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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Spiderman: The Party

    Spiderman
    The crowd outside the Bowlmor on West 44th Street swelled into a non-menacing mini-mob. Harry Belafonte, Spike Lee, and Cindy Crawford snaked their families through, avoiding the plastic champagne flutes in the congested vestibule leading to two elevators carrying the party-ready up to the third and fourth floors. Nowhere to be seen: Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark's creators and their special guests, Bono, The Edge, Bill Clinton. Ousted director Julie Taymor graciously took a bow at the Foxwoods theater but never made it to the party, where celebrities disappeared behind heavily managed VIP curtains. But everyone else had ample comfort food (awesome mashed potatoes and meat loaf) and drink and a night of -what else-bowling! It was easy enough to swap shoes for the regulation lace up kind, but more often women slipped off their sling backs and took to the lanes in bare feet.  And what did people think of the famously beleaguered show? The consensus, at least among this well fed throng: they loved it!

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Page One Inside The New York Times a new documentary: The Medium as Message

    Inside-TheNew-YorkTimes
    Bitching and moaning about the immensity of the newspaper of record, the way its cornucopia of offerings chewed into his writerly workday, the essayist Seymour Krim (who died in 1989) used to say, The New York Times made me. 

    How would he now navigate its terrain, both in gritty print and boundless cyberspace, had he lived to see our journalistic no man's land? How do many of us do it, fellow “near sighted cannoneers,” a term Krim took from cosmic Walt Whitman to describe the newspapers' and reporters' mid-century identity forged in that time's new media, taking aim, as it were, living up to a “majestic ideal” in truth-telling? 

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  • Bobby Fischer: Against the World, and Against Me

    BobbyFischer
    Pawn to king 4. Last Tuesday, Bryant Park was a chess fest. Young and old, seasoned and novice players sat head in hands contemplating plastic pieces on the checkered mats. You could hear a pawn drop. Some, like Jay Bonin and Asa Hoffman, were guys I knew back in the day when I was dating my husband Bob Salpeter, a player who would haunt the clubs like the Marshall, a sponsor of this event. For me, a chess widow, this event was a reminder: in the game of chess, the queen has all the power, but the king is the prize.

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  • Robert Kennedy, Jr. Gets a Bird of Prey: The Last Mountain Premiere

    Rfk-jr
    He always shows up, said director Bill Haney, explaining why he bestowed a bald eagle crafted out of recycled moose antler by Iroquois Indian Stan Hill to Robert Kennedy, Jr. “He walks with kings and still has the common touch,” Haney went on praising Kennedy's commitment to the men and women in Appalachia threatened by the raping of coal from the mountains that secure their communities. Kennedy is also a star of Haney's new documentary, The Last Mountain.

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  • Drama at the Drama Desk Awards and Designing Women

    Dramadesk The Hammerstein Ballroom was packed for the Drama Desk Awards on Monday night. Broadway, off Broadway and off off Broadway casts and crews rubbed more than elbows, just getting to the stage at the announcements of their names. Rushing to receive his outstanding actor award for The Motherf**ker with the Hat, Bobby Cannavale locked Sutton Foster in embrace and hoped that she would be awarded next up. She was.

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  • Bruce Ricker/ Jazz Foundation of America – Keeping the Spirit Alive

    Bruce Ricker2
    Jazz lost one of its own last week, with the death of Bruce Ricker. Not a player per se, Ricker, a lawyer with a passion for jazz assembled Jay McShann, Count Basie, and Big Joe Turner in Kansas City for a jam session and filmed it. The resulting Last of the Blue Devils (1979) was a unique historic moment, a gathering of musicians, sequenced as an extended riff, as close to spontaneous as the music itself. The much praised film caught the attention of Clint Eastwood and Ricker then helped Eastwood with the scores of several of his films including The Bridges of Madison County and Mystic River, to name two films lauded for their soundtracks. Collaborating with Charlotte Zwerin, Ricker made Straight No Chaser (1988), a documentary about Thelonius Monk, and more recently films about Dave Brubeck, Johnny Mercer, and Tony Bennett. 

