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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Hamptons Journal: Celebrity Autobiography at Guild Hall/ The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife at Mulford Farm

    Celebrity
    Anticipating great gusts and flooding, many Hamptonites chose the real-life drama of celebrity lives as read by celebrities over the real-life drama of storms at Guild Hall last Friday night. Matthew Broderick reading Tommy Lee's advice on what to do with a woman's “gummy bear” stole a show that also featured Mario Cantone revealing what Tallulah Bankhead did with a variety of cats and Joy Behar reading from Madonna's now out-of-print sex book. 

    The entire company, including Nathan Lane, Tovah Feldshuh, Scott Adsit, Dayle Reyfel, and Celebrity Autobiography creator Eugene Pack chimed in on that ultra Hollywood scandal, the Liz Taylor-Debbie Reynolds-Eddie Fisher-Richard Burton story as told through the prism of several tell-alls. Lane was suave as Mike Todd, Behar nasal as a hotel operator, with Feldshuh as a most glamorous Liz. And I thought I heard it all in Carrie Fisher's one-woman Wishful Drinking!

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  • Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground for Hurricane Irene

    Higher-ground
    As the eastern coast of the United States gears up for a big storm due to hit on Sunday, many are stocking water, batteries, whatever in case they can't make it to “higher ground.” Coincidentally a beautiful, grace-full film called Higher Ground, directed by Vera Farmiga who also stars, opened Friday, about a woman's spiritual progression initiated by a near death experience.

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  • Josiane Balasko Stars in The Hedgehog:

    Hedgehog
    The idea of  an 11 year old from an affluent Parisian family who decides to commit suicide at age 12 because her “fishbowl” life is “not for her” does not strike me as funny, but it is a reigning conceit of Mona Achache's crowd-pleasing film The Hedgehog, based on Muriel Barbery's much beloved novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. The “hedgehog” of the title, a sad and lonely apartment building concierge played by the wonderful actress Josiane Balasko experiences an awakening thanks to her neighbor, Kazuro Ozu (Togo Igawa). The precocious preteen is watching. 

    Before opening theatrically this week, the 2009 film traveled to American film festivals, winning many audience awards. I caught up with Balasko in July, for a rooftop coffee in a midtown hotel.

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  • Hamptons Journal: Enter Laughing and Stay Laughing at Bay Street/ Seriously Bookish to Benefit the East Hampton Library

    Enter-Laughing-The-Musical-434x289

    The revival of Enter Laughing that opened Saturday night at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor had me howling so hard I nearly needed my own reviving. That's because Richard Kind is impossibly funny, and Josh Grisetti matches him zany move for move in the role of David Kolowitz. A cross between PeeWee Herman and Alan Cumming, he's hilarious when he enters laughing, trying out every guffaw, hiccup, chuckle, snort, belly-wrenching hoot in his repertoire.

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  • Classical Theatre of Harlem’s Henry V: I Love It When You Speak French

    HenryV.210
     As we watch the Republicans plan their strategy for toppling the American president, the question of what makes a good leader, indeed, a good man (of either gender) is played out, not in our current political arena, but onstage at the Malcom X & Dr.Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center, at the Classical Theatre of Harlem's concise, snazzy production of Shakespeare's Henry V.

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  • Gloria Steinem: A Bachmann Win Would Set Back the Women’s Movement

    Gloria Steinem
    For a public person, Gloria Steinem, 77, the writer and activist who is for many people the face of feminism, knows how to get up close and personal. Last week, at the Time Warner Center premiere for the documentary limning her life and career, Gloria Steinem: In Her Own Words to air on HBO on August 15, most in attendance were too young to have seen her in action in the '60's and '70's, or the historic moments that defined her career and this chapter of the struggle for women's rights: her reportage as a Playboy bunny, the founding of Ms. Magazine, bra burning, Roe v. Wade, and much more. 

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  • Richard Prince Covers Jackson Pollock at Guild Hall

    RPrinceweb

    To imagine Richard Prince doing drip paintings in honor of Jackson Pollock is too linear a concept for what Prince does in Guild Hall's new exhibition, Richard Prince: Covering Pollock. The iconic abstract expressionist is pure subject for Prince's collages, repetitions in the manner of Warhol, Rauchenberg-like juxtapositions. He's evoking a whole lot more than just Pollock in this homage. 

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  • Hamptons Journal: Tennessee Williams at 100, Dick Cavett at _____

    Tennesy Williams
    How old am I? asked Eli Wallach playfully. The occasion was a staged reading of works by Tennessee Williams, from memoirs, letters, and scenes from his work, most memorably The Glass Menagerie in honor of the playwright's centennial year.

    91, averred a reporter.

    With a smile, his finger gestured up. Meeting the challenge the reporter counted to 95. His face glowed. That's it.

    Do the math. Tennessee would have been only 5 years older and yet he seems to have come from a different era than this veteran actor who was quick to tell me he appeared in two recent movies: Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps and Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer.

