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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Scary Movies: A Quiet Place and The China Hustle

    A Quiet Place
    “This is a family story,” described John Krasinski at the premiere of his latest directorial effort, A Quiet Place. But isn’t this a horror movie? Krasinski stars alongside his life partner, as he refers to his wife Emily Blunt for this fresh take on a classic nail biter, featuring a family’s attempt at survival in a creaky house set in a world invaded by creatures sensitive to noise. “How far would you go to protect your family?” Krasinski asked the rapt crowd.

    Casting Millicent Simmonds, the star of last year’s Wonderstruck is simply brilliant. A young actress from Utah, Simmonds is deaf, and the film’s family, her parents, and brother must sign with her. That is the near soundless world of this tight movie, in which Blunt’s character is challenged to give birth, alone in a bathtub, without making a single squawk. The audience becomes attuned to all aspects of the filmmaking, the cinematography (from Charlotte Bruus Christensen who worked with Blunt on Girl on the Train), and Marco Beltrami’s music for example. This is what innovative filmmaking is all about. Play with sound, and all senses are heightened.

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  • Angels in America: Waiting for the Resurrection

    Angela in America1985, the year in which the 3 parts of Millennium Approaches, Part 1 of Angels in America is set, everyone is having fears and anxieties about the year 2000 like everyone is perched on the edge of a cliff waiting to fall off. Just as in the ‘90’s when Tony Kushner’s masterpiece was first staged, now at the Neil Simon Theater in a luminous production under the direction of Marianne Elliott, the characters experience dreamlike visions: Prior Walter hallucinates ancestors of the same name. He has mysterious lesions, as does Roy Cohn, the infamous McCarthy era lawyer visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. Harper Pitt on a Valium low suffers visions of falling into a black hole. Her husband Joe prowls the parks in search of what?  Along the way, the talk is of earth, Reagan, and race. The end of the world is coming. You know because the great book rises from the stage’s floor and bursts into flames. Yes, paranoia plagued us in 1985, and in 1993, when Angles was staged in New York, only now we know more about how our nightmares turn out. I am not yet over the delicious discomfort of this spectacle that is Angels in America.

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  • Billy Crudup as Harry Clarke at the Minetta Lane Theater

    Billy C
    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, is the ease with which we lose the actor for Harry Clarke, the inner extrovert of his character Philip Brugglestein. Talk about identity fluidity.

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  • Judy Collins at the Carlyle: “I’m the American Idol of 1957”

    Judy Collins2“I love you,” Judy Collins, a vision in white from mane to silvery toe, shouted out to Clive Davis, and to everyone present at the Café Carlyle for opening night of her enchanting show. She calls the evening “A Love Letter to Sondheim,” but her range of feeling, and vocals, encompasses all, even in her finale, “Send in the Clowns,” which she introduces with a most subtle political jab, “we know where the clowns really are.”

    Her own composition, “Maria,” a nod to West Side Story, reminds her, “This land was made by dreamers.” Of course her career spans lots of political moments, as she knew Dylan, Stephen Stills, and Leonard Cohen. When she sings his “Suzanne,” her crystalline voice fills the room, and out pour memories of his coming to her with material because he knew she could sell a song: “What can I tell you about Leonard Cohen?” Her friend brought him to her, saying, “His poetry is obscure. He’s never going to go anywhere.” But, says Judy, he was the smartest one. He died the morning of the election.

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  • John Pizzarelli’s Tribute to Nat King Cole at the Café Carlyle

    Pitsserelli
    For his run at the Café Carlyle this week, John Pizzarelli focuses on one of his inspirations, Nat King Cole, who would be 99. On guitar and vocals, John fronts an outstanding band of jazz musicians: Mike Karn on bass, Konrad Paszkudski on piano and “the sheriff” Andy Watson on drums for standards including “Paper Moon,” “Sweet Lorraine,” and “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” Yes, regulars wanted to know, where is Jessica? Well John’s wife and partner in music Jessica Molaskey was taking the night off. And how is Bucky? John’s father doesn’t make the rounds any more. Still, Bucky Pizzarelli is often the star of the lore and anecdotes by which this erudite and schmoozy performer laces together his not-to-be-missed show.