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  • Trust Buck

    Buck
    Hello, I'm Buck, says the man in the large brimmed hat, brown leather jacket, brown stitch trimmed white shirt, and red silk tie with horses, completely disarming a guest to the private screening of a documentary film about him on Tuesday night. Buck, the movie, has been circulating the festivals, touted as a crowd-pleaser for its depiction of this man and his unusual way with horses. But what gets you when Buck shakes your hand is the intensity of his blue-eyed gaze.

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  • Tony Kushner’s Religion and Politics: An Intelligent Guide

    Kushner600
    Congratulations to Tony Kushner on the occasion of receiving an honorary doctorate from the City University of New York after a challenge from groups who miss the point of Kushner's impressive contribution to American arts and letters. His views on Middle East politics, however they reflect on what is good for the Jews, should be taken as a point of debate, in the same way that his literature poses thoughtful consideration of what it means to be alive today. Fortunately, his ample gifts are evident in his new play.

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  • L’Amour Fou: The Fashion of Yves St. Laurent and Alexander McQueen

    Ives2 In a new documentary L'Amour Fou about the iconic Yves St. Laurent, it is hard to tell just what is the object of that besotted state: his work, his substantial art collection, his posh homes in Paris, Marrakech and Normandy, opulently decorated with antiques and woven fabrics. From the perspective of Pierre Berge, St. Laurent's lifelong companion, the film is perhaps an expression of the businessman's own mad devotion to the bespectacled designer who defined fashion in the mid century. In his view, YSL was an aloof workaholic, obsessed with sex and drugs, ambivalent to fame, and mainly depressed. Berge's own place in YSL's life comes off as more business than pleasure. This is not the ebullient Valentino and Giancarlo Giametti. 

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  • House of Blue Leaves on Broadway: No Kindness From Stranger

    House-of-blue-leaves-krulwich-1
    Bananas may be bananas in the revival of John Guare's play The House of Blue Leaves directed by David Cromer at the Walter Kerr Theater, but in the scheme of this wry drama, set in 1965 Sunnyside, Queens, she looks appropriately far gone. As performed by Edie Falco in a fright wig, whose work was just nominated for a Tony for “Best Actress in a Featured Role in a Play,” Bananas pops pills and rolls her bug eyes, taking a cue from Falco's character on Showtime's Nurse Jackie. When you meet her husband Artie Shaughnessy (Ben Stiller) and his girlfriend Bunny (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a scheming couple with ample dreams of fame and limited talent, you can see why they would want Bananas out of the way. Stiller must work hard to be so good at singing mediocre. Enter a gorgeous blond movie star, Corrinna (Alison Pill), the Shaughnessy's son Ronnie (Christopher Abbott in a role originated by a young Ben Stiller), a kid with a few issues, and Artie's successful friend Billy Einhorn (Thomas Sadoski). The nutsy quotient is amplified by the entrance through a barred window of a trio of nuns hoping to see the Pope who is planning a visit. Yes, that Pope. The “little nun” is maybe a head taller than the other two with a hilarious Halley Feiffer in her Broadway debut. She is antic and sour-faced even as she leaves her calling, and reason enough to see this zany play that by end, turns surprisingly poignant.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Joel Grey: Museum of the City of NY / The Normal Heart / Anything Goes

    Joel+Grey April 11. It was Joel Grey's birthday and what a celebration: an opening of an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York featuring a chronology of his life in the theater and his own photographs with an essay by playwright Jon Robin Baitz. Explaining Grey's particular eye, Baitz calls Grey a magician, “a very close observer” of the city around him. 

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  • Jerusalem on Broadway: No Trip to the Holy Land

    Jerusalem+Broadway
    Mark Rylance, after a second standing ovation following the evening performance of Jerusalem at the Music Box Theater, wanted to let the audience know that we had seen this epic length British play on the day of its action, St. George's Day, April 23. The Irish have St. Patrick's, he said, when they get drunk. But all we do for St. George is feel guilt. I began to understand more about the play I had just seen in that epilogue than in the 3 hours it took to present it. Like the set, a back yard of sorts, a vision of a low rent tag sale, in front of an airstream marked Waterloo, strobe lights hanging off trees, sirens, and like the central character portrayed with great brio by Mr. Rylance, Jez Butterworth's brilliant play is a divine mess. 

