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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Let’s Dance: Anticipating the Chita Rivera Awards on Broadway

    “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than in a roomful of dancers,” Bebe Neuwirth quoted Chita Rivera, legendary Broadway dancer, Anita in the original “West Side Story,” the star of many other classics.

    At Bond 45, in a roomful of notable talent from this year’s great shows, Chita Rivera would have felt quite at home. The occasion: to announce the nominees for the Chita Rivera Award, honoring choreographers, dance ensembles, and featured dancers on stage and on screen. The Awards presentation is scheduled for May 19.

    Michael Musto introduced me to Donna McKechnie, the veteran dancer of the greatest dance musical of all time, “A Chorus Line,” now on the nominating committee. Is it cheeky to ask which shows you like the most? She whispered yes, it is, and noted, she liked “Just in Time” a lot. And then, on cue, its star, Jonathan Groff, descended the stair. His role as Bobby Darin is nominated for Outstanding Dancer in a Broadway show, as are the dancers for Best Ensemble in a Broadway show, and even a movie he’s in, A NICE INDIAN BOY, is nominated for Outstanding Choreography in a Feature Film. You’re the heartthrob, I venture, to wit he grins, “Imagine that.”

    For Outstanding Ensemble “Just in Time” competes with “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical,” “Death Becomes Her,” “Pirates! The Penzance Musical,” ‘Smash,” “Boop! The Musical,” and already a fan favorite, “Buena Vista Social Club.” Dancers Carlos Falu and Angelica Beliard enthused about their show: “Come see us backstage.” They are nominated for Outstanding Dancer in a Broadway show.

    Nominated choreographers, Christopher Gattelli from “Death Becomes Her” and Joshua Bergasse from “Smash” spoke to me about the challenges and joys of working on these productions. Gattelli had to work out the intricate Megan Hilty falling down a flight of stairs from the “Death” script, while Bergasse had to collaborate with the multi-TONY winning Susan Stroman, a choreographer/ director. He had created the dance for the hit television show “Smash,” and “Stro” in her role as the Broadway musical’s director merely sat on his shoulder for him to bounce ideas to. Happily, they were in sync.

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  • Susan Stroman: A Smash on Broadway, and at The Rainbow Room

    “It’s meta, it’s very funny, about a bunch of creatives trying to put on a musical about Marilyn Monroe,” said choreographer/ director/ theater legend Susan Stroman about her current Broadway musical, “Smash.” “It’s really about what it takes to create something—whether it’s a musical or something in life.”

    That’s the energy Stro –as she’s called– brings to projects. And, that’s what she brought as host to this year’s Guild Hall gala at The Rainbow Room last week, now in her new role as President of the Academy of the Arts. Gracious—and relieved– after a decade on the job, painter Eric Fishl passed the reins: “I’m pleased to be shown the door.”

    This annual gala, always a love-fest, was particularly mushy about “Stro.” Guests either worked with her, or wanted to. Seth Rudetsky, Tony Yazbeck, and Debra Monk collaborated with Stro for one musical or another agreed she was super prepared—you always felt like you were in good hands; super talented, she’s the smartest person in the room. So, in tribute to her, the entertainment was through-the-proverbial-roof: Yazbeck’s tap, Monk’s sassy riff with a yellow boa (not at all like the dour sour-puss she plays in HBO’s “The Gilded Age”), topped by Rudetsky’s magnificent piano for “Rhapsody in Blue.”

    In attendance: Florence Fabricant who no doubt made deft menu selections: maybe the seared beef tenderloin or slow-baked Alaskan King salmon and warm chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. Artists April Gornik, Toni Ross, Alice Aycock, Ross Bleckner, Julian Schnabel joined the theater crowd: producer Daryl Roth, Victor Garber, Candace Bushnell, and Peter Gallagher who starred in “Left on Tenth” earlier this year; Stro directed this rom-com theater piece based on Delia Ephron’s memoir about loss, cancer, and happy endings; Gallagher played the dreamy, supportive boyfriend.

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  • George Clooney Channels Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck on Broadway

    How timely is a stage adaptation George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s 2005 movie Good Night and Good Luck, set in the era of Joseph McCarthy and The Red Scare? Just ask the media crowd attending the play’s opening at the Winter Garden Theater last week: Stephanie Ruhle, Lawrence O’Donnell, Gayle King, George Stephanopoulos, even Drew Barrymore among them. Rachel Maddow opined about current events, “We’re f—ked!”

    The newsroom drama, when CBS was broadcasting from their studios in the deep recesses of Grand Central Station, portrays broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow as a hero in a potent historic time. Or was he simply doing the job of reporting the truth?

    Cool, chain-smoking, Murrow interviewed celebrities and politicians. Last year Bradley Cooper used some archival footage to recreate Murrow’s interview with Leonard Bernstein in MAESTRO. In this play, cool, chain-smoking Clooney nails it, and in the trend of eye-popping video onstage, he includes archival footage of Murrow’s 1954 contretemps with McCarthy, a landmark moment which bared his House UnAmerican Activities Committee’s witch hunt in condemning would-be, trumped up Communist sympathizers, wrecking many lives. Bringing McCarthy down was a great reminder of the power of dedicated journalism.