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  • Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs: Yelps Against the Empire

    Isleofdogs2
    At the Metropolitan Museum this week it was easy to forget that Wes Anderson’s brilliant new movie, Isle of Dogs, is animated. Oracle, a pint-sized pug, announces snow is on the way, and she was right. New York was bracing for another blizzard, its fourth of the season. That’s a tall blond woman, you think looking at the adorable Oracle situated as all the dogs are, on a junk heap; she’s voiced by Tilda Swinton. She and co-stars including Anderson regulars Jason Schwartzman who also worked on the script, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, and a young find, Koyu Rankin, who plays the lead boy, all joined the incredible art team for the movie’s grand premiere to create this Japanese themed confection of imperiled canines in stop-motion animation.

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  • Escape to Margaritaville: Last Mango in Paradise

    Escape to Margerretville
    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 of Jimmy Buffett’s greatest hits, you feel the grind for those who make it their life, dropouts like Tully (Paul Alexander Nolan) and his sidekick Brick (Eric Petersen), and Marley (Rema Webb) who owns the rundown resort where the guys serenade on guitar and tend bar, respectively. Serving the never ending ferry loads of vacationers sporting wide brim straw hats, Hawaiian shirts, and sandals, Tully for one has island fatigue when we meet him. Well, you know what they say about nirvana, it’s so boring. That is, until, and you can guess, a smart and snappy workaholic scientist named Rachel (Alison Luff) arrives with her best pal Tammy (Lisa Howard) who’s set for, not a fling but a flirt, on the eve of her wedding to the wrong guy.

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  • “David Bowie is . . .” at the Brooklyn Museum

    Bowie1At the Brooklyn Museum, “David Bowie is . . .” draws huge crowds, as it should. Dense with history, art, and music, the exhibition, a transplant from Europe where I first saw it in Berlin, is essential viewing. My memory piece from January 2016, written on the occasion of Bowie’s unexpected death, seems especially appropriate:

    BowieAAI was a huge Bowie fan back in the day, which made it strange that I did not recognize him when I met him backstage at The Bottom Line during a Steve Reich and his 18 Musicians concert. This light haired, well-groomed guy stood there in an argyle vest and pegged pants. Maybe I was clueless because he wasn’t wearing lipstick or glitter. The preppie guy and I talked about the lizard on top of the Lone Star Café at 13th Street and 5th Avenue very near home for me in the West Village. As we chatted, a room full of people leaned in. I could feel the heat of their bodies and curiosity. What were we talking about, rapt and oblivious to them?

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

    Arther 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 her father’s second and most famous wife, but told John Guare in a post-screening conversation at MoMA, this was really not discussed in their family life, except for the random anecdote. The daughter of Miller and his third wife, photographer Inge Morath, Rebecca Miller interviewed her father for the last 25 years of his life—he died in 2002– with Ellen Kuras filming, and then was in post-production for another eight, to make Arthur Miller: Writer, to air on HBO next week.

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  • Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, and Mathieu Amalric

    FrenchCinima
    Hollywood can learn a thing or two from the French, its film industry and joie de vivre. Mathieu Amalric, attending this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual popular series in collaboration with Unifrance, presented his film Barbara, homage to a chanteuse, not so famous anywhere but France. Best known to American film lovers for his acting in such films as Julian Schnabel’s Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and most recently Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts, featured in this year’s New York Film Festival, here Amalric directs. On hand with the film’s star, Jeanne Balibar, incidentally the mother of his two sons, Amalric apologized for Barbara’s lack of plot to an opening night audience that included John Waters and James Ivory, just back from L.A. after winning his Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Call Me by Your Name.

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

    Edward Albey
    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, The Zoo Story, Jerry (Paul Sparks), a seemingly aimless sort, provokes Peter in the park. As staged at the Signature Theater, under Lila Neugebauer’s fine direction, the production now so popular it was extended twice: Be ware of those who want to talk.

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  • Waiting for Alec Baldwin at the Guild Hall Gala

    AlecBaldwinGuildHallYes, G. E. Smith previewed Guild Hall’s first annual guitar masters festival, to take place in July, but that was not the only music at this year’s winter celebration of Guild Hall. Honored for her career in the visual arts, Audrey Flack, brought her History of Art band to The Rainbow Room to perform her tribute to Jackson Pollock on banjo and spoons. Her feminist take on the iconic painter dovetails with the current Me Too movement, and as she is quick to tell you, “he came on but nothing happened. He was way too drunk.”

