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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story: Get Ready to Rumble

    West Side Story 2
    You will not have to ask, do we need yet another adaptation of this classic? With Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics firmly implanted in your head, a memory of the 1961 Jerome Robbins’ choreography and Arthur Laurents’ book, prepare to be delightfully shocked at how much this new version of West Side Story feels new. Maybe it’s Tony Kushner’s masterful script that takes us first into an image of urban renewal, the ‘hood, a battleground for the Sharks and Jets, being right here in Hell’s Kitchen cum Lincoln Center (shot on a lot in Paterson, New Jersey), and the wisdom we bring knowing the future: everything must change.

    But come back to that era: to the cars and shops declaring poverty, ethnicity, the warehouses, crumbling buildings—the boys styled like mid-century heroes, a bit of Marlon Brando and Jack Kerouac. Enter the sweet-faced Polack Tony for Anton (Ansel Elgort) and the Latina ingenue Maria (newcomer Rachel Zegler). Justin Peck updates the original choreography without upsetting Robbins’ vision. And then there’s Rita Moreno, the Oscar-awarded Anita in 1961, now near 90 and getting ready to be celebrated at the Museum of the Moving Image. A widow, perhaps an oracle to the young, as Valentina, Moreno bridges past and present: Spielberg has her singing “Somewhere,” and your heart aches.

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  • Gotham Awards: The Film Season’s Coolest Kick Off

    Gothem2
    At the annual New York City event at Cipriani Wall Street, bestowing serious awards and spreading unexpected intimacy, Maggie Gyllenhaal swept the Gotham Awards in her directorial debut for The Lost Daughter. Her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s short story won Best Screenplay and Best Feature; and, ç1 shared the award for Outstanding Lead Performance with Frankie Faison, star of The Killing of Kenneth. Traditionally the start of the award season for films, the Gothams prides itself on indie selections, and still manages to honor major stars.

    Kristen Stewart introduced by Julianne Moore and Pablo Larrain who directed her in Spencer, his take on Diana, managed to keep it real deploying an occasional if authentic “f” word. As Moore, asked, “Who is cooler than Kristen Stewart? Well maybe Ethan Hawke who shared a prize for Outstanding Performance in a New Series for his work on The Good Lord Bird with Thuso Mbedu of The Underground Railroad, and then was right back onstage to introduce Peter Dinklage. “He contains multitudes,” Hawke quoted Walt Whitman, praising Dinklage’s acting chops. Bonding in praise of John Malkovitch, actor to actor, well, they should know.

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  • Faith Salie Off the Air: Approval Junkie at the Minetta Lane Theater

    Approval Junkie
    That voice. I’d know it anywhere, and so would you if you’ve been attuned to NPR. You could say I’m a junkie for talk radio, and “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” is a particular addiction. A news quiz cum comedy revue, the show has gotten me from here to there, as I drive in traffic along Montauk Highway. One star, Faith Salie, has taken her story on the road, so to speak, landing at the Minetta Lane Theater with “Approval Junkie.” A monologue (co-written with Amanda Watkins) about career, marriage—she’s especially funny about her ex, “wasband,” as she dubs him, nurturing mom and dad, disparaging career coach—who while encouraging she cut bangs, basically says without saying it, she has a face for the radio.

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  • The Lehman Trilogy on Broadway: American’s Magical Music Box

    Lehman
    The epic length evolution of three brothers from Bavaria becoming Americans, immigrants in the 19th century coming by boat, would be one kind of story, maybe a sequel to “Fiddler,” picking up when the family leaves the shtetl. That this is the Lehman family, who go from textile merchants in the south to the Lehman Brothers—yes, those Lehman Brothers— bankers at the heart of the giant financial debacle of 2008,–spins this saga: the dream that arcs and declines to dust. This awesome dramatic work, The Lehman Trilogy by Italian playwright and novelist Stefano Massini, a pre-pandemic hit at the Park Avenue Armory, is now neatly performed in a rotating crystal cube—"a magical music box”– at the Nederlander Theater, lauded and playing to packed houses every night—to masked, vaxxed, avid theatergoers. It’s still a hot show.