    What now? That was on the minds of many who made their way to the New York Public Library for a swank afterparty: Robert Klein, Richard Kind, Michael J. Fox, and Jennifer Lopez who swept through the packed lobby in a white opera coat with long train; taking seriously the black and white dress code, she was an attention-grabbing vision. Yet most exultant were the producers who hit theater gold: a sold-out run at record prices.

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  • Kieran Culkin in Glengarry Glen Ross: Looking for David Mamet 

    This year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner Kieran Culkin can banter with the best of them, in this case, the real estate winners and losers of David Mamet’s now classic “Glengarry Glen Ross.” A natural choice to play Richard Roma, Culkin fast talked his way through A REAL PAIN, as the titular “real pain,” and held his own among the Roy siblings in HBO’s “Succession.” In the current revival at the refurbished Palace Theater, he’s up against Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Michael McKean; a hot shot salesman, he paces the poetry, Mamet’s language with his own evident neurotic verbal tics.

    At the afterparty at Tao Downtown, Bob Odenkirk said this was his Broadway debut. When I asked, is Mamet here tonight? No. Did Mamet see it? He replied, Yes, he liked it a lot. Always a great vehicle for testosterone driven actors, I could imagine all who attended opening night this week wishing to have a crack at the drama: F. Murray Abraham, Anthony Edwards, David Schwimmer, among them. Bobby Cannavale played Richard Roma in a revival. Others: Linda Emond, Al Franken, Lorne Michaels, Ansel Elgort were on hand.

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  • Pamela Anderson at the NYWFT Muse Awards: Keeping It Real

    Voluptuous as “Baywatch” pinup, Pamela Anderson was always a muse. Just ask Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat! But this year, specifically, she is honored by New York Women in Film and Television for her work in THE LAST SHOWGIRL. At the annual Muse Awards luncheon at Cipriani 42nd Street she greeted the over 600 guests graciously and plain-faced, an ageless beauty without the usual cosmetic accoutrements we’ve come expect of the famed and glamorous, particularly if they are sex symbols as well. Guess what? She’s all the more glamorous natural, posing on the press line in a somber tan, loose-fitting pants suit. An advocate of plant-based cooking, an earnest, healthy approach to life has become her brand.

    Yes! There were veggies on the table, a baby artichoke salad with shaved parmesan, but braised boneless short ribs were the entrée of the day. Smashed potatoes had clout while messages of inclusion and empowerment were the focus of many a speech, moved forward by host Nancy Giles’ jokes about our political scene: “Therapy and medication get me by.” The humor was welcome. Speakers—among them Anderson’s fellow honorees Marissa Bode, Lisa Cortes, Amy Entelis, Versha Sharma, and producer Celia Costas, landed on the event’s theme of “Metamorphosis,” invoking Franz Kafka and Ovid, but mainly relating to their own transformative processes of becoming who they are, thanking ancestors, and encouraging women to believe in themselves.

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  • Robert DeNiro in The Alto Knights: Holding Court in a Room of Writers

    Based on a true story, THE ALTO KNIGHTS stars Robert DeNiro in two roles: best frenemies Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. Childhood pals, they hung out in The Alto Knights social club. Dapper, refined for a mobster, Costello wants out of “the business.” Scruffy and rude, Genovese wants in—that is, to reclaim his head-of-the-family position he had prior to leaving the country to beat a jail term. Costello hopes to retire with his wife, Bobbie, —Debra Messing, superb as we have never before seen her, –as Genovese contends with his wife, Anna, —Kathrine Narducci, out-of-control-good–waging a legal battle with her husband over his daily theft of her nightclub take, even as she screams professing her love for him. Married to these women, playing by mafia rules with the men, DeNiro gives a tour de force performance, his “Costello” hinting at a saintly Corleone, and his crazed “Genovese” channeling Joe Pesce.

    You cannot make this stuff up, but in Nicholas Pileggi’s hands, you can supply the words, flesh out a drama perfect for the fine direction of Barry Levinson and Irwin Winkler’s expert, detailed production, a script, a part of his book Wiseguys, for these classic mob movie-makers. This is the year’s first great old-school entertainment, a nostalgia trip and high bar for films to follow.

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  • The Jonathan Larson Project: His Words, His Music Downtown

    A new musical revue, The Jonathan Larson Project, at the Orpheum Theater on Second Avenue is proof of a simple fact: there’s never enough Jonathan Larson. Sure, opening night was a fan fest, with many having sampled the work the writer/ composer left behind after his truly untimely death on the eve of his Rent’s downtown debut. Now assembled for its own entertaining evening, conceived by Jennifer Ashley Tepper, his compositions remind us all of his awesome talent.

    “Not a word has been changed,” says the program. His lyrics remain topical, whimsical, pure joy. A standout was Lauren Marcus’ hilarious romp around the stage, hose in hand for “Hosing the Furniture.” Larson had contributed the song for a 1989 revue about the 1939 World’s Fair, imagining the future. According to the notes, Larson knew Stephen Sondheim would be there at the premiere. Working hard, he won the Stephen Sondheim Award. The number comes close to a forgotten American musical genre, the art song. Silly and fun, it hearkens back to an era, to a lyric like Paul Bowles’ “the best part of a picnic are the napkins.”