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  • Ute Lemper: Rendezvous with Marlene at the Café Carlyle

    UtaLemper
    “Music, champagne, dancing—wonderful things that make you forget, until you find something to remember,” Ute Lemper laughs dramatically perched on a barstool close to the Café Carlyle’s grand piano, skin showing through her skirt’s slit. She chides the audience, “Stop looking at my legs. They are not that good. I just know what to do with them.” This was opening night of Ute Lemper's show at the Café Carlyle, “Rendezvous with Marlene,” this week, and many of her fans attended to hear the leggy redhead recount the history that forms this tribute performance to the legendary Marlene.

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  • Relevance at MCC Theater: A Case of Righteous Victimhood

    Relavence4
    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 spar on a panel moderated by the ambitious and opportunist Kelly (Molly Camp), Theresa must have been something in her day. In a hotel room with her agent (Richard Masur) we learn of a long ago affair, but now she’s hit a time when all attention is on the new improved version: smart, sexy and African-American. But shouldn’t feminists be on the same side, fighting against economic inequity and gender harassment? In Relevance, the old and the new do not even speak the same language.

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  • Athena Honors J. J. Abrams, Bridget Everett, Amma Asante, and Barbara Kopple

    Athena2018
    Dedicated to celebrating courageous and audacious women leaders, the Athena Film Festival captures the Zeitgeist. Under the auspices of Barnard College, Athena honored J. J. Abrams, presenting him an Athena Leading Man award, among its stellar women in film honorees this year, Amma Asante, Athena Breakthrough awardee Bridget Everett, and Barbara Kopple its Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award. In accepting, awardees are asked to speak about a woman influence, excluding mother. Introduced by Lena Dunham, Abrams spoke about his wife, Katie McGrath. You’ve gotta love a man who honors his wife. She and Abrams run his Bad Robot production company. She is also one of the forces in the Time’s Up movement; many at Athena wore the pin, the much talked about accessory at the Golden Globes. And then, defying the rules, he did thank his mother. What a mensch!

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

    Hello Dolly
    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 performance, we did not miss Bette, as good as she was. Feisty, petite and taking Dolly as a practical businesswoman, Peters fits the role like a fine kid glove, dancing, and oh that voice. She’s a Broadway star without the diva posture and best of all, she has chemistry galore with Victor Garber as the curmudgeonly Horace Vandergelder. These Broadway musical veterans look like they are having a wonderful time in old New York, and watching them, so are we.

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  • Screaming with Laurie Anderson at Guild Hall

    Lauri Anderson
    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 set for this summer. Among the many stories that kept Anderson riffing for over an hour, was the story of Ono’s primal scream following the election of Donald Trump. The audience complied and screamed with relish.

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  • John Lloyd Young: Heart to Heart at the Café Carlyle 

    John Loyd Young2
    A Valentine’s Day tradition at the Cafe Carlyle, John Lloyd Young’s dreamy tenor conjures romance better than a box of chocolates. 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. As he says about “Sherry” from Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio, before crooning “Sherrrrreee Baby,” some songs just follow you around. Ditto for his signature hits: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” from the same songwriting team, and “Jerry Fuller’s “Show and Tell.” Exuding confidence, this “Jersey Boy” leaves the stage allowing his superior band: Tommy Faragher on piano, along with a cool Bashiri Johnson on percussion, and a nice touch, Gokce Erem on violin, to show their chops. Not only a sideman, Tommy Faragher is also a writing partner.  The ensemble performed their “Slow Dawn Calling,” and  “Almost There.”

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  • Flight: Dreaming of Bruce Willis, Action Hero

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    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 Emanuel from journalist Caroline Brothers’ novel Hinterland. The brothers—Kabir (Nalini Chetty’s voice) and Aryan (Farshid Rokey)—composites of the author’s interviews with many young people on such a nightmare odyssey, appear as figures in diaramas as they rotate on a carousel; the viewer accompanies them across Europe as they encounter a not so nice “smiling man,” bird police, a freezer truck filled with hanging carcasses. The tale goes light as they invoke the name Bruce Willis for inspiration, and, when some rich American-Iranian tourists buy them food and new sneakers in Paris. But this story, told in Kabir’s 8-year old voice—well conceived with fine lighting and music—while enchanting, is no fairy tale.