    The trilogy may rival Angels in America as a large and unique variation of the dream. Under Sam Mendes’s fine direction, the British actors are the main event. Simon Russell Beale, the eldest brother, Haim becomes Henry upon reaching these shores. An alpha male, the actor dissolves effortlessly into the girl he will marry, illustrating just how split-second, unexpected and witty the actors’ performances are, and how the principal cast of three occupy a world. As the middle brother Mendel now Emmanuel, Adrian Lester, so evocative when he starred in Red Velvet is a distinguished presence and Adam Godley, —the tall third brother Mayer nicknamed Spud—his angles, physicality, amaze. Each—likable in this context– becomes a wife, a son in this portrait of capitalist success, despite their casual disregard of slavery, the poor, how they and their children step on their way up. Well, that’s American too, through a European lens.

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  • JR’s Spontaneous Poetics: Paper and Glue

    Paper and Glue3
    JR, French  graffiti artist and Agnes Varda collaborator on Faces, Places is infectious. His virus, a matchless enthusiasm for the creation of art, is impossible to describe: his energy is a force. Burroughs/Gysin had their Third Mind, Ouevres Croissees in French, a roadmap to artistic creation through collaboration, and JR inherits their spirit along with Varda’s. In his new documentary, Paper and Glue, he takes us to the US/Mexican wall, a California prison, the banlieu of Paris, favela of Rio, places we would never think to want to see. Infusing them with his je ne sais quoi, voila, they become the only places that matter, sites with superstars among the disenfranchised, the movie’s inscription from Varda: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscape.

    His pal Bradley Cooper introduced the nomadic JR at the MoMA premiere this week, hosted by MSNBC whose filmmaking arm funded the film. Cooper, a bona fide movie star in awe, seemed happy to just to be in JR’s posse, a growing populace of fans and volunteers helping to build his outrageous installations. At the wall—yes that wall—someone even jokes about who is going to pay for it–JR erected a structure to paste a giant-sized photo of a small Mexican boy, waiting for the authorities to shut him down. Instead, they arrived and shared tacos. That’s just what you want to do with the irresistible JR. “Kevin,” a prison inmate sporting a swastika tattoo on his cheek, calls collect and JR picks up wherever he is. He sends Kevin a signed copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Now, the prison system provides a tattoo removing system.

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  • Freda Payne at The Cutting Room: What Love Could Be –And Is

    Freida2An apt locale for a book party for a famed pop singer, the Cutting Room filled with well – wishers for Freda Payne’s memoir, Band of Gold, last week. Co-writer Mark Bego flew in from Tucson, wearing the most outstanding jacket, a print of black & white with sparks of bold color. Yes, it was rock n’roll –without the music. And Payne, resplendent in red, greeted everyone with a kiss and hug. Of course, I knew Freda Payne’s most famous pop tune, “Band of Gold,” grew up with its sound in my ears, her great voice on the proto-feminist lyrics: Left on her wedding night, she laments, all that’s left is a band of gold—and memories of what “love could be.” It did seem like a turning point in 1970. For Freda Payne, a jazz vocalist of note, this was a breakout, flying high on the pop charts.

    Up next for her is a new release, “Freda Payne: Let There Be Love,” featuring duets with Dee Dee Bridgewater, Kenny Lattimore, Kurt Elling. With Johnny Mathis, her rendition of the Gershwins’ “They Can’t Take That Way From Me” is an inspiration. She is set to perform at Birdland on November 22.

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  • Last Night in Soho Hits a Nerve

    LastNight in SohoHard to put a finger on what makes Edgar Wright’s latest movie, Last Night in Soho, so deeply affecting. Is it the fascination with Anya Taylor-Joy’s indelible performance? So good at grabbing the eye in The Queen’s Gambit, Taylor-Joy is mainly a phantom in this coming-of-age horror movie set in a sinister London in the ‘60’s when everyone was swinging until they were not. Called Sandie, she haunts Eloise’s fantasies of a time gone by, when her mother came to the big city from the countryside to some tragic end. At the beginning, Wright lures you in: you think Eloise (the lovely Thomasin McKenzie) is a stand-in for Audrey Hepburn, twirling about in a frilly frock, mirrors galore in her bedroom, focused on fashion. Ingenue comes to London to learn her craft and is instead caught up in the horrors of exploitative men—such as Matt Smith, sporting a devilish seductiveness in a James Dean hair swoosh– who steal their dreams.