    Larson’s “Casual Sex, Pizza, and Beer” had been written on “a junky spinet piano with missing keys that he found on the street and rolled into his first apartment.” In performance, the ensemble featuring Adam Chanler-Berat, Taylor Iman Jones, Andy Mientus, Jason Tam, and Marcus makes the song a youthful, raucous anthem. Echoes of Rent abound. Bittersweet hints of the show’s various permutations, making it to Broadway and beyond were noted, all limned in the hit 2021 movie, “Tick Tick . . . Boom” with Andrew Garfield as Larson.

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  • Adrien Brody at the Oscars: Don’t Let Hate Go Unchecked

    Hollywood sent a message at this year’s Oscars. Winning Best Actor for his role in THE BRUTALIST, his second for this prize, Adrien Brody hoped for a healthier, happier, more inclusive world: “Don’t let hate go unchecked.” That’s not a small ask. From his first win for THE PIANIST in 2002, the actor whose mother, the superb Village Voice photographer Sylvia Plachy emigrated from Hungary in the mid-sixties, the actor with a war-torn look has played parts hewing close to this background. He has even said he could hear his grandfather, as he created the accent for this role, reminding everyone of America’s highest ideals even as his partner, Georgina Chapman had to remind him to thank his mother.

    The Palestinian/ Israeli team that made Best Documentary winner NO OTHER LAND, showed how their collaboration as filmmakers cut through the senseless political practices in a town in the West Bank, policies that brought violence and horror to communities in Israel and Gaza. The filmmakers asserted that our government’s current response is not helping to bring peace.

    Zoe Saldana was the first American-born Oscar winner whose history goes back to the Dominican Republic. Honored with many awards on her way up to the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in EMILIA PEREZ, Saldana’s win could not have been easy for her co-star Karla Sofia Gascon, shunned for hate-speech, racist comments made online. For sure, that hurt the Netflix movie’s chances for Best Picture.

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  • White Lotus in Rajasthan: Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright 

    The fictive White Lotus resort in Thailand, the locus of Mike White’s mega HBO series in its third season, has nothing on the Six Senses wellness retreats in India. Seeing the staff line up to greet guests arriving by boat in episode one recalled entrée into the extraordinarily fabulously fashioned Six Senses Fort Barwara in Rajasthan—modeled after Marrakech’s La Mamounia. On a recent trip, we were treated to a cascade of bright red rose petals on a recent visit, by a staff lining up for this awesome welcome.

    True, the tiger safari is a great lure. Tourists often book multiple excursions in a given day a year in advance, just in case Charger, the alpha male, feels like a stroll in this nearby preserved habitat also occupied by crocodiles, monkeys, mongooses, and spotted deer, the favored delectable dinner for tigers. Snagging a last-minute reservation, we careened around road curves in our open-air jeep, assigned to the park’s Zone 4, hoping to catch a glimpse. Not only did Charger make the scene, so too did one of his lady friends and their three cubs. We had won the safari lottery.

    But just in case, the consolation prize was none too shabby: hanging in a resort featuring prana yoga, sound meditation, classes in pottery and herbal cures—plus pool, sauna, steam, and massage. If this fort had been home to kings, we were next in line.

    Climbing up the 720 steps to a white hilltop temple, we encountered a wedding party. Young boys asked to take selfies with us, and the women wrapped in festive red, green, blue saris pulled us into dance. Rose petals may be a metaphor for a valentine’s love, or for the kind of connection that has no price.

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  • Grand Central Terminal: Always in Vogue 

    A fashion crowd crammed into the Campbell Bar at Grand Central station this week, to celebrate Consuelo Vanderbilt Costin, covergirl of Vogue Magazine. For most of us, the issue was unreadable, in Czech, but that didn’t matter. Air kissing is universal, after all. So is the greeting, “You look great.” That applied to everyone in the room but mostly to the men in brocade jackets. And to socialite Jean Shafiroff clad in a blue straight skirt suit and booties. She usually wears a wide skirt ball gown. But with impending snow, no room for flare.

    The highlight of the evening was a grand tour of the inner Grand Central station. Terminal architect Mark Saulnier led the way through the catacombs past David Rockwell chairs, so often the seat of the homeless, they are now hidden away. Looking down at the main floor, people scurrying looked like ants, and we could appreciate the central information booth had a glass top. Saulnier pointed out the a secret echo chamber outside the iconic Oyster Bar, and how the marble in front of the original ticket windows sagged with use. Sometimes when it rains, pools form, he said. All detail was remarkable, even the inner staircases with wrought iron acorns. A move is underway to restore some peeling paint, the price tag astronomical, but worth it.