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  • Liz Smith: Remembering a “Natural Blonde”

    Liz Smith2AAt 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 Rio Grande” in duet with Ann Richards, each one in full cowgirl regalia. Joni Evans told the stellar crowd—a who’s who of actors and show biz types– about getting Liz Smith to write her memoir, Natural Blonde, taking a seven-figure contract to actually get the gossip columnist to sit down. One speaker after another, from Barry Diller to Lesley Stahl to Holland Taylor and Bruce Willis, attested to the key ingredient of Liz Smith’s success: she was nice.

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  • Peter Hujar: Photographs of a Bygone Era at the Morgan Library & Museum

    Tennessy
    At an opening at the Morgan Library & Museum celebrating exhibitions of Peter Hujar’s photographs and Tennessee Williams’ memorabilia, a gentleman in a maroon jacket marveled that the Morgan, known for collections of old master drawings and manuscripts would now show photography, especially of the type created by Hujar. While Williams’ scripts and Playbills form the kind of closeted history right up the Morgan’s proverbial alley, well, Hujar’s work is something else. A decade older than Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, Hujar too documented the downtown demimonde, its denizen in drag. Hujar’s portraits—black & white– haunt, testament to the era before AIDS, a vibrant artistic world in the autumn of life.

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  • Oscar Nods: Sharing and Sparing the Love

    Oscars2018
    When the category of Best Picture swells to nine, you can be sure that your favorites will be covered. Throughout “the season,” prognosticators haggled –with one another and themselves– over the supremacy of The Shape of Water over Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Lady Bird over Get Out, Dunkirk over The Darkest Hour. An excellent solution is to award every one of them, and with the lineup announced today, every one of them gets the prize for showing up. But, it is safe to say, as one Academy member has reminded me year after year, this award is like no other. And so, I would like to think there is still mystery afoot for the winner, even though I am pretty sure of which are the real contenders on this awesome list, and which one will get the prize.

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  • Meditating with Naomi Watts at Saks Fifth Avenue

    Purist3Amidst the racks of multi-colored Missonis on Saks 4th floor, Shiva Rose led a meditation, a prelude to a panel featuring Naomi Watts, cover girl on the winter issue of Purist, the wellness themed brainchild of Cristina Cuomo. Just sitting with eyes closed, to a guided breathing contrasted with the commerce, bright lights and bustle of the store. And the event, to promote Onda, Watts’ all-natural beauty brand with her Australian friend Sarah Bryden-Brown and New Yorker Larissa Thompson, is also an attempt for Saks to offer something more in the shopping experience, in the age of online expedience.

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  • Michael Moore’s Latest Cause: One of Us: Jews in Revolt

    Jew
    Okay, Michael Moore is not Jewish, but he’s a menschy guy who cannot abide injustice. Co-hosting—with Fran Leibowitz— a post-screening party for Netflix’s documentary, One of Us, this week at the Waverly Inn, the Oscar winning documentarian and recent Broadway star could not restrain his indignation at the plight of Etty, an Orthodox Jewish woman in her ‘30’s whose children were taken away from her when she left her abusive husband. One of three ostracized by the Hasidic community, featured in this award-winning non-fiction film by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, Etty and her story especially seems to grab everyone by the throat. She is seen to be a loving mother. Clearly it is a crime against all human instinct and decency to take children away from such a mother. Leibowitz, who is Jewish, rightly pointed out that the current wave of extreme Judaism is not the Hasidism she knew growing up, but a more improvised, puzzling and arbitrary variant.

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  • Variety’s Salute to Service: Honoring Those Who Stand Up

    Jo Oliver3Whenever I see Lee and Bob Woodruff, I know the event is going to be serious, and I’m going to laugh. At Variety’s inaugural Salute to Service luncheon this week at Cipriani on Broadway, the brainchild of Gerry Byrne, vice chair of Penske Media and a Vietnam War veteran, Bob Woodruff got up to introduce Caroline Hirsch of Caroline’s, the city’s premier comedy club. Their relationship goes back to when she saw a documentary about him, a correspondent who was severely injured in the Iraq War. She was looking for a way to help those returning from combat and they, with Lee Woodruff and Andrew Fox, began their annual Stand Up for Heroes event. Soon Bruce Springsteen, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, and others, came to deliver the most outrageous monologues to benefit veterans and those who serve. What started at Town Hall, grew to the Beacon Theater, and now takes place at Madison Square Garden. It is a never-to-be-missed evening, with the most important attendees, our military and their families.

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