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  • Geena Davis Sings at the Sarasota Opera House

    Gena Davis    The actress Geena Davis was awarded the Sarasota Film Festival's first “Impact Award” for her work on promoting the visibility of women in the media. Suddenly shy, the tall movie star, “Thelma” of Thelma and Louise, turned her back to diners feasting on shell fish and short ribs on the Sarasota Opera House stage, and, facing the empty seats, sang “Nina,” an Italian art song, a favorite of her singing coach. Just last year, at the same event, Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye walked around the tables like troubadours, strumming and singing. There is just something about being on the stage of that opera house that brings out the inner voice. Or perhaps it is simply the joy of this premiere regional film festival, the brainchild of  Board President, Mark Famiglio.

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  • Cajun Fiction: Treme on HBO

    Treme
    If you are late to the HBO series Treme, have no fear that you will be at sea. You can jump into the second season, to commence this Sunday, without missing a beat. That's because the series, evocatively set in post-Katrina New Orleans, is so well conceived (David Simon and Eric Overmyer) with syncopated story lines focused on appealing characters, and the assurance that cherished memories of that port city's special place in American life with its music, food, unique language and sensibility have not washed away when those levees broke. Weighing in on the conversation about New Orleans-Why rebuild it? What leadership? What funds? Have Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr. sold out?, the show also features sly humor, insider tidbits and some of the best jazz on television.

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  • Motherf**ker on Broadway: The First Amendment Gets a Workout

    Mother F
    In The Motherf**ker With the Hat, the “f” word, along with a panoply of shocking verbiage is deployed, an arsenal of language that makes you titter until the words themselves stop meaning what they mean, becoming pause, punctuation, and, at times, punishment.  You are dumbstruck by Stephen Adly Guirgis's script, getting into its poetry.

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  • Robert Redford’s Conspirators

    Consperitors
    Our American democracy is the most fragile of political systems, to be tweaked and twisted into serving injustice and blatant hysteria for revenge. Sound familiar? But this news is not ripped out of the post-9/11 headlines. 

    A new movie directed by Robert Redford, The Conspirator, is set in the aftermath of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Swift 'justice' is meted out to the conspirators, and the innocent (perhaps) widow, Mary Surratt (an understated, nuanced performance by Robin Wright) whose Washington D.C. boarding house served as a meeting place for those who would kill him. James McAvoy plays her lawyer, Frederick Aiken, who works to get justice in the military tribunal where she is tried. 

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  • Con Me If You Can: The Broadway Musical

    Catch Me if you Can
    Catch Me If You Can: The Musical is a con man's story, and the biggest con is the show itself. Like seeing a superbly performed magic trick, we're going to buy it, and happily revel in being duped, or that is what is promised: a conceit that separates this traditional Broadway vehicle from the 2002 caper movie of its inspiration. 

    From the beginning, we see Frank Abagnale, Jr. arrested at a Miami airport for an array of misdeeds and misdirections. He's going to show us how to make “butter out of cream,” in Catch Me lingo. To limn the storyline, as a teen, Frank not only passes bad checks, he passes himself off as a doctor, lawyer, whatever. But hey, self-invention is the ultimate American myth; add to that the Freudian search for the father and you've got what lifts this song and dance vehicle, even if by play's end that father-son pair is united by handcuffs.

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  • Jerry Weintraub: His Way By Way of Brooklyn, eh, The Bronx

    Jerry Weintraub Hollywood's Jerry Weintraub can take a joke, and one of the joys of His Way, an HBO documentary about the famed producer/promoter to air tonight is the amused testimony of family and friends-even George and Barbara Bush–about this Bronx boy's rise from Depression era Brooklyn to a Beverly Hills mansion, where he now resides with his long time companion Susie Ekins while still lovingly married to Jane Morgan. 