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  • Adrien Brody at the 90th New York Film Critics Circle Dinner: Sitting Shiva

    The New York Film Critics Circle celebrated its 90th year this week, at TAO Downtown. Member Rex Reed celebrated his 50th year with the group. Many spoke of the fires in LA. Adrien Brody, reflecting on TAO’s décor with its giant statue mistaken for Buddha, pointed out, that’s Shiva the destroyer before becoming emotional, and that’s before the girls were swooning in the bathroom: Robert Pattison had shown up for Brady Corbet’s Best Picture presentation for THE BRUTALIST.

    As celebrations go, this one was cerebral, not raucous which had some attendees concerned. And then there were the outliers: Claire Danes was wildly animated as she introduced Kieran Culkin for his Best Supporting Actor award, the real pain in A REAL PAIN. They had starred together in IGBY GOES DOWN as naughty teens but now, she pointed out, they each have kids. “Only you can be you,” she said gesticulating madly. To wit he got up to say, “You are so kind, I wish I had been listening.”

    Jim Jarmusch presented Best Screenplay to Sean Baker for ANORA who liked the snow falling in the last scene so much he proclaimed, “Hats off to the falling snow.” But you cannot admire the deftly constructed screenplay without admiring the sex. Fawned Jarmusch, “I loved the sex in the film: transactional, silly, showing the variety of what that is. He had heard that Baker demonstrated some scenes coupling with his wife. And Sean Baker fawned back, noting that when he finished film school at NYU he only wanted to be Jim Jarmusch. “I used screen grabs from NIGHT ON EARTH. All that matters is heart, COFFEE AND CIGARETTES.”

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  • L. A. Fires and Benjamin Netanyahu in The Bibi Files: How High the Flames?

    At a recent post-screening Q&A, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell stopped short in his questions for The Bibi Files producer Alex Gibney and director Alexis Bloom, to take a call from his daughter, excusing himself by explaining that she was in the evacuation area of Los Angeles, trying to discern which art to rescue from the fires raging there. Huh? What fire? The wildfires were just starting as big news. Meantime, the documentary, featuring a key interview with Benjamin Netanyahu, had reached its own heat with the realization that the Israeli prime minister had actually allowed funding Hamas through Qatar. To stay in power, to avert jail for corruption, he saw his chance to fuel chaos. Wanting to keep his enemies closer, as he boasted to his interrogators in the secret footage shown in the film, he would control the violence, allowing Hamas to set the fires as he contained the height of the flames.

    October 7 was a direct result. The Bibi Files reveals much through interviews conducted by police in Netanyahu’s office with a map of the Middle East in the background. Investigated for extravagant gifts of champagne, cigars, and jewelry, the prime minister maintains he is the victim of a witch hunt. He had learned from visiting world leaders during his many terms in office, life in Israel, even at the top, is an austere business.

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  • Michael Moore: Pennebaker Career Achievement Award at Hamptons DocFest: Unleashed and Undeterred

    Even Covid could not keep Michael Moore back. Of course, everyone at Hamptons DocFest was disappointed the irascible filmmaker could not make the scene for his Pennebaker Career Achievement Award—named for D. A. Pennebaker and presented by Chris Hegedus–, but show up he did, larger than life on Zoom. “Now everyone can see I really have hair,” he said, with a head shake. Usually tamed under a baseball cap, his ample head of hair was making a rare, tousled appearance. Hamptons DocFest would be screening his now classic ROGER & ME, his 1989 confrontational view of GM outsourcing their production from his hometown Flint, Michigan. All a young Moore wanted was to take CEO Roger Smith on a roadtrip around Flint to show him the impact of his business decision. His thwarted attempts are satiric, a sad laugh at his America—and ours– on the decline. How timely!

    The festival, well underway in Sag Harbor, had screened UNION the day before, a look at Amazon and the ongoing protests of workers, underpaid and overworked. Fulfillment indeed! Now on the Oscar docs shortlist for Best Documentary, the film makes you want to say, I thought slavery was ended in America. Think again. Think of the history of unions in America, democracy writ large. Where are you, Jeff Bezos? Attention must be paid!

    Between DOCNYC and Hamptons Doc Fest with the inevitable overlap of non-fiction films, truly stellar work emerged: BLUE ROAD: The Edna O’Brien Story opened DOCNYC. Sinead O’Shea’s doc illuminates the transgressive sexual boldness of the Irish writer. Jill Campbell’s BEYOND THE GAZE: Jule Campbell’s Swimsuit Issue, an inside glimpse into the woman who made the Sports Illustrated’s most financially successful and most anticipated magazine of the year.

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  • RaMell Ross’ The Nickel Boys: Re-Viewing Racial Injustice

    Harrowing tales of black boys and men during the Jim Crow era are the meat and potatoes of Pulitzer Prize winning author Colson Whitehead’s fiction. When filmmaker RaMell Ross, who made the acclaimed 2018 documentary “Hale County, This Morning, This Evening,” was given an advanced reading copy of Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, he was working on an exhibition in New Orleans on the history of the American South and its imprint on the Black soul. His installation and the novel, about two boys in a barbaric reform school serving time for arbitrary crimes—essentially because they were Black and vulnerable– seemed to put the filmmaker on a thematic path toward his exploration of Black identity.

