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about: Regina Weinreich

  • The TONY Awards: Party to Party

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    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 true in spades. Sure, Robert Di Niro’s expletives deployed against the present regime—deleted for television but you can well imagine– were not welcome to some ears, but with his well-meaning heart he introduced his pal Bruce Springsteen –Di Niro calling his Broadway one-man show “Jersey Boy.” 

    Here are some of my favorite moments from the 72nd TONY’s: Chita Rivera exclaiming “There’s still salt in this shaker.” Andrew Garfield, so gorgeous in a turban and gown in Angels in America as AIDS ridden Pryor Walter accepting his TONY: “Let’s all bake a cake for everyone who wants a cake.”Katrina Lenk dedicating her Band’s Visit TONY to the Israeli actress Ronit Elkabetz who brought her character to life in the movie original. Tony Shaloub honoring his immigrant father: “May we never lose sight of what they taught us.”Nathan Lanequipping even Tony Kushner’s emails are Pulitzer worthy. The British Glenda Jackson reminding everyone: “America is always great!”

     

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  • Remembering Anthony Bourdain

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    The irreverence of Anthony Bourdain’s CNN series, “Parts Unknown” always struck me as a sign that behind this foodie’s yen for travel and exotic eats was a beat soul. One segment had him on an island off Italy fighting with the fishermen. In Tangier, a city I know well, he found the funkiest place to shoot a crackerjack Moroccan feast. His programs did not feel over-produced. He allowed for the mayhem of spontaneity. And I loved that.

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  • Why Mister Rogers Matters: Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Premieres

    MR. Rodgers
    My kids weren’t interested in the nerdy television personality of Fred Rogers when they were growing up, maybe because, as the Academy Award winning documentarian Morgan Neville put it, introducing his new movie, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? at a special screening at MoMA this week, as a cultural figure, he was a two-dimensional. That’s an odd way to describe this former Protestant minister and gifted composer from Pittsburgh. Recognizing television as the ultimate pulpit, Fred Rogers was so committed to the emotional lives of children that he created an imaginary world, a Neighborhood of Make-Believe, for them and encouraged them to just be themselves. When Neville made his documentary about Yo Yo Ma, he was struck by the cellist’s friendship with Fred Rogers. Born in 1967, Neville was the right demographic to remember and admire the man who entered the room, removing a formal jacket, and putting on a comfy cardigan on television beginning in 1968. And now, with this treasure of a film, we can all appreciate just how radical his vision was.

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

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    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 were artists of the 1950’s fully committed to their work, and so a backstory for staging the 20th century’s most iconic dramas against the real-life trials of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, informs the heated, engaging dialogue.

    Fellow Travelers, under Michael Wilson’s fine direction, will leave viewers deeply moved by the effects of the McCarthy era on creative lives, debating points along the way. Is it relevant to today’s American ethos? The line about paranoia that Russia is infiltrating our country through our movies leaps out. Here it refers to Kazan’s masterpiece On the Waterfront, and to the consequence of fear that so informs the writing of Miller’s stage play, The Crucible. To what extent does the present culture force self-censorship?

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  • A Jason Wu Fashion Show at the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation Annual Luncheon

    JasonWuAs noted in the past: It is a truth widely held, that ladies who lunch are wont to shop. And so a fashion show to benefit the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation has become an annual luncheon event. The options for lavish spending were displayed at Susan Gutfreund’s apartment in May, featuring models wearing Jason Wu’s dresses and gowns currently available on Bergdorf’s third floor. While the designer was not present, his assistant assured everyone he sincerely wished he could be, but was mid-air en route to Asia, launching a new fragrance. We would all get one in a goody bag, along with a cupcake from Magnolia. For guilt free spending, the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation benefits from a portion of the sales. Dr. Samuel Waxman, formidable and inspiring, spoke to the rapt crowd, many women beautifully dressed for the occasion.

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  • Peter Beard in That Summer, a New Grey Gardens Documentary

    That summer
    That Summer, the summer of 1972, Peter Beard and Lee Radziwill had the idea to make a film about East Hampton. On the Memorial Day weekend, a crowd of East Enders attended a private screening of That Summer in East Hampton. Director Goran Olsson was not present, nor was Lee, but Peter Beard and his wife Nejma Beard, a producer of this film attended, along with Bruce Weber, Joy Behar, and many others, to hear Vincent Fremont and Bob Colacello, experts on Warhol, tell stories about Andy Warhol and visitors Truman Capote, Bianca Jagger and many others to the Montauk estate back in the day. The film serves as a history of those heady times, of a great group of artists who came to Montauk in 1972.