    Working on the recent Oceans movies, George Clooney impersonated Weintraub on the phone with room service, sending mountains of food to his hotel room at 5 A.M. following a late night shoot. The actor also smacked Weintraub's rump during a massage, and, according to co-star Julia Roberts, filled his shoes with M&M's. For a man who is doing it “his way,” that's a lot to suck up, but Jerry Weintraub, the man who revived the careers of Elvis and Sinatra, who produced Robert Altman's Nashville and Barry Levinson's Diner, has a passion for people. He's a “character,” a “rare bird,” says Barbara Bush with comic timing. And, no one who ever met him forgot the experience. 

    When his father, a jewelry salesman and important influence, came to visit and saw the outsized lifestyle: swimming pool and tennis courts, the champagne and caviar, he was convinced his son was in the mob. But as the film reveals with each Bronx boy-makes-good anecdote, Jerry Weintraub made it the old fashioned American way: persistence, chutzpah, a knack for making money, and luck.

    As his brother, Melvyn Douglas Weintraub-named after the movie star–puts it, “He's going to sell you something, you are going to buy it, and you will like it.”

    On the eve of the documentary's second “Bar Mitzvah,” a swell party at Porterhouse hosted by Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter and attended by a who's who in media-I caught up with him to talk about the fabulous trajectory of his life. 

    RW: Your book, When I Stop Talking You'll Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man, is a bestseller. Were you interested in doing a book and movie about yourself?

    JW: I didn't want to do a book. Rich Cohen interviewed me for Vanity Fair. He “got” me right away and he wanted to do the book. He got 7 offers. The movie followed.

    RW: Are you more Brooklyn or more Bronx?

    JW: Brooklyn is more romantic out in the world, so I say that. I was more Bronx because that's where my family lived. But my grandmother lived in Williamsburg, and the whole family congregated at her house: aunts, uncles, cousins. Chickens ran free in the back yard. We killed and cooked them. 

    Both cultures fed my personality. I grew up at the beginning of the war and women didn't go out and work. They stayed home to take care of the children. A warm familial atmosphere was an important part of my life. I was born in 1937. I am 73 now. And that's why I have such a cadre of friends and people around me. I have that familial side of me. 

    RW: You had a “Jewish mother,” but the way you describe her she was certainly not like Philip Roth's devouring, oppressive New Jersey mom. 

    JW: I was extremely lucky. I have warm feelings for my mother. My mother and my father were extraordinary. A lot of people don't have that. 

    My mother read to me every night. My mother was afraid of everything in the world, everything she couldn't control. She took care of the money; my father gave her the money and she gave everyone an allowance. She loved to read and loved movies. She didn't want to travel so she experienced everything through books and films. And that's how she went to Hawaii and South Africa, in foreign films.

    RW: Your life can be read as a study in success. What is your secret?

    JW: I am persistent about everything I believe in. If there's a film I want to do, a record, a Broadway show-I do it. Everybody can hate it but I will still do it. I am fearless that way.

    Early in my career, Lou Wasserman knew people and as a businessman, he thought he could make a lot of money with me. But I made it for myself. 

    RW: You also know failure. What did you learn from that?

    JW: By the '80's I was too rich and started a company. I learned not to do it again, and made more money after that failure. I learned not be somebody I wasn't. I can do anything-run companies–but that doesn't mean I should do that. I need to enjoy what I do. I enjoy making movies.

    RW: Ellen Barkin thinks you rescued her. Did you?

    JW: I didn't rescue her because she is a great artist, a great talent. I gave her another opportunity to rescue herself. I love her. 

    We go way back to Diner. I didn't call her up to say I am going to do you a favor because you're in trouble. I don't do that to people. 

    She thought she was in trouble but she wasn't because nobody can take her talent away. Talented people have to do what they do. Someone can criticize but you do what you do. Content is king. Ellen is a great actress. I was just giving her the opportunity to do that again at a time when things weren't so good for her. I knew that they weren't and I could have given the part to a lot of girls, but she was great in Oceans Thirteen.

    RW: A hilarious bit in the documentary is everyone weighing in on your unusual family life, married to Jane and living with Susie. Is everyone still happy with that arrangement?