    The result is an edgy film, arty in the best sense. Innovative, the movie takes a novelistic approach to visual storytelling. About a real-life reform school, the fictive Nickel Academy, is grim –and even grimmer for its Black population. Punishment, perhaps a turn on a torture device meted out by Spencer (Hamish Linklater) may also extend to murder and burial in an unmarked grave. Given the disquieting details, as viewer, you may find yourself looking up at a face, the sky, the branches of an orange tree, the interior of a dorm or cafeteria from an unexpected angle, and wonder, how did they get that shot?

    At the premiere screening, on the New York Film Festival’s opening night, Ross spoke about not wanting to overburden the actors with concepts but to have them experience each other. He fitted the actors with camera rigs literally strapped on. In more traditional filming, you always assume the camera is there. With the rig on, actors have always to be more aware. Daveed Diggs spoke about wearing the heavy rig all day for fear of losing perspective. Fred Hechinger observed that actors and cameramen seemed to exchange roles in the filmmaking. The result is as close as I’ve ever seen to a novel-to-film adaptation that translates technique as well as story. Already nominated for top awards, RaMell Ross and “The Nickel Boys” are high on the lists predicting Best Director/ Best Film Oscar nods.

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  • Sebastian Stan, Timothee Chalamet, Adrien Brody: Among Leading Men at the Gotham Awards 2024

    Old Hollywood likes their leading men handsome and debonair—think Cary Grant, Rock Hudson—but with this year’s Gotham selection of A DIFFERENT MAN for the top prize, Best Feature, a new look grabs at your attention. You have to love an awards season that starts with a celebration of –well, difference. A hit at the New Director/ New Films series, the film stars a unique protagonist, a man not without his charms, but no traditional heart throb; with a face a Cubist portraitist would love, he becomes all the rage. The film choice is a reminder that no matter how smart, suave, and elegant this start to the awards season, the Gothams still keep a discerning eye on indies.

    That said, the biggest stars were in the room, eh, the cavernous Cipriani Wall Street, mainly as presenters, a great show of support; the stars know this is the night for great food and fun. A-listers: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rachel Brosnahan, Aubrey Plaza, Jessica Chastain, and Oscar Isaac were among the presenters, some nominated for their performances: Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, Saoirse Ronan, among them, but these did not take home the prize. Gender mixed, the Gothams gave Coleman Domingo Outstanding Lead Performance and Clarence Maclin Outstanding Supporting Performance for their respective roles in SING SING.

    Highlights for me included James Mangold and Timothee Chalamet accepting the Visionary Award for A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, the new Bob Dylan movie. Chalamet does not imitate Dylan so much as make the songs his own. Elle Fanning cheered her director and co-star on. She made her Broadway debut this year in Appropriate and said she enjoyed the challenges of theater, especially working with Sarah Paulson. We first met “Timmy” at the Hamptons International Film Festival. He was in a group of “Rising Stars.” I think his star has risen.

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  • Hollywood Film Mavens Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, and Doug Liman Praise Gaucho Gaucho: Reinventing Documentary

    Documentary filmmakers Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck had a shoutout of praise for their 2022 film, THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS –from Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks. These veteran filmmakers, the FORREST GUMP team, are not the only fans. For their latest doc, GAUCHO GAUCHO, about Argentinian cowboys, making the rounds of film festivals to great acclaim, director/ producer Doug Liman, another fan known for popular films such as EDGE OF TOMORROW, starring Tom Cruise, hosted a private screening of excerpts in his downtown Manhattan apartment, followed by a Q&A with Michael Dweck. On the face of it, the filmmakers could not be more different. The evening became a master class in film art.

    Shot in black & white, GAUCHO GAUCHO, takes place in a hilly landscape, featuring a community close to nature, far from our tech world. In one clip, a still mound moves. A horse rises from rest, a man on top of it—all in one long take. The filmmakers knew this “horse whisperer” often slept on his animal, and simply filmed it—like a Warholian meditation. The Hollywood filmmakers appreciate how challenging such a one-shot scene can be. No tricks, cut-aways, or B-roll–just the camera recording what takes place, taking its time. The audience at Liman’s comprised of documentary filmmakers all know that even non-fiction filmmaking relies on crafting. Without the customary “script,” Kershaw and Dweck get as close to the real moment as one can get with thrilling results.

    Prior to their recent screening at DOCNYC, I had a chance to speak to them on Zoom. Onto the next project, they were filming in Burgundy, in France’s wine country, yet another off the grid community—their specialty. While the doc team were honored to be lauded by Zemeckis and Hanks, and to meet Liman and be friends, as they said, they work on a smaller canvas. “We have the luxury of time to create the film we want to make,” said Dweck.

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  • Tammy Faye: Finding Religion on Broadway

    Before becoming the pioneering televangelist power couple, Jim Bakker and his enterprising wife Tammy Faye Bakker sold God using puppets out of the back seat of a car, creating an industry and an empire. Religion, as we know, is big business. Limning their rise—and fall– in fame and fortune, the new Elton John musical, Tammy Faye, puts them onstage at the newly refurbished Palace Theater, set against a wall of television monitors. The usual ministry of heavy-weights—Billy Graham (Mark Evans), Jimmy Swaggart (Ian Lassiter), Pat Robertson (Andy Taylor), Jerry Falwell (Michael Cerveris)– pop up like the stars on Hollywood Squares. The story doesn’t get more American than this.