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  • Odessa Young, Olivia Colman, Penelope Cruz at the Hamptons International Film Festival If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

    Cruz
    Australian actress Odessa Young exhibits poise beyond her years. At 23, the star of Mothering Sunday, screened at the recent Hamptons International Film Festival, commanded a leather sofa at the Maidstone Inn in East Hampton, ready to promote her film. With her was her co-star Josh O’Connor, Emmy winner for his role as Prince Charles in The Crown. The two are a hot item in the movie, flirting, making love, unselfconsciously intimate, unclothed, under Eve Husson’s fine direction. The nudity, beside the point, was never mentioned. The actors instead raged on about who had the closer friendship with the elder star each adored, Colin Firth. Young was certain she was the one. O’Connor wisely let that rest.

    The “mothering” of the title has to do with a day off, a family time in fact kept for their trysts. Young’s character, an orphan working as the well-to-do family’s housekeeper, has no family obligation, and as the bereaved mother (Olivia Colman in a small but memorable role) tells her; therefore, she would not, she says, experience loss; the opposite is true.

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  • Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers Closes The New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz is Spain’s Sophia Loren

    Cruz

    Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers Closes The New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz is Spain’s Sophia Loren loves women. He also loves actors. He could not have been more passionate introducing the stars of his new movie, Parallel Mothers, closing night of the New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz and Milena Smit. Beautiful women, one older, the other younger, they play women who bond in a maternity ward, each birthing a daughter, and if you know this Spanish auteur’s oeuvre, the event occasions the usual high stakes emotional melodrama for which he famously directs the women to pull back the tears.

    For this film, he folds their stories into a historical memory, a time when Fascists came door to door in the Spanish countryside arresting men, shooting them, their fates tied together with barbed wire in mass graves. Having been told of this horrific event by her grandmother, Cruz’s Janis (named for Janis Joplin) seeks to unearth this site in her village so that the men—fathers, brothers, uncles– can be properly mourned and remembered.

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  • The First Wave Opens the Hamptons International Film Festival

    Guild Hall Film Festival2021
    The opening night film is tough, warned a programmer at the HIFF, the beloved festival in person after the pandemic shutdown last year. It’s Matthew Heineman, I said, knowing that this documentary filmmaker embedded with Mexico’s cartels in his film, Cartel Land; of course it is tough. If you can insinuate yourself with murderous drug traffickers, might the hospital wards overwhelmed by Covid be a good subject. But here’s the unexpected: The First Wave covers a tough subject with enormous heart.

    Ahmed, a police officer, overweight, and diabetic oozes pus on a hospital bed. A nurse, Kelly, knows he’s a family guy with young kids; she’s determined to help him make it through. He does not look so good, going in and out of ventilators. Not a good sign. We check in on him as he strains to have face time calls with his wife, Alexis, and their children. Other families come into view: one is a woman who just gave birth now fighting for her life. You know these stories and hundreds like them.

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  • The Power of the Dog: Jane Campion’s Hills are Sexy

    Power of the dog
    Who can forget Harvey Keitel’s full-frontal nudity in The Piano? How daring was Jane Campion’s female gaze in her 1993 feature! Now with her new film, The Power of the Dog, get ready for a well-hung Benedict Cumberbach. Based on Thomas Savage’s novel, The Power of the Dog, the film is shot in New Zealand, a stand in for 1925 Montana; the landscape stars, not that Cumberbach,

    Kirsten Dunst, and Jesse Clemons don’t do their part with superb performances, as well as Kodi Smit-McPhee as Peter, a young, lean, fey boy, not yet at ease with his eye for men. Following a New York Film Festival screening, when asked about the prominent, imposing natural setting, Campion admitted, she found hills sexy.

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  • Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground at the New York Film Festival: Homage to a Bygone Era

    Velvet
    Film at Lincoln Center had a grand plan for Todd Haynes’ new film, The Velvet Underground. They would bring extant founding members of the band John Cale, Maureen (Mo) Tucker, for a performance at the movie’s New York Film Festival opening. That, sadly, was not to be. The premiere, though, with a posh party at Jazz at Lincoln Center, celebrated the city’s creative energy from which the New York Film Festival emerged, and the music that influenced generations of artists to come.

    A vivid portrait of the band, yes, The Velvet Underground is a deep dive into the historic artistic period of New York in the ‘60’s, especially showcasing the avant-garde filmmakers who shot evocative footage: Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas. The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is a treasure trove of this rare material. The great Ed Lachman shot the interviews in 2018: Mekas at 96 was first.