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  • Joe Pintauro Finds Salvation at the Parrish Art Museum

    JoePintauro2If 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 engage more deeply with our core beliefs, and our identity as human beings. On Friday night, the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill staged Salvation, an art song trilogy based on three of Pintauro’s one-acters, published in 1997. Kevin Jeffers composed the book, music and lyrics, having discovered Joe Pintauro’s work as he was looking for plays to put to music. The ethical and spiritual dilemmas of Salvation speak to faith in the unknowable, the divine.

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

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    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 her role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie. Here in this play, it is an animated moment when Mary Tyrone shows the girlish whims she once had, and it is startling, commanding the Connecticut sitting room, taking center stage from the alcoholic men, her husband James, a miserly matinee idol played to perfection by Jeremy Irons, and their two sons, James, Jr. and Edmund (Rory Keenan and Matthew Beard). Her plight, after all, wrenches this drama, written in the 1940’s and hewn so close to the playwright’s life it was not produced till after his death, into the Zeitgeist: conjuring #MeToo moments, not to mention the opioid epidemic. You get her immediately; forced to go on tour with her husband, waiting in fleabag hotels and “one-night stands,” losing a child, and treated by doctors with morphine; this is not a role for sissies.

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  • Wim Wenders’ Pope Francis: A Man of his Word at its World Premiere

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    All I ever knew of Saint Francis of Assisi was that he talked to animals, said filmmaker Wim Wenders this week, at a special screening of his latest film Pope Francis: A Man of his Word at the Whitby Hotel, just a stone’s throw from Trump Tower. The current pope is the first to call himself after the saint who lived 800 years ago, loved nature and the earth, and is said to have charmed a sultan of Egypt. If you think of the church only in terms of the gold threaded, bejeweled capes on view at the MET’s Costume Institute exhibition, you will find Pope Francis of another cloth.

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  • Annette Bening in The Seagull

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    As guests filed into the room for a special screening of The Seagull at Lincoln Center, Patti Smith was enthusiastic for Chekhov, and Christopher Walken nodded hello to guests that included John Cameron Mitchell, Lena Hall, Ben Shenkman, Patricia Bosworth and A. M. Holmes. Stephen Karam who adapted the classic for director Michael Mayer brought Jayne Houdyshell. Playwright of The Humans, Karam had not yet seen The Seagull with an audience, and seemed thrilled: everyone laughed in the right places. The Seagull is, of course, a tragedy.

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

    Carlyle BuildingThe 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. With many patrons such as Anthony Bourdain and George Clooney (they know a thing or two about hotels) extolling the hotel’s virtues, and Jon Hamm’s gentle critique of its prices–$10, 000 for one of the suites—yikes, and homages to legendary guests like Jacqueline Kennedy, and the scandals of a secret tunnel Marilyn Monroe is said to have used to enter for a tryst with John F. Kennedy—more yikes!

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  • Linda Lavin’s Debut at the Café Carlyle

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    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 roles, and comedy, she can sing. As chanteuse for her Café Carlyle debut she is warm, charming, providing a distinct comfort zone of classic tunes. Age-less in sparkling blue, she wants to know, “I look pretty good, don’t I?” as if she needed to ask!

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  • Heavenly Bodies: The Metropolitan Museum’s Religious Commitment


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    To say the latest MET Costume Institute exhibition, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” is up there, as gorgeous, generous, and sumptuous as these yearly shows get, is to flirt with the ethereal. The Catholic imagination, as His Eminence Timothy Michael Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, stated in his remarks at the MET’s Temple of Dendur, where divine cookies and coffee approached the sacrament, is testament to Christ’s art. The church is about truth, good, and beauty in praise of God, he said. One part Vatican, and another Versace, with gem-stones and jewels, capes threaded in gold juxtaposed with modest peplum monk-styled couture and almost no skin-revealing gowns and wedding dresses, the fashion inspired by Catholicism is a revelation.

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



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    “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 6. Well known for bawdy humor, she’s also known to have played the Queen “more times than RuPaul,” quipped speaker Robert DiNiro, who also noted, see what happens when you have weak immigrant laws. Isn’t it great that this award was given to both Charlie Chaplin and Helen Mirren, he went on, before launching into a commentary on the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner: seeing her look mildly hurt, he almost for a moment thought Sarah Sanders was human. And so a night dedicated to great acting over decades took a turn into the immediate and timely.