    Except this is Broadway, and it’s Tammy Faye whose arc we follow. Before feminism was a thing, she master-minded much of the God-selling program. A wronged woman once Jim strayed with Jessica Hahn (Alana Pollard), Tammy Faye went off her own rails, spending excessively, downing drugs in her own tearfully sad journey–all to great spectacle; she’s accompanied by Elton John’s tunes—“He’s Inside Me,” “Look How Far We’ve Fallen,” “If You Came to See Me Cry,” “See You in Heaven”–with Jake Shears’ lyrics, book by James Graham, under Rupert Goold’s direction.

    Opening night had Extravaganza written all over in sequins and glitz, from Jake Shears’ multicolored track suit to Elton John’s pearls. A Tammy Faye look-alike played the red carpet, batting winged eyelashes. We met Tammy Faye’s son, Jay Bakker, and his BFF Jeanette at the Tavern on the Green afterparty. No, he doesn’t see his dad, who seems to be in hiding. The great Christian Borle is in his glory portraying a hammy Jim Bakker. Jay Bakker was thrilled to hear Katie Brayben portraying his mom, and meet Michael Stipe who told Jay that when he started out recording in a studio, he was on the same microphone as Tammy Faye, a big moment for the REM singer/ lyricist. Meantime, young Jay said he was listening to “Losing My Religion.”

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  • Remembering Paul Morrissey 

    From the edgy look of his movies—FLESH, TRASH, HEAT, to name a few–you would never think of Paul Morrissey as deeply religious. With his friend and partner Andy Warhol, a fellow Catholic, he made art, collaborating on many cinema-verite films and other ventures including the purchase of cliff-high acreage in Montauk overlooking the Atlantic.

    The legendary Eothen had on it a number of cottages—more like rustic Catskill bungalows—where visitors could reside. Realtor Linda Stein who had brokered the deal stayed for a summer with Morrissey insisting that she shut lights when rooms were not in use. Not quite a conservationist, he was old school frugal and utilities out east are not cheap. Notables passed through: dutchesses, Kennedy’s and Radziwill’s, artists, musicians such as Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones. Curmudgeonly and loving, Paul Morrissey was the consummate host.

    Friends and family celebrated him at his funeral this week hosted by his adoring nieces. Gerard Malanga, who had introduced Morrissey to Warhol in 1965, sent a poem. With speakers: the casting director Leonard Finger and music manager Danny Fields, much was made of Morrissey’s contradictions to a knowing crowd including Geraldine Smith and Susan Blond. A promoter of The Velvet Underground, Morrissey nevertheless cautioned against drug use. Compelled to sell the property long after Warhol died in 1987, he bought three units in the newly desirable trailer park nearby, just before the market surged for these waterfront residences now beached on cement foundations in rows. One for himself, the others for visiting family.

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  • Luca Guadagnino’s Queer at the New York Film Festival: Daniel Craig Looking for Love

    The novels of William S. Burroughs may be difficult to adapt—just ask David Cronenberg—but in the able imagination of Luca Guadagnino, the transformation of Queer to film is a triumph. The packed audience at the recent Alice Tully Hall premiere, a high point at this year’s New York Film Festival, went wild as the creative team took the stage for the post-screening Q&A. And it is not only because the movie stars Daniel Craig. Guadagnino explained how as a boy in Palermo, he picked up the Burroughs work and always wanted to make this film. While working on Challengers from screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes’ script, he gifted him the book one day and said “Read this tonight.”

    The text of Queer, unlike say, Burroughs’ most famous Naked Lunch, has a linear thread so a narrative could be made of the love story between William Lee and a younger Eugene Allerton (a formidable Drew Starkey). Yes, there’s plenty of man-on-man sex—minus the testosterone. How else can you explain the tenderness? Prowling Mexico City looking for a connection, Lee has a tryst or two, essential to the vision of what homosexuality meant in the midcentury—achy, twitchy, awkward, and alone, Craig plays Lee’s vulnerability.

    Of course, there are drugs involved. Costume designer J. W. Anderson spoke of dressing Lee in cool whites when the substance of choice was cocaine to the colors for heroin use. A funny moment comes when a doctor asks the sick Lee, are you addicted to opiates? Cut into chapters, Queer proceeds to South America as Lee looks to explore “telepathy;” Lee invites Allerton to travel with him in search of yage. The jungle scenes feature an unrecognizable Lesley Manville as shaman—the one significant woman in this movie, a transformation from the male Dr. Cotter of the book.

    Another significant change: insisting that Queer did not have an ending, Guadagnino and Kuritzkes supply one, bringing closure to their plot. As Guadagnino put it, the novel opens a door and then closes it. Guadagnino proposed, “What if we went through that door?”