    The film is an homage to these underground filmmakers as well as to Lou Reed, whose teen years on Long Island, complicated sexuality and drug use provide the backstory for his artistic development. Studying poetry with Delmore Schwartz, Reed read Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby, Jr., and Arthur Rimbaud. Early on, he proclaimed he would be a rock star.

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  • No Time to Die: The Sublime Seductions of Lea Seydoux

    James Bond 2
    The last James Bond feature to star Daniel Craig, No Time to Die, picks up where the last, Spectre, left off, with James succumbing to love, and a life with Madeleine, the irresistible Lea Seydoux. Off they go on a Rome adventure, carefree in James’ Aston Martin, with “all the time in the world,”—that line alone should send off waves of foreboding. Rome is Vesper Lynd territory, and sentimental as Bond has become, he must visit his former love’s burying place. Boom! Forget retirement! Bond is off and explosive!

    In fact, explosions galore! Fancy cars showing off their equipment! We’re off and running through the many Bond tropes: breathtaking vistas and eye popping laboratories of menacing threats to the world. Among the villains, Rami Malek makes a most chilling appearance as a damaged child gone amok on revenge. “Who’s the blond?” asks Bond eyeing a particularly fawning, smiley sidekick to the CIA’s Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) named Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen). But some heavy lifting belongs to the gun-toting women: Lashanna Lynch as Nomi, a new 007 with 007 chops, Ana de Armas as Paloma, amazingly adept at target practice in crowds, party gown unruffled, and finally Madeleine Swann herself, in for the kill. The girl power is through the proverbial roof!

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  • Joel Coen’s Tragedy of Macbeth Opens the NYFF: Let It Come Down

    Denzel
    As a tragic hero, a deeply flawed man, Denzel Washington was perfect for the role of Macbeth. He’d done downcast/larger-than-life before, say, in August Wilson’s Fences, and now in Joel Coen’s new film that opened the new season’s New York Film Festival, his Macbeth oozes Shakespeare’s eternal wisdom: It’s not that good to be king.

    When Coen was asked whether Washington was his first choice for the role, his producer, Lady Macbeth herself, Frances McDormand said, “There’s no list for Macbeth. You must be born to it.” Seated between Coen and Washington, her two husbands so to speak, in life and in tragedy, on the Walter Reade Theater stage for a post-screening press conference, she professed to have instigated the project, having slept walked in Lady Macbeth’s shoes since she was 14. While there have been many Macbeths through the centuries, this one, in sumptuous and austere black & white most closely follows Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, and yet Roman Polanski’s was referenced as well. Discussing the age of this murderous couple, the usual idea is to make them young and ambitious. McDormand and Washington make them older, passed over by the king, and wanting to get their due. We can attest to that feeling, Frances and Denzel, revel in a private joke.

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  • Alessandro Nivola’s Breakthrough in The Many Saints of Newark

    Gossip
    How was Tony Soprano “made?” That’s the through line for the long-awaited prequel to HBO’s Sopranos series, The Many Saints of Newark. At a stellar premiere this week at the Beacon Theater, Robert DeNiro, who knows a thing or two about mobsters, along with Tribeca Film Festival partner Jane Rosenthal—greeted a packed, masked house of the show’s creators, veteran actors, as well as devotees dressed to kill. As creator David Chase introduced the superb cast, much hooting and shouting, I love you, rang out–well, this was a celebration. With no room for this feature to tank—instead, it radiated excellence intertwining the Soprano’s trademark violence with values of the family kind.

    Tony (a wonderful Michael Gandolfini trying on his late, great father’s shoes) is just a kid here, troubled but smart, a born leader, taking notes from a variety of paternal figures, especially his uncle Dickie Moltisanti played with psychotic charm and menace by Alessandro Nivola. You have never seen this actor this good, turning from lover to murderer on a proverbial dime. At the Tavern on the Green afterparty, Vera Farmiga, Tony’s mother Livia in the film, could not stop talking about Sandro, how she could not take her eyes off his every gesture. She, in turn, transformed to play the Soprano matriarch, brings the mob wives’ domineering submissiveness to new levels of humor and delight. John Magaro as Silvio Dante gets a big laugh as we see him walk that walk. Billy Magnusson as Paulie Walnuts frets over the blood stains on a new jacket as he tortures, making a mess using a drill. They almost got Corey Stoll as Uncle Junior to sing. With its sly humor and nod to the popular, game changing series, the movie creates its own universe—this is not Philip Roth’s Newark.