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  • Netflix’ Bobby Kennedy for President at the Tribeca Film Festival: Is it Too Late? 

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    What is presidential? This week at the Tribeca Film Festival, a special screening featured part one of four of the Netflix series, Bobby Kennedy for President, marking the 50th anniversary of his 83-day presidential run. Filmmaker Dawn Porter deftly intercut archival footage with key interviews, with John Lewis, for example, William vanden Heuvel, and D. A. Pennebaker in this first segment, focusing particularly on Robert Kennedy’s history with racism, that pernicious American disease that simply does not go away. The film forces a reevaluation of this Kennedy brother, what might have been had he not been murdered and gone on to serve in our government’s highest position, and how the dignity of this man reflects upon the man in that office today.

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  • Mary Kay Place Stars in Diane: Indie Gem at the Tribeca Film Festival

    Diane
    The movie Diane happens to be about a woman of a certain age, played to perfection by Mary Kay Place, in one of the most compelling performances of the year. Diane happens to be based on writer/director Kent Jones’ mother, dealing with friends and family around her in dramatic circumstance or dying, and a son (Jake Lacy) struggling with drug addiction in rural Massachusetts, where, by the way, a good deal of Bible thumping serves as a threat.

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  • Rory Kennedy Premieres her NASA Documentary for Sarasota Film Festival’s Awesome Closing Night

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    Planet Earth was the star of the Sarasota Film Festival’s closing night film, Rory Kennedy’s Above and Beyond: NASA’s Journey to Tomorrow, just in time for Earth Day. Following up on an aspirational speech given by her uncle, President John F. Kennedy, about going to the moon at Rice University, Kennedy’s documentary tells the history of NASA from the ‘60’s to the present, how space, the planets, and the universe, have been explored and what scientists have learned about the Earth. David Bowie may sing his query, Is there life on Mars? And the answer is still looking for signs. For sure, the Earth is vulnerable. Global warming is irrefutable. Following the screening, a panel featuring Kennedy, Mark Bailey, her husband and the film’s producer, and scientist Dr. Ellen Stofan answered questions about the possibilities of life beyond our planet, and the excitement of continued exploration. What about space tourism?

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  • Megan Hilty at the Café Carlyle: Incurably Soprano

    Megan3Introducing 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 Café Carlyle, it would be odd to have an evening of musical theater from Megan Hilty without this signature number, this being her fourth time at the Carlyle, she says proudly, “and I’m not pregnant.” She studied opera, she tells us, and learned she loved musical theater. Revealing the demands of the genre for a soprano, she goes low for the tune “Alto’s Lament,” obsessed with the songwriters Zina Goldrich and Marcy Heisler, and warning everyone, this would be a weird, eclectic set.

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  • At Lunch with Priscilla Presley: HBO’s Elvis Presley: The Searcher

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    At lunch at the Rainbow Room recently, Priscilla Presley joined a panel of Elvis experts, journalists and filmmakers to illuminate "The King's" rags to riches career. Certainly an American original, Elvis Presley was a dreamboat to teens when he first began to sing, swiveling his hips on the Ed Sullivan Show. Of course they famously photographed him from the waist up for television’s primetime viewing. But on stage, that was something else. Music aficionados knew his sources, gospel, country, and rhythm and blues, idioms of the South. While many thought his moves brazen, no one contested his musicianship. Priscilla Presley, keeper of the flame who has worked well to maintain his legacy in the public eye, wants everyone to know he was a “Searcher,” the theme of the new two-part HBO documentary about him, that she hopes will force a reappraisal of his art.

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

    Three Tall Women Brigitte Lacombe
    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 did. Much has been made of the actress Glenda Jackson in the formidable role of “A,” and Laurie Metcalf in the bridge role of “B,” and Alison Pill as the 26-year-old “C.” Line up the Tony Awards now. Albee’s words, both abstract and specific circle around an emblematic woman’s history, her wiles, excesses, entitlements, and deprivations. Deeply funny, just hear “A” recounting how her husband appeared naked to her with a diamond bracelet hanging on his stiff “pee pee” aimed at her face. “I just couldn’t do that,” she cries proclaiming herself a “good girl,” astonished that she is revealing this intimacy. “Oh keep the bracelet,” she remembers him saying, as the audience howls.

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  • Sarasota Film Festival Celebrates 20

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    “In our 20th year, we have more films than ever,” Mark Famiglio, Chairman and President of the Sarasota Film Festival said in a phone interview about the two-week event now underway until April 22. While many beautiful locations world over can boast of a film festival, SFF is often noted as a well-kept secret for its intimacy, and inspired audiences, reflecting the community’s commitment to the arts. This year Sarasota is especially popular for the new boutique hotels gracing the city’s downtown, and a new building space designated for the festival. “We were at the epicenter of financial collapse in 2008,” Famiglio exclaimed. “We recovered. Today we are well programmed, well conceived and FUN. Maybe we will last another 20 years.”

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  • Variety Power of Women Luncheon Honors Emily Blunt, Tarana Burke, Padma Lakshmi, Margaret Atwood, Tamron Hall, Alicia Keys, and Tina Fey

    Padma“I have a vagina,” Padma Lakshmi announced, calling female genitalia by as many names as she could muster including the “c” word. The food network impresario was accepting the KARMA award for her work as founder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America, and revealing years of pain and bleeding with no relief because the condition—and many women suffer it—had not yet been diagnosed. By the time this year’s Variety’s Power of Women M. C.Samantha Bee hit the podium, noting that this jam packed Cipriani Wall Street was Mike Pence’s idea of hell, I had been treated to one Bellini and a hand massage by Z’nea in a pop up spa for SheaMoisture in a corner of the spacious former bank. Feeling no pain, I found out SheaMoisture, a premiere sponsor of this yearly luncheon presented by Lifetime, not only smoothed out every gnarl on my hands, this is a company that sends 10% of its profits to African women.Yes, there were big names featured at this luncheon from Emily Blunt to Tamron Hall, who was awarded the Commerce Impact Award by SheaMoisture, to Tina Fey. With its high-octane focus on promoting reading and education for girls, the safety, nourishment, and education of children, and yes, “me too,” this was no ordinary event. Each speaker was an inspiration for empowering others. U. S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand made opening remarks assuring everyone, time’s up. Viola Davis introduced Tarana Burke who explained how this was the next chapter of the women’s movement, that after the violence of sexual assault, survivors need to be heard and believed and to keep going. Billie Jean King is giving her $100,000, she said tearing up. “If you are ready to help, I have two words for you, ‘me too.’”

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  • Carousel: A Celebratory Revival

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    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 top of a ride, a-spin for the dazzling romance that unfolds. A girl, Julie Jordan meets a boy, Billy Bigelow and the rest is the pure pull of irresistible, young love and consequent tragedy. While we all remember the songs “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and “If I Loved You,” with Renee Fleming, Jessie Mueller, and exceptionally gifted voices from Lindsay Mendez and Alexander Gemignani, you are reminded of this works’ operatic soul. It’s gorgeous, but most exceptionally for Joshua Henry as Billy, intense, damaged, and lost. During intermission you could hear murmurs of comparison with Paul Robeson; this actor has it all, and can he dance!

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  • MATA Celebrates 20

    MataAt the Paula Cooper Gallery for MATA’s 20th birthday celebration, Mexican percussionist Diego Espinosa faced the challenge of performing a 1967 work by Philip Glass, with the world-class composer seated several feet away. Instrument: an ordinary caterer’s foldup table. Soon in the cathedral style space, the sound of rhythmic scratching rose to the skylights. The piece, “1 x 1,” had been created on a kitchen table, Espinosa explained later, and he memorized the notes, applying them freely. Crouching down, he added the metal of the table’s spindly legs to the act, improvising on every surface. If a definition of “new music” were needed to kick off MATA’s week of experimental music concerts, this opening performance illuminates.

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

    Mean Girls
    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 comic gold. It’s not just that this is high school, duh, the drive to dominate is understood in terms of jungle hierarchies. The class queen bee, Regina George (Taylor Louderman) is “apex predator,” determining all that matters in the cafeteria and fragile egos of her peers, especially the two girls, eh, attending maids in mega heels and mini skirts (Ashley Park and standout Kate Rockwell). In comes the new girl, Cady Heron (Erika Henningsen), a transfer from the wilds of Africa, whip smart and eager to fit in. She learns, just play by the rules: never wear a tank top two days in a row.

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