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  • Neal Cassady Drives Again in Magic Trip

    Magic Trip
    After the American writer Jack Kerouac's On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957, its characters were instantly immortalized, but not as fictional creations. Much to the author's horror, they became fodder for the needy mid-century Zeitgeist, heroes of an alternative lifestyle. You can read shy Kerouac's Big Sur, an account of his nervous breakdown, to understand his terror at girls trying to climb into his window to bed him, thinking the sexy guy based on Neal Cassady was really the author. Or, you can see Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood's “archival cinema verite” documentary Magic Trip to see Neal Cassady's next chapter, as the driver of Ken Kesey's bus Further. 

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  • Guest Post: One Night Stand Documents 24 Hour Theater

    OPEN24HOURS

    Making theater requires a lot of planning. In fact, it takes about five years to produce the average opera. Imagine only having 24 hours to write, compose, cast, direct, rehearse, and perform a show! In the documentary One Night Stand, which premiered last week at Newfest, filmmakers Elisabeth Sperling and Trish Dalton provide a behind-the-scenes view of the annual fundraising event, The 24 Hour Plays. 

    During the festival, which has taken place in late winter or early spring for the past four years, volunteer writers, composers, directors and performers are put into groups and produce four separate twenty minute plays within the span of a day. And you thought your job was stressful! 

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  • Hamptons Journal: Robert Wilson’s Very Merry Un-Birthday

    Robert_wilson The parties are planned for the fall, at least 4 of them in Milan, Berlin, New York, and Paris, for the internationally famous artist Robert Wilson's 70th birthday. But on Saturday night, he presided over the 18th annual summer benefit for the Byrd Hoffman Watermill Center. Celebrating collaboration in the arts, the extravaganza featured an array of wildly clad actors in outlandish poses and postures, in haute melodrama befitting the theme: Voluptuous Panic; taken together throughout the Center's ample 8 acres, 20 site-specific installations and performances created by young international artists, the Center became a carnival of splendor and silver body paint. You never knew what might come peeking through the trees, or underfoot, as in two heads poking up through the straw ground cover. For all his avant-garde vision, Wilson stays close to the classics: One upcoming premiere, a production of The Odyssey for October, 2012, in Athens.

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  • The Whistleblower: Know Your Enemy

    Whistleblower
    In Cowboys and Aliens, the enemies are horror fantasy monsters with a nod to James Cameron's classic creations down to their gooey mitts. In The Whistleblower, they can be government officials, policemen, friends and relations, evil in human form. 

    Based on the real life story of Nebraska cop Kathy Bolkovac, who gets a job with an international peacekeeping force in post-war Bosnia, the new movie is a thriller in which some members of the U.N. and U.S. State Department collude with contractors in the lucrative trade of human trafficking. Just doing her job, Bolkovac played by Rachel Weisz in the film, simply can't stop the violence against women committed by the men who are there to keep them safe. 

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  • Dominic Cooper in The Devil’s Double

    Devils
    Mamma Mia's pretty boy, Dominic Cooper, turns ugly-twice– portraying the evil Uday Hussein, Saddam's sadistic psychopath son, as well as Latif Yahia, the Iraqi army lieutenant tortured into service as his body double. In sharp Armani suits, Cooper maintains a brutal edge for Iday, an enraged wounded soul for Latif. This accomplished performance, the first Oscar worthy Best Actor of the year, begs the question, can an Academy Award go to a portrait of a despicable character? Yes, Forest Whitaker won for his deft portrayal of Idi Amin. 

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  • The Shoemaker / Shakespeare in the Park: The Problem Plays

    THE SHOEMAKER
    In an old fashioned shoemaker's shop, to the sounds of opera from an antique radio, Danny Aiello sits head in hands. A woman (Alma Cuervo) barges in to say, I need a new sole. The pun signals: this shop strewn with shoes and old photos on the walls including one of an iconic pile of bones is a holy sanctuary in Susan Charlotte's play, The Shoemaker, at the Acorn Theater, directed by Antony Marsellis. An ambitious effort that also features a pair of pumps, a young woman caught in the drama of 9/11, and a voice from Holocaust era Italy (Michael Twaine), The Shoemaker is about, as the playwright said on opening night, walking out the door.

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  • Hamptons Journal: Alec Baldwin Takes the Heat

    AlecbaldwinCarr
    Guild Hall's John Drew Theater was packed on Friday night for the second film in the documentary series HIFF Summerdocs: Page One: Inside the New York Times. This fine glimpse at newspapers in the digital age so fits the Zeitgeist with the huge to do about ethics in journalism generated by the British tabloid scandal, that the film's main character, David Carr has become a television pundit facing off on Charlie Rose and other shows since the time of this documentary's June premiere at Lincoln Center. At a pre-screening reception at the Maidstone, Carr said the medium of television is not natural for him. “I'm just surviving.”

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  • Summer Love: Friends With Benefits

    Friends_with_benefits2

    Summer may be a time to chill, but when it comes to movies, some like it hot. The romantic comedy, Friends With Benefits, may sound smart and snappy with sex that sizzles, but in the end, the message is old fashioned: never let her go. 

