered to recognize achievement in editing, directing, graphic design or animation, cinematography and other aspects of story-telling craft. Oscar voters have their own list; the Cinema Eye nominees, and winners, coming from theatrical, television, and streaming venues, may not be your most familiar movies, such as this year’s Free Solo, Three Identical Strangers, and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but they are the ones most admired by industry insiders. Academy Award winner Morgan Neville said he was attending: because his documentary about Mister Rogers was nominated, and because he loves the documentary community.

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  • Love Fest for Green Book at Patsy’s Restaurant

    Green
    The road movie Green Book, winner of numerous awards this week, is also shadowed by controversy. Are recent discoveries of racist tweets an attempt to bring down what is for many the Oscar film of the year?

    At a celebration for Green Book at Patsy’s Restaurant this week, friends and family of both jazz pianist Dr. Don Shirley and his driver Tony Lip gathered to remember the real life characters of this crowd-pleasing road story. Daniel Craig hosted, and stuck around just long enough for the movie’s star, Viggo Mortensen, to arrive. As he left, a waiter requested a selfie with him, and the Bond actor obliged.

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  • Golden Globes to New York Film Critics Circle Awards: How to Travel Light During the Award Season

    Film Critocs Award2019
    With this year’s Golden Globes in Hollywood preceding the New York Film Critics Circle’s annual award dinner by a night, the big question was how did directors like Alfonso Cuaron (Roma) or actors like Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk), winners at both events, traverse the country with such speed, looking fresh as can be? Imagining private jets, I was briskly informed by an insider, they were on a 7 A. M. flight out of L. A. this morning, arriving in New York in the afternoon. At Tao Downtown, Roma was honored: while our president looks to make a wall, Roma gives us a window. Roma won not only for Best Film and Best Director, but Best Cinematographer: that would be Alfonso Cuaron himself, so for sure, he’d make every effort. The transition West to East may have looked seamless, but the Golden Globes, so green in everyone’s memory, made a lingering impression.

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  • Warhol at the Whitney, Epic Abstraction at the MET

    Warhal2
    Back in the day, at the height of abstract expressionism, Warhol was the enemy. When subjectivity in art was all the rage—i.e. Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings– Warhol was commodifying soup cans, world leaders, and other celebrities. Such artists as de Kooning and Kline would enjoy more than their 15 minutes of fame, and Warhol with his production line productivity, his commercial factory considered an antithesis to fine art. Now with the current exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum (Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again) and Metropolitan Museum of Art (Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera), it’s a good time to reevaluate the mid-century’s art.

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  • Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie Rule in Mary Queen of Scots

    MARY QUEEN OF SCOTSCelebrating her new movie Mary Queen of Scots this week at the Monkey Bar, the actress Saoirse Ronan, now 24, said she’s has wanted to play the role of this ill-fated queen since she was 18. “Mary is a big deal where I come from, an icon,” she noted, and though many notable actresses have played her, there was enough new in the source material, a copiously researched book by Tudor scholar John Guy, to warrant another look. Director Josie Rourke was attracted to the period material through the book, which reads like a “forensic thriller”—“I’m just a nerd,” she joked. That, and Ronan’s enthusiasm: “My path to this film was through Saoirse.”

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  • Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War: Cool Women and Hot Jazz

    Cold War
    For Oscars, the Best Foreign Language Film category is often a fierce race with some of the year’s best offerings. When The New York Film Critics Circle anointed Alfonso Cuaron’s Mexican-language Roma best film, the move acknowledged a “darling” that’s been on many critics’ “best” and “favorite” lists beating out American or English language hits such as Green Book, A Star is Born, and The Favourite, among many others hotly debated. That selection also made room for Cold War as Best Foreign Language Film. At this year’s New York Film Festival, where I first saw it, this black & white gem, the Polish Academy Award entry, resonated deeply for me, a reaction confirmed at a more recent second viewing following a Q&A at the Brasserie Ruhlmann between the actress Rachel Weisz and Cold War director Pawel Pawlikowski.

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  • John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan in Stan & Ollie: Do You Like My Hat?

    Laurajland Hardy
    Reviving the classic antics of the premiere comedy duo of the 1930’s is no joke. A new movie, Stan & Ollie, features performances by John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan, based on the final tour of the very lean Stan Laurel and the very large Oliver Hardy, as their fame declined. With a script by Jeff Pope and under the fine direction of Jon S. Baird, the comic team comes live, a testament to the talents of this cast. New audiences will be introduced to a historic moment in entertainment, the visual gags and simplicity of the time. Audiences for whom Laurel & Hardy were childhood staples will delight at the laughs, and will be moved by the underside of their hilarity, the resilience of their friendship, the challenges of maintaining celebrity.

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