    JW: It's very simple. I married Jane 50 years ago. I love her as much now as I loved her then. We grew apart at a certain time. We just lived too long. 

    This monogamous thing that people try to do, to live together for 70 or 80 years, it just doesn't work. When Jane and I started to pull apart I went to her. She could have had a divorce and gotten lots and lots of money. She didn't want that. She didn't want me to mess up my estate. She loves Susie and Susie loves her.

    RW: What are your plans?

    JW: I have several projects including a film about Liberace with a script by Richard LaGravanese to come out a year from now. He's a great screenwriter. I love him. 

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • The Other Place May Be Right Here

    Other-Place_320
    Laurie Metcalf, perhaps best known for her part in the television series Rosanne, is, in New York theater circles, actor's actor supreme. That accolade was well-deserved Monday night at the world premiere of the MCC production of The Other Place at the Lucille Lortel theater. There, in that venerable West Village venue, paired with Dennis Boutsikaris, her co-star from the short lived production of Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, she plays Juliana Smithton, a well-dressed scientist addressing a meeting of doctors in St. Thomas on the subject of pharmaceuticals who loses composure distracted by a girl in a yellow string bikini, a possible vision caused by a brain tumor. 

    Harrowing as the prospect of cancer is, a question arises as to whether or not she really has that dread disease-or something else. In short order we see that this professional is coping with a personal matter, the disappearance of her 15 year old from the family's second home on Cape Cod. Having created a mental picture of the daughter's life after this cataclysmic event, the inconsolable Juliana suffers delusions, breaking into her former vacation home where the new resident (Aya Cash, fine in a variety of roles) feeds her Chinese food until she is picked up. John Schiappa rounds out the cast.

    Sharr White wrote this 75-minute tour de force of narrative ingenuity, successfully accomplishing a description of the deterioration of a demented person's experience. Juliana may not be the delicate Blanche DuBois, but you feel her pain. 

    Filing out of the Laura Pels were Josh Hamilton, part of the recent Three Sisters ensemble at CSC, Thomas Sadoski of the MCC production of Reasons to be Pretty, and many others. Eric Bogosian, the famed monologist who starred in last year's Time Stands Still said of Metcalf's performance, that was the most powerful I've ever seen anywhere. Joe Mantello deserves high praise for his expert direction. A Broadway fixture, he joins the company of The Normal Heart, when it reopens, but this time as actor to be directed by Joel Grey. 

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Mildred Pierce: Todd Haynes’ Tribute to Mothers

    Mildred-pierce
    Taking the stage at the Ziegfeld last Monday for the premiere of the long awaited HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce, director Todd Haynes dedicated the night to mothers, “This is a movie about a mom. Mine passed away while we were making it.”

    Starting top down, he introduced the cast: Kate Winslet: “She delivers a seismic career defining performance,” he noted, and in her career that's saying a lot. Winslet got up, splendid in a Stella McCartney sheath with polka dots on sheer fabric, her blond waves pinned back in a French twist. The stellar ensemble followed suit: Guy Pearse, James LeGros, Melissa Leo, Mare Winningham, Evan Rachel Wood, her blond tresses done like a long Veronica Lake do. Composer Carter Burwell stood up and bowed, his newborn in a snuggly. The night extended to dads as well.

    If you are nostalgic about the James M. Cain's 1941 noir novel, or the 1945 movie starring Joan Crawford in an Oscar winning performance, think again. Haynes makes the material his own, more Far From Heaven with its take on the limitations of American women's lives.

    This is an epic 5-part film set in depression era '30's and Mildred Pierce is one resourceful woman in a way that may feel resonant in today's economy. Principled and full of pride, she throws her cheating husband out and takes a job as a waitress in a Hollywood hash house much to the horror of her hoity-toity daughter Veda. In the 2 parts shown, Veda is played by a young actress, Morgan Turner. By part 3, Wood takes over the role as the drama becomes more emblematic of the troubled relationships between mothers and daughters.