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  • Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher in Left on Tenth:  A Rom-Com on Broadway

    Forget “meet-cute,” the winning rom-com trope that made writer Delia Ephron’s career. In Left on Tenth, Ephron’s play based on her memoir at the James Earl Jones Theater about finding love after her husband died, we get the more powerful “Bechert.” As Peter Gallagher, in the role of Peter explains, it is Yiddish for fated, –much more cosmic and explosive. That’s how he defines finding love with Delia, Julianna Margulies of ER fame in her Broadway debut, after decades, marriages, and emails. This is more than You’ve Got Mail. What could go wrong?

    Well, as fate would have it, Delia’s watching her blood count after losing her older sister, writer, director Nora Ephron to leukemia. Following many reassuring doctor visits, Delia’s told, it’s not looking so good today. Delia in disbelief exclaims, But I’m falling in love.

    Peter Gallagher, among his many theater credits including Guys and Dolls, is perfect in a lover role he nailed as Jane Fonda’s younger man in Grace & Frankie. Here, as Peter, he helps Delia through the arduous ordeal of cancer. We should all have such a handsome and handy lover helping us through hard life passages. Still, however based on true events, this is a rom-com in high Broadway form, and with Stro directing (that’s Susan Stroman to you), Left on Tenth features dancing. Margulies does a little tap, a little soft shoe, a happy dance. And some old school ballroom dips have the audience kvelling.

    And laughing. When Delia compliments the doctor’s shoes, she says she got them ages ago at a sale at Barney’s. The audience lets out a collective sigh. Barney’s! The name evokes unspeakable loss. Forget cancer! The memory of a beloved department store has us where it hurts, the very heart of elite New York City shopping. This play knows its people! Does this spontaneous expression of deep loss happen every night?

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  • Hillary Clinton, Producer at the Hamptons International Film Festival: Speaking Out on Women’s Health

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    Hillary Clinton     and Chelsea Clinton led the list of producers of Zurawski v Texas, a documentary by Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault. After screening in the five states where abortion is on the ballot, this essential documentary is now in a theater near you, following an impassioned event at the recent Hamptons International Film Festival.

    “This means you, New York,” the women shouted from the stage at the East Hampton Middle School in early October, where the packed audience stood to cheer the film team: the directors, producers Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, and a brave and hardworking legal team from the Center for Reproductive Rights who work with women suing Texas over its Draconian anti-abortion laws. The film is an unflinching look at women who have had to endure barbaric cruelty when some basic medical care was all that was needed to avert trauma and in the state of Georgia, now two deaths. What the women want is a clarification of the language—when exactly, under the new Dobbs decision—is it legal for a doctor to perform procedures on women at risk? What is a “medical exception?”

    As it stands, the medical community is scared. Doctors face fines and imprisonment. In one harrowing case, a woman is made to bring a pregnancy to term even knowing the baby had a zero chance to live. Calling her Halo, the parents watched her die in her four hours of life. The mother was so traumatized, she subsequently had her tubes tied.

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  • Hamptons Journal: McArthur Binions at the Peter Marino Foundation, the LongHouse Gala, and Daniel Humm at Guild Hall

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    The work is detailed and geographic, tonal, you might say, like bop graffiti on brick in a Detroit abandoned building. The artist, McArthur Binions, in fact, comes from Detroit but spent a lot of time in New York meeting Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis, moving on to Chicago where he now lives and works. Artist Rachid Johnson was his student, so favored that he became part of the family, taking care of the kids. At a recent "Brunch with Bob," at the Peter Marino Foundation, he told a packed crowd awed by Binions' art, Binions refused to sell his work at the time, proclaiming it would be worth a lot someday. And Johnson who knew him only in that school setting as his teacher, thought, "This guy is crazy." Yeah, as the saying goes, crazy like a fox. This was the talk's great takeaway.

    In the foundation gardens for brunch, Prudence Fairweather asked McArthur Binions if he had ever met her husband, John Chamberlain. Oh yes, that was at the Fanelli Bar. He had a large vial of cocaine. I ask, did he share? "Yes he did. It was very good."

    A who’s who of artists show up at the LongHouse gala every year. The evening, honoring Kenny Scharf and Tony Bechara, is always an homage to Jack Lenor Larsen, its founder, and a celebration for nature enthusiasts who love the combo of gorgeously curated outdoor art in the leafy setting: Robert Wilson, Ned Smyth, Joan Semel, mingling among many others. The much-awarded “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” costumer Donna Sakowska said she’s been living in Paris developing a ballet series called “Etoile” with the Palladinos.

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  • Bob Balaban Directs Blythe Danner, Edie Falco, Alec Baldwin for 2024: The Pursuit of Happiness at Guild Hall

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    Begging the question: is it too soon to laugh about the pandemic year, 2020, a collection of short plays by masterful playwrights, did just that in a one-nighter at Guild Hall, directed by Bob Balaban. That was July 2021. Now for July 2024, as we ponder where we are in an arguably post-pandemic year, Balaban assembled a collection of short plays to consider “The Pursuit of Happiness” starring Alec Baldwin, Edie Falco, Blythe Danner, Jim Bracchitta, Steven Wallem, and Richard Kind.