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  • Hitler’s Tasters at Guild Hall: A Fresh Take on the Evil Men Do

    Guild Hall
    After writing a play about German girls tasked with tasting food prepared for Hitler, Michelle Kholos Brooks worried about using der Fuhrer’s name in its title. She asked her father in-law, who just happens to be Mel Brooks, who famously featured Hitler in the title of a musical within the iconic musical The Producers: “Springtime for Hitler,” you may recall—in the attempt to be as offensive as possible. His answer: “You must.” He insisted.

    The playwright told this story following a production of her play at Guild Hall this weekend, in a conversation with The Producers’ director/choreographer Susan Stroman. Scheduled for a run at 59 East 59, Hitler’s Tasters, based on a little-known pocket of World War II history, was put on hold, as were so many projects when COVID hit. Of the 15 girls made to risk their lives for the good of Germany, only one, Margot Woelk, survived. The others, murdered as the Allies advanced—well, they were just on the wrong side of history. Woelk was raped, but lived on till her mid-90’s. From this slim account, Michelle Kholos Brooks embroidered the story of five such girls, dancing, dreaming, fantasizing about boys, rejoicing as they lived another meal.

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  • Hamptons Journal: Susan Stroman Weekend at Guild Hall: Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Brad Oscar, and Mel Brooks Zoomed, Little Dancer Preview

    Producersa
    Starved for Broadway’s reopening, a happy crowd packed Guild Hall for an evening of clips and anecdotes about The Producers, the winner of the most Tony awards of any musical in history. On a panel introduced by choreographer Susan Stroman, a winner of 5 Tonys herself, the show’s stars Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, and Brad Oscar quipped and reminisced about the play’s Chicago debut, and the run on Broadway, shut down for 3 days in the aftermath of 9/11, but then it was Rudy Guiliani who urged everyone to get back to work. People did not know whether it was appropriate to laugh, said Oscar. And of course, the show offered the audience a way to grieve less for a two-hour period, Stroman remembered. Nathan Lane performed, but scheduled for a vacation he decided to take, he joked, “If I cancel my vacation, the terrorists won.”

    And so the evening went with Lane recounting his first encounter with Mel Brooks in a swimming pool at the Ritz in Paris. Anne Bancroft, finished with her swim, went up to her room, and Lane thought, Mel Brooks is in the pool with me instead of with Anne Bancroft. He also remembered that it was Harvey Weinstein, a backer at the time, who read the all-important New York Times review at the opening night party . . . “and then went off to pee in a flower pot” . . . conflating the producer’s crimes with another #Metoo accusee. Matthew Broderick remembered people coming to the door, every performance someone else would show up, Al Gore, for example. Lane said Bill Clinton came, shook hands, but kept his eyes on Cady Huffman, the show’s splendid Ulla. But they were all in awe when Gene Wilder, the original Leopold Bloom, stopped by.

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  • Kathy Hochul: At Brunch at Patti Kenner’s

    Bb copyWhen Patti Kenner sent out the brunch invite with Kathy Hochul for a date in early August, this seemed like tour-stop as usual for the lieutenant governor–to a lovely aged-cedar house just a stone’s throw from the legendary Maidstone Club and golf course in East Hampton. Even the postponement till today seemed normal, until the governor stepped down and, now we were greeting the first female to hold the highest spot in the state, the 57th governor of New York.

    Her theme –breaking the glass ceiling—went from goal to fait accompli—as she spoke about her realization early in political life that little girls were looking at her. “Of course, I am ready on day one,” she told the enthusiastic crowd sipping fresh squeezed orange juice and munching on lox and bagels, “that’s what lieutenant governors do”—train for this moment. This was indeed the historic moment–she will get to summon all that leadership strength and moxie for a year before New Yorkers get to vote her in.

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  • Hamptons Journal: Authors Night: One Cocktail Party Plus a Four Day Festival of Books

    BOOK
    Weary of pandemic year lockdown, I was pleased to attend Authors Night 2021 in person under a tent on the East Hampton Library grounds, a scaled back celebration of books and the people who write them. Gone (temporarily) is the voluminous tent in a large field that could hold150 authors. Twenty sat at a long table behind their books in piles: Robert Caro with Working, film critic Jeffrey Lyons’ Hemingway and Me, a memoir of his bonding with the legendary author over bullfights, the latest cookbook from Florence Fabricant (The Ladies’ Village Society Cookbook) seated near the team Hillary Davis and Stacy Dermont, writers of The Hamptons Kitchen. What could be more geared for the pairing of land and sea?

    Night life and the social scene! Noel Hankin with his wife Gwen sat behind piles of After Dark:Birth of the Disco Dance Party, about the clubs in midtown that inaugurated the era of Studio 54and celebrity culture. An homage to one person who never missed the party scene, Gwenn & Steven Stolman’s Bill Cunningham was There: Spring Flings and Summer Soirees, sold out almost immediately. Stolman explained how he helped Kurdewan, Bill Cunningham’s editor at The New York Times, assemble this collection of the photographer’s work after they toured the photographs cross country. As  Anna Wintour so aptly put it, “Everyone dressed forBill.” The Vogue icon is a star of Thomas Maier’s All that Glitters: Anna Wintour, Tina Brown,and the rivalry inside America’s Richest Media Empire.

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  • Hamptons Journal: Bay Street’s Camelot, Robert Longo at Guild Hall, Diana Frank at Tripoli Gallery

    Camalot
    Legends of King Arthur and his court are having a moment: The Green Knight in theaters, and out east, Bay Street Theater’s production of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot –under the stars! Now a classic, its signature song “If Ever I Would Leave You” sends a particular nostalgic chill—ah love—especially for the musical theater genre that Bay Street does so well! Remember the glorious revival of Annie Get Your Gun, Bay Street’s very last production before the COVID shut down? Or the intimate production of Evita a year before? With Camelot–outdoors—BayStreet’s setting conveys less castle and more country as Camelot wields its special charms.

    King Arthur in this imagining is a fair and just ruler, looking for equal representation in his governance, hence the knights’ round table. His liberal ideas come after he meets and weds Guenevere; at first, a dated gender bias marks the musical’s first act, especially brow-raising in our current discourse on the roles of men and women. The king’s attitudes progress when Sir Lancelot enters the story, as Arthur (Jeremy Kushnier), “Jen” (Britney Coleman), and “Lance” (Deven Kolluri) sing about good leadership, marriage, and loyalty, all performances solid and square. But, in this three-way expression of courtly love, a stylized representation of king and his knight/ knight and the queen –where the younger pair fall in love at their own peril, heat would be good. But that does not come till the second act.

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  • Hamptons Journal: Graham Nash in Montauk/ Longhouse/ Chuck Manion’s Paintings at Duck Creek

    Crosby
    OM—though that’s not my mantra. Dan and Maureen Cahill hosted an event for the David Lynch foundation to support veterans by providing them with TM—transcendental meditation– life changing according to most practitioners, some of whom attended the concert and sit-down dinner on a gorgeous property between the old and new highways leading into the town of Montauk, with an ocean view, a large vegetable garden, and a chicken coop. 

    Milling about on the manicured lawn, drinking wine, munching on canapes, attendees—among them Drew Barrymoore in an oversized hat pulled down (I took her for Julianne Moore at first, who really does live in Montauk) and Paul Jarrod Frank, MD, author of The Pro-Aging Playbook—(can’t miss the irony of that)–the night recalled Edenic times. Bob Roth led a meditation.

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  • Bob Balaban Directs 2020 at Guild Hall: Laughing Off COVID

    Screen Shot 2021-07-24 at 9.49.10 AM copy
    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.‘Some of the actors are serious,” warned Bob Balaban, a tad nervous as he greeted giggle-ready well-wishers. “I hope you like this experiment.” Under his fine direction, Paul Hecht, Susie Essman, Talia Balsam, Mercedes Ruehl, Isaac Mizrahi, and Ben Shenkman performed works by Sarah Ruhl, Lynn Grossman, Jon Robin Baitz, Paul Rudnick, Simon Rich, and R. G. Masons.

    The pairings were perfect: In Rudnick’s “Play Bills,” Mizrahi camps his quarantine, imagining Hugh Jackman, Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Nathan Lane coming to his apartment to sing for him, a collision of Broadway talents vying to perform. Ruehl stole it in Jon Robin Baitz’ contribution, “All the Old Familiar Places,” as a woman desperate for contact, and vital ç gloss, in an eternal loop with the pharmacy’s phone voice recording. Who could play that unseen role? Balaban, of course. Did the order go through? The pandemic may have pushed this woman over the brink, but this engagement with the automated world finished the job. Who among us has not suffered that?

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  • Remembering Anthony Bourdain in Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner

    Bodin2 copy
    The Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville assembled much evocative footage of his latest subject, Anthony Bourdain for his movie Roadrunner, even controversially putting words in the celebrity chef’s mouth—literally using A. I. While the film’s critics are abuzz over this technique, Anthony Bourdain’s life and work are overall well served in Neville’s treatment as he tries to untangle Bourdain’s sad demise. Bourdain was first a writer, and sadly, a suicide. If the viewer had not read the 2018 headlines, that news comes at the movie’s start. This is not going to end well, he says, and by the documentary’s end, there’s not a dry eye on the screen.

    Bourdain’s taste for artistic bad boys–Burroughs, Genet,— was not merely literary. You get a sense of his lust for extreme states of consciousness. He disparaged Kerouac, by the way, who might have been a forebear for a man on the road. Beyond his work in Les Halles’ kitchen, his distinct writerly voice, and penchant for drugs, Bourdain played a role as a subversive food ambassador. What I liked best about his sensibility was his sly political slant. In 2014, at Guild Hall, when NYT food writer Florence Fabricant asked CNN’s Anthony Bourdain, which country was most surprising, he quickly answered Iran. Most Americans had not been there, and he seized a moment of opportunity. Now, he said ruefully, would not be the time. That was the Anthony Bourdain everyone fell in love with, the celebrity food maven who sniffed out countries for his “Parts Unknown” series, favoring smelly dysfunction over orderly functionality. Iran surprised him with a people that had the attitude, “Are you American? We don’t care what the government is doing; welcome, we want to know you. In a Teheran restaurant where they put flags on diners’ tables, they apologized, Sorry, all our American flags were burnt.”

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  • Hamptons Diary: Samuel Waxman Benefit and Mike Birbiglia at Guild Hall

    Mike copy
    After a year and a half of sussing out a pandemic, surge-no surge, vax-no vax, mask-open face, it was refreshing to actually hear that cancer kills more Americans per year than Covid did in its tragic scourge. Not that anybody wants to hear about a deadly disease of any kind—or killing. In fact, it was a happy moment to be in a somewhat crowded Bridgehampton tent with glamorously dressed Hamptonites some of whom were wearing high heels as they tread across the grass, the property of the Fishel family for the annual Samuel Waxman’s Cancer Research Foundation Benefit. As I do every year I attend this fun party, I pondered an irony: my mother, the late Pola Weinreich died in the care of this world-renowned oncologist at Mount Sinai in 1996. Should I say something when I see him, remind him of an event commonplace to him and devastating to me? A sign of a good doctor, Samuel Waxman always very much wants to talk about her demise and the deadly disease that he was hoping to cure in his lifetime with the foundation he created so many years ago. “Did we do whatever we could for her,” he asks, caring. “Thank you for coming.”

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  • The Garden as Art: Longhouse/ The Return of Guild Hall’s Popular Tour

    Longhouse
    Textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen died in December of 2020, but Longhouse, the spectacular arts reserve off East Hampton’s Northwest Woods continues his tradition with an exhibition of his work. Influenced by his travels, the show is a glimpse into the adaptation of worldly visions into a uniquely American aesthetic. Of course, that’s only one reason to visit Longhouse, which features sculpture throughout, such as an iconic geodesic dome from Buckminster Fuller and Yoko Ono’s “Wishing Tree.” And what about the gardens, and arches of bright baby pink roses!!!!

    Guild Hall returned to its tradition, “The Garden as Art” tour featuring artists’ work on the grounds of their East End sanctuaries. I’d like to tell you that Tony Ingrao and Randy Kemper’s gorgeous grounds with its statuary and expert landscaping was my favorite. Or the artist Ross Bleckner’s studio left open for all to see, particularly showcasing the paintings so influenced by gardens. The “best” distinction goes to Tucker Marder who took visitors around his “Folly Tree Arboretum,” speaking of each tree and its specific ecological distinction: the “Moon Tree,” for example, a clone of a Sycamore that went to the moon as a seed with astronaut Stuart Roosa in 1971 as part of the Apollo 14 mission.

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