    Director Lena Dunham, whose debut film, the much acclaimed Tiny Furniture, featuring her own mother playing egad, her own mother, has a bit part in the miniseries, a nurse in a harrowing hospital scene. Ilene S. Landress, a producer of Mildred Pierce is developing an HBO project with her called Girls. You can't believe the sex these young people are having, she said of Dunham's new series, and I don't mean Mildred Pierce kind of sex, referring to the tasteful scenes with Winslet in a slip, or genteel and bare-breasted with Guy Pearce as the gigolo Monty. Added Landress of the film's locations, particularly the Glendale, California house where the Peirce family resides: We imported palm trees to Glen Cove.

    The after party at the Plaza Hotel was a riot of New York arts/film people, among them John Waters, John Cameron Mitchell, Mira Nair, Jason Reitman, Paul Haggis, Bob Balaban, Steve Buscemi. Oren Moverman, Stanley Crouch and Harry Evans. And because Mildred Pierce opens a restaurant serving only chicken and waffles, we thought the dinner menu would be a no-brainer. The surprise highlight of the buffet: short ribs.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Arcadia and Wittenberg: The Theater of Beautiful Minds

    Arcadia2
     
    Behold the brilliance of Tom Stoppard! His genius is reason enough to see the Broadway revival of Arcadia at the Barrymore, a civilizing relief ably directed by David Leveaux, just as the culture at large focuses on another kind of theater: the wild ravings of Charlie Sheen. Set in the stately Derbyshire estate in two time periods, the Romantic era 1809, and a modern 1993 featuring literary scholars who mine archaic manuscripts and letters in search of evidence to support slim career-making theories, Arcadia takes a sly swipe at the academic world, and tells a much richer story celebrating the life of the mind.

    “Wanting to know is what makes us matter,” says Hannah Jarvis, a historical novelist researching Arcadia's legendary garden.

    The play opens on a scene of privileged education. A precocious teen, one Thomasina Coverly (Bel Powley), inquires as to the nature of “carnal embrace.” Her tutor Septimus Hodge, a classmate of Lord Byron, already famous as poet and rake, answers coyly and soon reveals himself to be the subject of the inquiry, a source for household gossip, having been spotted in the gazebo with the poet Ezra Chater's wife. This scandal unfolds hilariously, and by the time we cut to the present with the heirs of the stately Arcadia, we are awed by the comedy of Byron's time as Stoppard imagines it. 

    To start with the most famous in this ensemble, Billy Crudup's Bernard Nightingale, an over-the-top academic, is all bravado. Playing a part originated by the wiry Bill Nighy, Crudup had been Septimus in the original American premiere directed by Trevor Nunn. Tom Riley's Septimus is sweet, smart, and worthy of the amorous attentions of the female cast including his ward's mother, Lady Croom (the elegant Margaret Colin). David Turner as the wronged Ezra Chater is hilarious; the character is so fey, you can understand the transgressions of his wife. Of the modern characters, Raul Esparza is understated as Valentin Coverly, even as he sits cross-legged on the table feeding lettuce to a turtle. Lia Williams stands out as Hannah, displaying the nervous energy of a contemporary writer. Grace Gummer as Chloe outstretched on the floor illustrates the physical freedom of the 20th century, as their 19th century counterparts in vests and high bodices are constrained. Still, and to the point, waltzing at the end, the characters of each time seem perfectly attuned. 

    On the night I attended, Arcadia hit a current events note. Thomasina hates Cleopatra: “The Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria.” Who can think of the famed Queen without remembering Elizabeth Taylor?

    Wittenberg  You could say that Hamlet as invented by Shakespeare is the first modernist man. Thinker to the point of paralysis, he epitomizes what it means to be human, or better, what we get by receiving the dubious gift of the mind. David Davalos's riff on Hamlet, Wittenberg, now staged at the Pearl Theatre under the direction of J.R. Sullivan, is much in the manner of Tom Stoppard's Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead, a teasing out of the Shakespearean thread. 