    Baldwin kicked off the staged reading with “Mr. Happiness” by David Mamet, a Dear Abby meets Miss Lonelyhearts, an advice guru which he performed with a stagy voice only Alec Baldwin could muster. Blythe Danner, for a Neil la Bute piece from his “10 x 10 Monologues,” about a woman of a certain age contemplating her current plan to go off for a weekend with a handsome stranger, said after in Guild Hall’s green room, that she merely read it straight, not trying to act at all. The result was so wistful and moving that even this playwright’s words which are often not respectful to women came off as a true insight into the female psyche.

    Lynn Grossman’s play “The Keepsake” took on the subject of memory and its lapses during the COVID era. As performed by Richard Kthis was the longest and most direct evocation of the virus and its aftermath, still uncharted. Grossman said she wrote the play with Richard Kind in mind as perfect to perform its manic ins and outs of memory and ending with a recitation of a Shakespeare sonnet.

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  • Remembering Audrey Flack

    Audrea FlackAt the end of Audrey Flack’s new memoir, With Darkness Came Stars, published when she was 92, she takes stock of a life well lived:

    I am lucky that my mind remains clear and sharp, filled with ideas for new art. The creative spirit is running strong and I continue to work.

    These words, and the fact that Flack’s mother lived to 100, gave the impression that she would always be there, encouraging artists of every kind, dispensing wisdom on every subject, exuding enthusiasm in her belief that art can heal. Her recent death at age 93 from a torn aorta was a great shock.

    A noted pioneering photorealist, abstract expressionist, and sculptor, she was controversial in every genre. As a photorealist, her work featured lipsticks, mirrors, beads shining bright as the chrome veneers of the men’s autos. Flack’s very subjects, Marilyn Monroe to ç1 as Cleopatra, to teary eyed macarenas, were seen as secondary to the men’s “reflections on metal surfaces.” Excluded from a show, she knew women were being written out of the history of art. Her dealer Ivan Karp told her flat out: “Paint cars and trucks and I’ll make you famous.”

    Flack went her own way. Airbrush was a no-no but she experimented anyway, and favored figuration when abstract expressionism was all the rage. Against the feminist grain, her bejeweled goddess statues were deemed kitsch, totally out of phase. Flack observed the art world from the inside: And she told her stories in the memoir and through her songs written for her “History of Art” bands. She played the banjo.

    Jackson Pollock was a favorite subject, but not the only one. Often drunk, the male artists come off as boorish; the women subservient, and catty, always second place. Flack opines on who’s a feminist (herself) and who is not (Elaine DeKooning and Alice Neel) and tells juicy stories describing the artists’ loft scene, galleries and gallerists, liaisons. In one, she’s instrumental in introducing Jackson Pollock to Ruth Kligman, an aspiring artist, instructing the voluptuous young woman to the far seat at the Cedar Tavern’s bar.

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  • Alec Baldwin Returns to East Hampton for Summerdocs: Skywalkers: A Love Story

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    Even more than meeting any Hollywood star, Alec Baldwin loves documentarians, he said this week, after a screening of Skywalkers: A Love Story, the first film screened at the newly refurbished Guild Hall and the first of the series, Summerdocs. The elite doc series, a cornerstone of HamptonsFilm programming, founded by Artistic Director David Nugent and Chairman Emeritus Baldwin, has since its inception showcased crowd-pleasing, feature-length nonfiction films that have gone on to Oscar nominations and wins (think Navalny). With its international focus, outstanding cinematography and core romance, expect Skywalkers to be an awards contender as the season approaches.

    Baldwin, despite legal battles around the accidental shooting on set making Rust, was in top form interviewing Tamir Ardon and Maria Bukhonina, the filmmakers of Skywalkers, on the frontier of a new era of cutting-edge documentaries. Two Russian rooftoppers, Vanya Beerkus and Angela Nikolau, already popular on social media, team up and fall in love. Challenged to climb the tallest construction site in the world, in Malaysia, they allow a film crew along for the trip, but, as Bukhonina pointed out, Vanya was already an expert drone photographer. They climb a 118-story building and spire, a nail-biting journey, and perform a balletic stunt atop, with Vanya holding Angela, a trained gymnast, as she “flies.” Believe him when he tells her, “I will never let you fall.”

    Prior to the film coming to the Hamptons, I had the opportunity to speak to director Jeff Zimbalist and producer/ director Maria Bukhanina:

     What was the most difficult part of making your film?

    Jeff Zimbalist: Our primary challenge was safety. We developed a protocol with Vanya and Angela's families to reassure them that our crew wouldn't distract them during their most daring climbs and we had an agreement with Vanya and Angela that they wouldn't do anything for our cameras that they wouldn't do otherwise. We kept reminding them, this isn't a film about the fear of falling from heights; it's about the fear of falling in love. Like the metaphor Angela uses in the film about trapeze couples, there's the flyer and the catcher, sometimes we found ourselves grounding our subjects when their heads were in the clouds and other times, they grounded us, and fortunately for a film about trespassing and death-defying stunts, that led to a process with few injuries and no arrests.

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