    Do I hear Ezio Pinza crooning in the background? Well no. Friends With Benefits has a booming soundtrack that had me begging for silence. But it also winks at the classics like It Happened One Night. Are Justin Timberlake (as Dylan, an online art director) and Mila Kunis (as Jamie, a head hunter, no pun intended) this generation's Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert? 

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  • No Shrinking Snow Flower: Wendi Murdoch in Southampton
    Wendi2 Just before she became all the rage on the news, backing her husband Rupert in hearings about the British tabloid scandal, famously diverting the path of a cream pie, Wendi Murdoch was interviewed in Southampton on Saturday at a private screening of a movie she co-produced with Florence Sloan, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. 

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  • Mandela Day: Media Fest at the Four Seasons

    Morgan-and-nelson
    Morgan Freeman, the actor who portrayed Nelson Mandela in the movie Invictus, defined heroism at a luncheon of luminaries in television, theater, journalism, and film at the Four Seasons on Monday, July 18. The occasion: the 93rd birthday of Nelson Mandela, perhaps the most heroic man of our time for his 67 years of public service, his insistence on justice, equality, and dignity, his work to end apartheid, freeing both blacks –and thereby whites in South Africa. And what gift did “Madiba” want most for this celebration? 

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  • Hamptons Journal: A Day at the Beach Minus the Beach

    Hamptons-beach
    The Ross School gym was decked out as a lounge with plush sofas as “The Diva of Haiti,” Barbara Guillaume took the stage singing in jazzy Creole. The well-heeled crowd swayed enjoying quail eggs and grilled cheese washed down with fine champagne. Liev Schreiber, Fisher Stevens, and hosts Maria Bello and Mariska Hargitay shook hands and posed for photographs at this elegant fund-raiser brunch hosted by WeAdvance.org, GlobalDirt.org, and Plum Hamptons Magazine. “The Hamptons for Haiti Brunch” was dedicated to filling the enormous gap for medical aid, education, and other humanitarian causes for the people of Haiti. 

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  • Good Hair Day

    Hair2011
    Hair is back! 

    The quintessential Age of Aquarius rock musical with its antic tribe, tie-dye tees, frayed jeans, mega frizz and naked joy, seems only to perfect with age. Having had a triumphant, award filled revival at the Delacorte in Central Park and Al Hirschfeld Theater on Broadway in 2009, now the show's touring company will run for ten-weeks at the St. James Theater. I wouldn't miss it.

    Of course Hair plays well for me, takes me back to that exuberant/ fearful time defined by Vietnam, when burning draft cards seemed the only sane course of action. But does it work for a younger age? I wondered what my 21 year old daughter would make of these flower children whipped into a frenzy, singing of sex, drugs, and freedom, whose trips high and low can quickly turn tragic. Then the clownish Berger fluffs his luxurious mane and strips to a fringed g-string, sticking his rump into the faces in the first row. She asks, Mom, did you know people like this? 

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  • Love, Above All: Thank Heaven for Little Girls



     LifeAboveAl Opening this week, Life, Above All, a film set in a small South African township, was the closing night feature of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center in June. Beautifully shot and wonderfully acted particularly by two young girls who had only the experience of singing in the school choir before being tapped for this project, the film offers a rare glimpse into a community ravaged not only by HIV/AIDS but prejudices that prevent addressing the problem. 

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  • Sarah’s Key: Thank Heaven for Little Girls

    SarahsKey Jewish mothers became the secret stars of the evening as Harvey Weinstein introduced a private screening of Sarah's Key at MoMA on Monday: the evening's host Diane von Furstenberg is such a mother as is his own, Miriam, who was in the audience, happy, he said, that this new film was not controversial in the manner of a recent Weinstein release, Julian Schnabel's Miral. Indeed, Sarah's Key, based upon the wildly popular novel by Tatiana de Rosnay and already a hit in Europe will not have B'nai Brith asking, Is it good for the Jews? 

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  • Project Nim: The Dope on a Charismatic Chimp

    Project_nim
    Nim Chimsky, the star of a new movie, died too soon. A charming troublemaker, this chimp, the subject of an experiment in understanding language and communication begun at Columbia University in the '70's changed the lives of many people. That fact came to the fore at the premiere screening on Wednesday night of the new documentary, Project Nim, a bildungsroman if you will, limning his birth, maturation, and particularly his remarkable use of language.

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  • Beauty and the Beast: Shen Yun at Lincoln Center /PEN on China / Horrible Bosses at Vault

    Shun Yun Spirits soar over snow capped mountains, a sword wielding hero, Wu Song, slays a man-eating tiger, a dance corps in Barbie pink clusters like plum blossoms, another twirls handkerchiefs, nymphs frolic in the waves. Heaven opens its gates. In spectacular color and gorgeous costumes, Shen Yun, a New York based arts group enacts the rich cultural heritage of China at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. 

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  • David Hyde Pierce Plays The Perfect Host

    The Perfect Host
    You'd be wise not to accept a glass of red wine from Warwick Wilson, the character played by David Hyde Pierce in his new movie, The Perfect Host. That epithet aside, let's just say his cooking skills may be impeccable, but his intentions are more than intoxicating. 

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