    Set in Wittenberg College just before our hero's life as a student is cut short by the news of his father's demise, the play's conceit has Hamlet as a pawn of his professors, Reverend Martin Luther (Chris Mixon) and Doctor Faustus (Scott Greer). Should he follow the religion of one, or the magic of the other? Sean McNall is simply a delight as the Prince of Denmark. A staple of the Pearl Theatre, McNall was a sight in pink tutu in the Pearl's revival of a Moliere play some years back. Here in tennis whites, lobbing with an imaginary Laertes, McNall looks the part of any college kid, caught in the dilemma of living out his potential, even as it comically spells tragedy.

     

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Winning Win Win, and at Guild Hall’s Achievement Awards

    WinWin
    Patricia Clarkson looked at her watch at the Chelsea Room, at the after party for the movie Win Win. Co-host with Tony Gilroy of this celebration of the movie Win Win, she would be on a plane in six hours, en route to her hometown of New Orleans to help with a theater fundraiser. All around, well-wishers for this feel-good movie of the season crammed into the small space. No one seemed to mind. The stars Paul Giamatti, a professional curmudgeon, grimaced as he tried to eat a plate of pasta. Amy Ryan who plays his no-nonsense wife with a heart of gold posed gamely with her best pal Clarkson. Scene-stealer Burt Young, Melanie Lynskey. The young actor Alex Shaffer schmoozed with his proud grandmother. Tom McCarthy, writer director of The Station Agent and The Visitor has another hit.

    Mad Men's John Slattery, and Boardwalk Empire's Vincent Piazza, Tovah Feldshuh just back from starring in Arsenic and Old Lace, Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, Bob Balaban, Gabourey Sidibe, Andrew and Nancy Zarecki, and others rubbed shoulders. And, not to be overlooked in this eh, winning comedy, Bobby Cannavale came late, fresh off his Broadway show, The Motherf**cker With the Hat.

    Marshall-brickmanj Say “Congratulations!” to Marshall Brickman, Lifetime Achievement award honoree at Guild Hall's winter gala and you will hear, “Not yet, it's early. They may change their minds.”

    No matter that Cipriani at 42nd Street was already filling up with men in formal attire like Mort Zuckerman and Tony Walton, that the other honorees, Dick Cavett for Literary Arts, and Elizabeth Peyton for Visual Arts were filing past a row of television journalists, microphones snaking through the front lobby of this opulent former bank. In the serendipity of these honors, the event featured layers of celebrations including Dick Cavett's October marriage to Martha Rogers, in a private (only her 2 sons attended) ceremony in New Orleans, a few blocks from where they first met 35 years ago. The able M.C. Bob Balaban kept the evening moving with smart quips. Even without jugglers, he kept all the balls in the air.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Miral Screens at the United Nations General Assembly

      Miral “Who would not want to see my film?” asked painter/director Julian Schnabel at the premiere of his new movie Miral. Shown at the UN’s General Assembly, with a quarter of a million dollar screen and sound equipment supplied by Gucci, Miral reflects Schnabel’s scale: out-sized and awesome. Still, his question was provocative and ambiguous, a cry for commerce amidst rumors that the film was not very good and an email campaign by B’nai Brith asking for a boycott, claiming the film is anti-Israel. 

    In fact, introducing the film in the gigantic space, and for an audience that included Sean Penn, Candice Bergen, Steve Buscemi, Zac Posen, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and many more, Schnabel asserted that he loved Israel and that the film if anything is a plea for peace. Based upon a novel by Rula Jebreal, Miral tells the story of a young Arab girl, an Israeli citizen, caught, in the modern tragedy of the Middle East. No one wants to see children suffer: the film’s narrative underscores the aching longing for a workable solution. And, by the way, this is a good film.

    Performances by a Freida Pintos Miral, Haim Abbass as the head mistress of a girls’ school and Alexander Siddiq as Miral’s father are compelling, as are cameos by Vanessa Redgrave and Willem Dafoe, who also attended. The director’s daughter Stella Schnabel plays a Jewish girl in love with a Palestinian man. Issues of violence vs. non-violence are weighed. In perhaps the most inflammatory scene, a house is demolished as a helpless family watches –an insensitive and arbitrary power play by a government obsessed with security. The film does not instigate a new critique. Rather, Schnabel enters into an ongoing discourse in Israel with intellectuals and writers like David Grossman, Amos Oz, and Yehuda Amichai.

