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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Red Velvet at St. Ann’s Warehouse: The Moor Comes to Brooklyn

    IraAldridge
    To some, red velvet refers to the latest craze in cupcakes. To others, like those who attended the New York opening of a British import at St. Ann’s Warehouse in downtown Brooklyn, Red Velvet is the play to see. 

    About an American actor from a bygone era, black and brilliant, named Ira Aldridge, with outsized ego and hubris to match, Red Velvet limns familiar racial themes, and then freshens them beyond a story of victimization: a black actor in the early 1833 gets a chance against all bias to perform Othello with an all white cast at London’s Covent Garden. But, he has his own ideas about how to play the moor. Aldridge experiences a classic demise that you may argue is color blind. The actor Adrian Lester brings vitality to this role, and the play within. As a black actor dismissed for refusing to restrain his all too ferocious performance as the crazed Othello, Lester is all rage, and vulnerability.

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  • Les Miserables: Epic Crowd Pleaser

    LeyMiserabels2
    The revival of Les Miserables comes weighted with history, and not just the French Revolution as Victor Hugo imagined it: a long running Broadway original, a more recent revival, an Oscar nominated movie just last year. Certainly producers are counting on a familiarity with the material, the show’s rich music covered by many pop vocalists. But with its superb casting and recent trim, this Les Miserables revival at the Imperial Theater is simply stunning.

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  • Stuff Happens: Errol Morris’ Unknown Known

    Rumsfeld
    Donald Rumsfeld,     for no apparent reason, agreed to allow Fog of War documentarian Errol Morris to interview him. Was it to assure his legacy? We may never know. When the filmmaker asks him that very question after a long evasive interview in the new film Unknown Known opening this week, he evades even that, replying, “That’s a vicious question. Damned if I know.”

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  • Jim Jarmusch Turns the Vampire Myth: Only Lovers Left Alive

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    Jim Jarmusch,     the celebrated indie filmmaker gives the vampire genre a clever tweak in his new movie, Only Lovers Left Alive. If you’ve been around sucking blood for centuries, you’ve probably met history’s most famous characters, Byron, Schubert, to mention a few. The movie pushes this conceit, name dropping with aplomb, or just cracking wise in vampire tropes. Roaming the Tangier medina, Eve (Tilda Swinton) follows the well-worn path of the midcentury dissolute and hip, looking for a fix in the manner of beat legendary figures. Arriving at the “1001 Nights” café, she finds none other than Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt) who has a special “Type O,” just what she needs. The café is named after one once owned by Brion Gysin, in the days when William Burroughs resided in the then seedy port hotel, the Muneria. Known as “El Hombre Invisible,” he was a figure of unidentifiable age, seeming to exist on junk alone.

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  • Take Me to Your Leader: All the Way on Broadway

    LBJ“Are you ready for your history lesson,” asked the usher at a recent performance of All the Way at the Neil Simon Theater. Please! All the Way is way more than a history lesson, although it does dramatize a significant part of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency from his taking office after Kennedy’s assassination through the march on Selma, the murders of voting recruiters Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, and his signature achievement, passing The Civil Rights Act. Yes, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Brandon J. Dirden), Sen. Hubert Humphrey (Robert Petkoff), J. Edgar Hoover (Michael Keaton), Governor George Wallace (Rob Campbell) and Lady Bird Johnson (Betsy Aidem) are significant players in the political tableau, which also reveals the requisite wheeling, dealing, and compromise under his leadership. Most of all, this fast-paced and entertaining three hours covering November, 1963-November, 1964, is the occasion to see the extraordinary Bryan Cranston, in his Broadway debut, morph into the role of LBJ, even down to his boxer shorts. Bryan Cranston can take his Tony now.

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  • Mothers and Sons at the Golden: Terrence McNally Makes History

    MothersandSons
    Strident, a woman with whom to reckon, Tyne Daly’s Katharine Gerard is a force of nature. Encased in fur, she’s the refrigerator-sized iceberg in Terrence McNally’s Mothers and Sons, a new play that opened at the Golden Theater on Monday. Well, never has a joke carried such heft: if it isn’t one thing, it’s your mother!

    Arriving unannounced at the Upper West Side apartment of her dead son’s lover, Cal (a terrific Frederick Weller) now newly married and with a son, she represents every parent who could not understand or accept a gay child. Her only son, Andre died of AIDS in the early scourge of that plague; it’s not an event that can heal, even after decades. And here’s the switch: she is the one alone, ostracized, loveless, and finally embraced. The play, an extension of material McNally first wrote back in the late ‘80’s, is an important social and political history that culminates in being the first Broadway play to feature a gay marriage.

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  • Nina Arianda: The “IT” Girl in Tales from Red Vienna and Rob the Mob

    Rob the Mob2
    As a desperate widow in MTC’s new play, Tales from Red Vienna, Nina Arianda’s Helena Altman is demure in period weeds, even as the gentlemen she services rip her black lace. In her new movie, Rob the Mob, opening this week, Arianda’s Rosie is wily and saucy and naïve as befits a character in a modern “Bonnie & Clyde” story, about a real-life Queens couple deigning to hold up members of the “family” in their social clubs. Her boyfriend, Tommy, in the charming if rough person of Michael Pitt, has this brainstorm sitting in on the trial of John Gotti, that the Mafia, bosses and soldiers, wield no weapons as they play cards, and in the name of his father, he simply and nervously shows up, asks them for their watches and wallets, while she waits in the getaway car. Needless to say, this daring prank comes to no good end for the young lovers.

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  • Rachel Boynton Tackles Big Men – and Big Oil

    BigMenThe illuminating documentary Big Men tells a variation of the oil story in Africa. Nigeria was an example of fifty years of oil discovery, with busted pipelines, and rampant pollution, a result of the business of oil. Ghana was next in line for oil extraction. Attracted to this story, filmmaker Rachel Boynton asks the tough questions of the “big men,” African government officials and American companies like Kosmos, that wish to profit. These characters appear so willing to explain their greed on camera. I asked Boynton the obvious: what’s a nice girl like you doing with a subject like this?

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  • Maria Shriver Shines a Light on the Financial Plight of Many American Women: “Paycheck to Paycheck” on HBO

    Paycheck-to-paycheck
    Introducing a new documentary at HBO, “Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life and Times of Katrina Gilbert,” Executive Director Sheila Nevins paused at the podium to ask Trent Gilbert whether or not he was feeling safe. The dimpled 4 year old who nearly steals the show from his mom, was seated in the back of the screening room, about to see the movie about the challenges facing his family, mom as well as his two older sisters, as they struggle to live on the $9.49/ per hour mom makes working at an elder care facility. The kids are well mannered and cooperative with the filmmakers, Shari Cookson and Nick Doob, as they follow the family around for a year, part of The Shriver Report, from home in a trailer, to child care, and in and out of various cars including the one driven by their dad who does not live with them while Katrina has to help pay for his gas. This life in Chattanooga, Tennessee is not the worst, not utter poverty, it is just the way it is for this ambitious mother who is seen as emblematic of 42 million American mothers out there, trying.

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  • Nymphomaniac Part I: Lars von Trier’s Coitus Interruptus

    NyphomaniacFilmmaker provocateur Lars von Trier’s latest movie exceeds even his own perversions. The title, Nymphomaniac, tells you much. A troubled woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is rescued and helped to convalescing by a professorial type (Stellan Skarsgard). She explains her despair, recounting the history of her sexuality. Another man might pounce, but the scene remains cerebral, she in bed, he by her side. The voice of von Trier, he listens to each anecdote, responding with correlatives in science, in nature, in the world of ideas, while the viewer is treated to visual flashbacks starring Stacy Martin; in her first movie, as young Joe, she engages in a game with a classmate whereby she has sex with as many men on a moving train as possible, the prize, a bag of candies. Dressed in demure dresses and knee socks, Joe becomes the traditional object of the male gaze, allowing von Trier to muse about the human organism as an anthropologist might.

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  • Ascending to Hell: No Exit at the Pearl Theatre/ Satchmo at the Waldorf at the Westside Theater

    No Exit2Looks like hell is a step up, as the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre’s mid century allegory step off the elevator into a swank upscale loft in the Pearl Theater Company’s stylish production of No Exit. A first New York revival since its award winning Broadway debut in 1946, the play, adapted from the French by Paul Bowles, is freshened up: a statue of Napoleon from the original is now a modernist sculpture, a microcosm of the loft space. In this peculiar art piece, the rectangular shoebox-sized spaces are multiplied and piled up, like apartments in a high rise, reflecting the dwelling where three characters discuss life’s meaning, as it were, romping about, posing on three divans. The ensemble, featuring Bradford Cover, Jolly Abraham, Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris, and Pete McElligott, is good at conveying this imagined post-death dialogue. And this being 2014, the politics are less specific than Sartre’s post-war vision of eternity, but the mood could not be more focused. Behind a scrim on both sides of the stage, the detritus of lives, broken furnishings, and just plain stuff are a reminder: You won’t need them here.

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  • Oscars Afterglow: Anne Thompson’s Book “The $11 Billion Year”

    Annethompsonslider
    As last week’s Oscar ceremony fades from memory, it is useful to consider, as Marlon Brando’s character in Last Tango in Paris says, when it’s over it begins again. The “it” here is the Hollywood cycle from Sundance to the Oscar red carpet, awards, and after parties, the subject of a new book, “The $11 Billion Year: From Sundance to the Oscars, an Insider Look at the Changing Hollywood System.” Veteran Hollywood reporter and “Oscarologist,” Anne Thompson focuses on 2012, the game-changing year when declining sales in the movie business turned around. Examining the journey of the nine best picture nominees of that year toward the Oscars, and other key films, Anne Thompson begins with the news of indie film champion Bingham Ray’s sudden death and puts together a picture of the industry’s movers and matters, offering a glimpse of the personalities, the talent, the risks, the marketing, and a view to the future.

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  • Catherine Deneuve Kicks Off Rendez-vous with French Cinema

      Deneuve“You’re stunning,” an admirer shouted out at the Paris Theater on Thursday night, when Catherine Deneuve, the undisputed queen of international cinema took the stage. In bulk-enhancing horizontal striped mink, a standout among the others of the French delegation, her first words were, why was the mike given to me? And then poised and elegant she welcomed the crowd to the opening night feature, On My Way. The focus of every frame, she stars as an aging beauty queen on a road trip in rural France. As daffy as that premise could be, Deneuve pulls this romp off with comic aplomb: after a lover’s betrayal, Bettie sets out in search of serenity and a good smoke. A man with sausage fingers rolls a cigarette in excruciating slow motion. Bettie has a one-nighter with a guy half her age, a photo shoot during which she faints, a bonding with her adorable grandson, a surprising rapprochement with family, and a romance. It was only later I found out, the French find this movie serious.

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  • Shirley Jones at the Café Carlyle: People Will Say We’re in Love

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    The Partridge Family mom took center stage at the Café Carlyle this week, singing classics from the American musical theater, and recounting anecdotes from a life well lived. At nearly 80, yes, she does reveal her age exaggerating upward, Shirley Jones sounds and looks great. In Oscar week, with a stunning June Squibb nominated for her role in Nebraska (at age 84), the ‘80’s are maybe not so fearsome. Shirley, named after Shirley Temple, won a Best Supporting Oscar in 1960 for playing a prostitute in Elmer Gantry. She credits the movie’s star, Burt Lancaster, for launching her career into acting on top of the singing career she already had performing in Oklahoma, Carousel, and many other musicals. And guess what, of all the stunning leading men she’s loved on stage and screen, Burt was the best kisser.

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  • Oscars for Foreign Language Films: Omar and Bethlehem

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    Omar, one of the five nominees for Foreign Language Film Oscar did not win. The sumptuous Italian film, The Great Beauty, did. But the Palestinian entry, about a young Palestinian man who, despite his youthful dreams of love, peace and freedom, becomes an asset for Israeli intelligence, offers a glimpse into the fraught Middle East situation. With another film opening this week, Bethlehem, Israel’s entry for the Academy Award that did not get nominated, Omar doubles the picture of despair about the region. The films’ titles say much about their differences: Omar has a sympathetic character at center: in the film Bethlehem, the arid Biblical place is the focus, yet each features individuals on opposite sides of the conflict sacrificed in cycles of violence.

    I had the opportunity to interview Bethlehem’s director, Yuval Adler, who wrote the script with Ali Waked, a Palestinian writer and journalist.

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  • The Bridges of Madison County: Sex in Iowa

    Bridges
    This is a great American myth: a mysterious stranger comes to town, briefly, and changes everything. Reference: Mark Twain. As the Italian-born homemaker Francesca (Kelli O’Hara) falls in love with Robert (Steven Pasquale), the young hunk who breezes through her Iowa town for a photo shoot, she thinks The Patron Saint of Housewives shined his beneficence on her. As operatic as these emotions come, the new musical, The Bridges of Madison County at the Gerald Shoenfeld Theater on Broadway, under the direction of Bartlett Sher, is sexy fodder for women of a certain age.

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  • The Americans at the Plaza

    Americans
    Season two of the award-winning, much acclaimed FX cold war series The Americans kicks off this week, proving that Americans were ready to embrace a television series about appealing KGB operatives: Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell. Without giving away too much of a sensational first episode, at one point the couple is caught in flagrante delicto by Paige, their teenaged daughter. What follows the next morning over breakfast is a by-the-book conversation about privacy and closed doors. When they are not shuttling family around to carnivals, where son Henry comes close to inadvertently joining the family business, the couple, wearing an assortment of guises, take out whom they must, and the scenes are often bloody.

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  • Pig Iron Theatre’s Twelfth Night, Downtown

    Pig-ironHow is it possible: two incredibly good productions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in the same season? One of the bard’s bawdiest, the comedy inspired the recent Broadway hit featuring Mark Rylance as Olivia, in a brilliant stab at staying true to Elizabethan strictures: men play the women’s roles. Rylance makes a damned good woman, but in the Pig Iron Theatre’s production, the women (real women) are saucier, the partying heartier, the drink flowing so freely, viewers in the front row of the Abrons Center may require raincoats.

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  • William S. Burroughs’ Centennial Year in American Cities, and One Serendipitous Photo at the Morgan Library

    Burrows
    When William S. Burroughs died in August 1997 at age 83, he was the last of the seminal beat writers to go. Jack Kerouac died in 1969, and Allen Ginsberg in 1997. Some argue that Gregory Corso who died in 2001, should have enjoyed that status too. Despite Burroughs’ known heroin use over many years, his hundredth birthday on February 5, the same week that Philip Seymour Hoffman appeared to have died of a drug related cocktail, made many ponder: how do some addicts maintain till old age? Yearlong celebrations, in Bloomington, Lawrence, Seattle and other American cities including New York will mark the occasion with parties and poetry in the expectation that the beat generation will endure in their efforts, and it does in spirit.

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  • Oscar Documentaries and Others: The Act of Killing and The Last of the Unjust

    ActofKilling
    147 docs were eligible for Oscars this year. 15 made a short list, and 5 are now contenders. One, The Act of Killing, a first feature length film for director Josh Oppenheimer, working with an anonymous partner, raises questions of morality, conscience, and accountability related to the 1965-6 genocide in Indonesia. As Oppenheimer explained at a special Academy of Art & Sciences screening series of the Oscar nominated documentaries, he had met some survivors of the killings, and in the process of deciding to make a film on this subject, he met with perpetrators, proud and still in powerful government positions.

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  • k.d. lang in After Midnight

    KD LANG
    Canadian pop and country singer k.d. lang took over the role originated by Fantasia Barrino in the exuberant Broadway revue After Midnight this week. Channeling Tony Bennett, who came by the Brooks Atkinson Theater to hear her on opening night, lang performed “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “Stormy Weather,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” and “Zaz Zuh Zaz” wearing different tuxes, in black and white, her hair slicked up. Yes, with the orchestra onstage under Wynton Marsalis’ direction —you are not going to hear a better big band sound anywhere in New York, and the dancing still wildly entertaining–, lang does not disappoint. She is the crooner whose debonair jazz style marks a new level in her career

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

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  • At Daniel’s: A New Tradition for Oscar Night

    Danny-bolud3Daniel Boulud makes a mean red carpet, a special cocktail of that name for Oscar night. This, the second year in a row chef Boulud is host to the east coast academy of arts & sciences members, everyone hopes his restaurant, Daniel, will become a tradition; the fare matches the grandeur of the occasion. Daniel Boulud wants to ensure that he is on the East Coast what Wolfgang Puck and Thomas Keller are to the West where those chefs are hosting the parties and dinners. Of course, some diners there will surely have their statues in hand.

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  • George Clooney Celebrates Monuments Men at the Metropolitan Club

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    On Tuesday night with an ice storm looming, George Clooney worked the room, a very big room. The elegant Metropolitan Club featured its signature ice sculptures dripping over the raw bar; with its ceiling paintings, this was an opulent and fitting locale for Monuments Men, a movie about the recovered art of Europe during World War II. Honoring the rescuers, a dream cast includes Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Jean Dujardin, Hugh Bonneville and Bob Balaban in what must be called an extended buddy movie directed by George Clooney, and based on a true story from a book by Robert Edsel. Affable, fixing a fan or friend with a steady gaze and an arm firm on the shoulder, Clooney fielded questions about the film’s casting. He’d see Balaban at parties, and at one for the movie Argo, he and co-producer Grant Heslov had a Eureka! moment, deciding to cast the versatile bespectacled actor.

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  • Focus on Women Leaders: Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe and Athena Film Festival

    Nyiramba
    Forest Whitaker     takes her calls. Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe so epitomizes the strength of simplicity, the Oscar winning star of Last King of Scotland— he portrays the dictator Idi Amin-– form a likely alliance in helping young people in Africa recover from the horrors of vicious murderous rebels like Joseph Kony who, like Idi Amin, brutalized them. Whitaker founded a school for boys, to re-humanize them. Sister Rosemary founded a school to teach women to sew, specifically working pop tabs into fashionable bags. That trade allows them to survive with dignity for themselves and for the children many bore against their will. St. Monica’s also serves as a safe haven and hospital for the women. Last week, Sister Rosemary met a group of journalists. She was carrying one of the bags woven of the silver aluminum tabs. Everyone at the table at Milano wanted one, but we all settled for an autographed copy of the book about her life and work, Sewing Hope, and chatted with Derek Watson, the director of a documentary about this woman of faith. Her secret: exuding serenity, Sister Rosemary exacts tough love in situations many would find impossible.

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  • Afternoon of a Faun: A Life of Dancer Tanaquil LeClercq

    Afternoon of a FaunTanaquil LeClercq was a lithe, angular beauty, a dancer who graced ballet until polio struck, paralyzing her and ending her career at age 27. Nursing her to a life beyond this disease, a crippler in the 1950’s and now nearly eradicated, were her husband George Balanchine, and friend Jerome Robbins. She had been muse to each of them. The luminous documentary about her, aptly named Afternoon of a Faun from a memorable performance when she is coupled with Jacques d’Amboise, limns her brief career. Archival footage shows this remarkable talent in key performances, including a prophetic dance choreographed by Balanchine for a March of Dimes benefit; in “Resurgence,” she is a girl afflicted with polio as Balanchine himself dances the role of Death.

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