    Afterwards, Dan Rather led a panel in a conversation extolling the fundamental need for dialogue, for finding new ways toward peace. No one could argue with that. Journalist Mona Eltahawy, Rabbi Irwin Kula, former Israeli Yonatan Schapira all agreed with Rula Jabreal and Julian Schnabel, noting the irony that it would take a Jewish man -Schnabel’s mother was active in Hadassah-to tell this story. 

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Cactus Flower Abloom Off Broadway

    Cactus+Flower
    Abe Burrows' 1965 comedy Cactus Flower would not be a likely candidate for revival with its retrograde-if quaintly hilarious-take on matters of the heart. But Burrows' musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize is now in previews on Broadway; maybe there's business in the madness.  

    At the Westside Theater opening Thursday night, director Michael Bush explained, he wanted to do the quintessential 60's comedy. Silly in the manner of a Feydeau-farce set in a dentist's office, a bedroom, a nightclub, with lots of doors slamming, this Cactus Flower still has such charm and good spirit, it makes for a delightful evening of theater. And the crowd that showed up in the teeming rain: Leslie Uggams, Hayley Mills, Penny Fuller, seemed pleased, especially with the performances of soap opera veteran Lois Robbins, Maxwell Caulfield (best known for Grease 2), and an ensemble that includes Jenni Barber, Jeremy Bobb, John Herrera, Anthony Reimer, Robin Skye and Emily Walton. 

    Of course the play is most memorable for the film starring Goldie Hawn in a blond pixie cut. But Jenni Barber, who did so well in last year's Bridge Project As You Like It and The Tempest at BAM, said at the after party at B. Smith, it was Edie Sedgwick who most influenced her look and performance. The actress went to MoMA and studied the screen test prominent in the Warhol exhibition on the museum's 6th floor. She was so open and vulnerable, without a hint of cynicism, said Barber. How else can you explain a girl who is as gullible and big hearted as her character Toni Simmons, when her deceitful boyfriend tells her he's married and she insists upon meeting his wife, the conceit that sets off the play's mountain of improbabilities. Lois Robbins said she took the role of Stephanie Dickinson, the dutiful nurse who plays along as Dr. Winston's wife, the “cactus flower,” when one of the producers said, it will change your life. Robbins laughed, I guess we will see tomorrow, when the reviews come out.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

     

  • Limitless: Just Say Yes

    Limitless-2011
    By the end of last night's premiere of Limitless, a new movie starring Bradley Cooper, everyone wanted to have what he has: the dream drug for over-achievers that keeps his character so upbeat and so focused, he simply cannot fail. A novelist with chronic writers block and scruffy hair, Eddie pens his book, learns the piano, French, gets a sharp suit and haircut, and speeds forward figuring out corporate finances for himself and for a Wall Street mogul played by Robert DeNiro. Whew! With the strength of superman, he fells the refrigerator-sized mobsters who want his stash. And keeping up with the breakneck speed of his mind, the cinematography takes you for a splendid ride.

    Bradley Cooper, so good in one of my all-time favorites, Wedding Crashers, is probably best known for The Hangover. He is simply thrilling in this movie, his blue eyes blazing with intensity. And Abbie Cornish, as delicate as a poem in Bright Star, holds her own in this contemporary caper. Next up for her, a film directed by Madonna.

    Alas, when the movie's stars Cooper, Cornish, DeNiro, TV Carpio, Tomas Arana, director Neil Burger, caught up with Patricia Clarkson, Denise Rich, Oliver Platt, Jason Bateman, Noah Emmerich, Chaz Palminteri, Ryan Kavanaugh, James Lipton, Giancarlo Esposito, and others at Buddakan for an afterparty, it soon became clear that the pills in cellophane strewn across the restaurant's tables were mere placebo. Fortunately cocktails made with DeLeon tequila were on hand for a quick fix.

    Regina Weinreich

    Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura