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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Mariska Hargitay, Ken Burns, Alan Berliner: Non-Fiction Filmmakers Award Season

    Documentarian Ken Burns won the Critics Choice Impact Award last month. Many attending the dinner at the Edison Ballroom could not resist joking about this filmmaker’s series – epic length, and irresistibly historic. Every worthy subject inspires long form story-telling.

    Yet, more intimate films prevailed too: among many sweet moments at the 2025 ceremony was Mariska Hargitay picking up the statue for, My Mom Jayne, her documentary about her mother, the curvaceous platinum bombshell of the midcentury, Jayne Mansfield. Men may have the Freudian paradigm, the classic discovery of their fathers, but Hargitay’s story not only makes the tender mother-daughter connection for which the “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” star yearned, but packs a paternal surprise as well. In the true-life film world, it’s PG. That is, pure gold.

    At DocHamptons, Chris Hegedus presented the Pennebaker Award, named for legendary cinema verite filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, to Alan Berliner. The audience of filmmakers at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater –including Susan Lacy, co-director and producer of Billy Joel: And So It Goes and Marisa Fox, producer and director of My Underground Mother, a film that explores her mother’s hidden journey through the Holocaust—viewed Berliner’s latest feature, Benita, about an artist and filmmaker who ended her life during Covid. Known for films about family members, Berliner focused on a friend who, much like his father and uncle, made for a fascinating and poetic vision on what it means to be alive.

    Also screened: several films that have made their way through the festival circuit. My favorites: Cover-Up following Seymour Hersch’s fearless career in truth-telling journalism, and the beautiful and mythic The Tale of Silyan.

    Ask E. Jean, directed by Ivy Meeropol, is more than just a profile about E. Jean Carroll, a writer and television personality who exposed Donald Trump for sexual assault in a Bergdorf dressing room, and then retried him for defamation. She won both court cases and still awaits settlement. Yet, money is beside the point. The film captures her contradictions, her bravado and fragility as an ambitious and talented woman in a culture of predatory men of power and their lies. Invisible to the outside world, the damage runs deep. 

    Perhaps on the other end of women’s empowerment, Pretty Dirty: The Life and Time of Marilyn Minter, was a highlight of DOCNYC. Minter and Jane Fonda have a lively discussion about their sex lives. Who says women of a certain age are invisible?

  • David Amram: The First 95 Years at Dizzy’s Club

    At 95, Amram maintains a schedule that would be daunting to men half his age, with generosity, charm, and youthful panache. At Dizzy’s Club this week, and in celebration of his November 17 birthday, he warded off bad reviews: if you improvise, you have no material to get wrong, he joked. The audience, including Arturo O’Farrell and Barbara Kopple ate it up.

    Known to me in beat literary circles, Amram, adorned at the neck with an assemblage of multiple pipes, appears in the Robert Frank/Alfred Leslie film Pull My Daisy, from a play by Jack Kerouac. Amram composed the music for its anthem– and the music for Splendor in the Grass and The Manchurian Candidate, yes, the original one with Angela Lansbury, and hundreds of songs and symphonies. 

    On piano, vocals, flutes, percussion, Amram kicked off his set with his classic rendition of Sonny Rollins’ “St. Thomas” dating back to 1955 when he performed with Rollins and Charles Mingus at the original Café Bohemia on Barrow Street. Stories accompanied Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” a tribute to Terry Southern in Paris when he composed “Bards of Montparnasse,” and Phil Ochs’ “When I’m Gone.” Accompanied by his band, Jerome Harris on guitar, Rene Hart on bass, Kevin Twigg on drums and glockenspiel, and his son Adam Amram on congas, the delightful evening closed with the Pull My Daisy anthem, an Amram composition with words by Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac’s favorite composer, he asserted, was Bach.

    Of course, Amram knew everyone. Chatting with well-wishers after an hour of music, he spoke lovingly of Sheila Jordan, the jazz vocalist who died recently. He knew her from 1955, and performed together from time to time over the years. He remembers when she and then husband Duke Jordan welcomed baby Tracy, his generous appreciation of others unfaltering. In fact, that’s what his birthday celebration is all about. We pray, this tradition does not die.

  • “Piper No!” Parker Posey and The White Lotus Cast Have a Lot to Say About Incest and Good Parenting

    The White Lotus season 3 may have been set in hot and kinky Thailand, but that doesn’t mean it lacked family values. 

    Dressed in a lacy white gown with black trim evoking a Southern gothic look, Parker Posey revealed how showrunner/ director Mike White prepared her for the role as Victoria Ratliff in HBO’s The White Lotus season 3. 

    “Think Big Edie from Grey Gardens,” she recounted him saying.

    Seated onstage at the DGA theater with castmates Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb, Sam Rockwell, Walton Goggins,Tayme Thapthimthong, Jason Isaacs, Patrick Schwartzenegger, Sam Nivola, and Sarah Catherine Hook for a Q&A following a screening of episode 5 when her daughter exposes a ruse. She had conned her family into vacationing at the ultra-luxurious Thailand retreat so she can meditate on joining a Buddhist meditation center. Drama queen mom knows best. Parker, a master at drug-woozy drawls, applied Big Edie parenting wisdom knowing one night in deprivation no matter the spiritual reward is too much for the privileged draws the line at poverty:“You go right ahead.”

    Patrick Schwartzenegger said, “I worked with Parker Posey before, on the HBO series The Staircase. When we first saw each other now, she immediately asked, “How’s my son? What body part do you walk with?” Posey had heard about Schwartzenegger’s physicality in the part. The cast egged her on to repeat his answer. She demurred coining a term, “He walks with his mansplain.”

    The Screen Actors Guild members were rapt hearing the ensemble’s take on living in the five-star set, in close quarters with one another in preparation, a tv family. Leslie Bibb in a baby doll dress said she helped Sam Rockwell learn the lines of his super-calibrated monologue while they were on safari. Frank’s monologue, deeply troubling to Goggins’ Rick, reveals the actors’ shorthand.

    Hearing that, Jason Isaacs had monologue-envy. It’s easier to have lines, but all he does is brood, imagining killing his family and then himself. How did he prepare? The actor said he just thought of his own children. In fact, they came to the set. “Who wouldn’t want to come to a five-star hotel in Thailand?” he said. “When I suggested we invite the kids to dinner with us, they said, ‘We are your kids.’”

    Sam Nivola called The White Lotus acting boot camp. He learned from everybody, he said. His character Lochlan allegedly has sex with his elder brother Saxon (Schwartzenegger). Meticulous to the end, White insisted the brothers return to the family villa wearing each other’s shorts. Catching up with young Nivola at the Russian Tea Room afterparty, where only those with yellow wrist bands were invited, I asked how his parents, actors Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer, reacted to the salacious scene. Sam, now twenty-two, was anxious watching with them. “I’m lucky,” he said with diplomacy, “to have grown up in an actor environment.” They took it in. 

  • Jeremy Allen White’s Springsteen at the New York Film Festival: The Boss in a Melancholy Moment

    Photo by Danny Clinch that features Jeremy Allen White and Bruce Springsteen in a promotional image for the biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. The photograph was taken by Clinch and is associated with the film, which stars White as Springsteen. 

    If you are looking for the E Street Band or Clarence Clemons, you may find Scott Cooper’s film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, sad. Well, yes, sad in that the time frame –from the book by Warren Zanes–covers a childhood in New Jersey with shall we say, flawed parents, and a meltdown as he was creating the album “Nebraska.” Screened at the New York Film Festival, where fans incanted “Bruuuuuce” the way they always do, the film had a night that was far from sad. In fact, exuberant! Pleased, Bruce Springsteen took the stage in a post-screening performance.

    Alice Tully Hall is a huge space, but maybe small compared to the way The Boss can now fill a house. The Stone Pony is smaller still as the performance venue in the film where a girl named Faye (Odessa Young) hopes he will fill her dreams. Best locale though is the bedroom where we see Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen work diligently for simple truth-telling material which he wants to launch without a promotional single, without a tour, without press. Watch Jeremy Strong’s face as he takes this news in. As agent Jon Landau, he is supportive of this folly in a time when Bruce was hot. But, hey, the film’s triumph is the vision of an artist wresting his art from commerce, staying “true.”

    Jon Landau was present at the premiere, as were Clive Davis who first signed Bruce Springsteen, Julian Schnabel and his son Vito Schnabel, Paul Schrader whose script for a movie Born to Run gave Springsteen the title of his signature song. Stephen Graham, a standout as the father in the series Adolescence, and now as Bruce Springsteen’s dad, has a lock on that paternal place. As to Springsteen, we can all rejoice in another triumph: he got over his funk.

  • George Clooney: Movie Star in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly/ Engaged Citizen in Real Life

    It would be a mistake to think George Clooney plays himself in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly—a smart take on a man who, in a late career epiphany, learns the meaning of life. Cliches aside, and one-upped: Yes, he’s a movie star! A big one. And the movie plays with all the stereotypes including a heroic moment when Kelly rescues a woman’s purse from a theft on a train. Life and legend merge. Because it is Jay Kelly, superstar, the incident blows up on social media just as he—remorseful about lost moments with family– is on the train hoping to have some quality time with his daughter before she goes off to college.

    Co-written with Emily Mortimer, the Jay Kelly script includes a formidable role for Adam Sandler as Kelly’s sideman, bagman, manager, best friend, all around butt wipe named Ronald Sukenick. Ronald Sukenick!!! This is not a casual appellation but rather an homage to Baumbach’s father’s world. Jonathan Baumbach was a college professor/ novelist who with his colleague Ronald Sukenick founded The Fiction Collective; they were pioneers in self-publishing experimental novels. Along with Laura Dern as publicist, Greta Gerwig, and Riley Keough, the films’ casting is brilliant. Billy Crudup as a drama school classmate who never made it, steals the movie, despite Kelly/ Clooney’s obvious charisma.

    You could also think that Clooney was that superstar with Amal Clooney on his arm as well-wishers gathered at the Polo Lounge swank afterparty. Richard Kind is always a loyal pal. George Clooney loves to talk to everyone. When I asked him about his activism, he was quick to say, You know how that Jimmy Kimmel firing got turned around? Well, let’s just say I made a phone call.

    Regina Weinreich

  • Mark Ruffalo Gives an Impassioned Oscar-Worthy Speech to Save an Arts Space

    Wall Street Journal reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were only 29 and 28 respectfully when they embarked on the unfolding of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. Speaking to the well-heeled donors at a benefit at Guild Hall this week, for a staged reading of All the President’s Men, a screenplay based on their book, they spoke about how youth and naivete led them to make the mistakes and discoveries that led to the truth, important ingredients for free press. Woodward said he still uses the same strategy of knocking on people’s doors to speak to them. If he leaves at 9, he may be home by 9:30 if a door is slammed in his face.

    After they wrote the book, Robert Redford came calling. They hung up on him, as you do when Hollywood comes your way. But Redford insisted on making the film as a buddy movie: two guys with opposite personalities working together to make something historic. His persistence paid off. Behind Woodward and Bernstein on the Guild Hall stage were the A-list actors reading their lines. Robert Downey Jr. and Ramy Youssef led this cast–that also included Gwyneth Paltrow, Talia Balsam, Andy Cohen, Corey Hawkins, Kenneth Lonergan, J. Smith-Cameron, to name a few– in the reading directed by John Benjamin Hickey and dedicated to Mark Brokaw. The cast included Victor Garber as Deep Throat, and the Wall Street Journal team led by Nathan Lane as Ben Bradlee, Mark Ruffalo as Harry Rosenfeld, and Julianne Moore as Katherine Graham. Bernstein told a story about her, how she subpoenaed his files claiming his notes belonged to her. She feared the police would come to arrest them, and she wanted to take the fall. Much humor ensued imagining her driven to a Washington women’s prison in her limo.

    The matching of this project to save West Park Presbyterian Church on 86th Street and Broadway at this moment in our history could not be more apt. The historic church was where Joe Papp incubated his ideas about the public theater, where today community comes together to inspire young artists, playwrights, dancers, and actors like those on the stage. When M.C. Alec Baldwin asked Wendell Pierce why he got involved, the actor told his story of his New Orleans neighborhood being the worst flooded during Hurricane Katrina. This being the 20th anniversary, he remembered his effort in rebuilding his community, house by house.

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  • Lupita Nyong’O, Peter Dinklage, Sandra Oh in Twelfth Night: A Dazzling Night at the Delacorte

    PHOTOGRAPH BY EMMA SUMMERTON; STYLED BY NATASHA ROYT.

    Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is so often staged, I brought with me to Central Park, to the refurbished Delacorte Theater, the memory of prior productions of this comedy, fixating on one hilarious wardrobe detail. I couldn’t wait for Malvolio in his yellow socks, the accessory he thinks will woo his heart throb, his lady, Olivia. In character, Peter Dinklage delights wearing banana hued boots in this role in the latest Twelfth Night, clueless as to why he, so decked out is rejected and ultimately jailed. Of course, Olivia (Sandra Oh) is repulsed. Besides she’s in love with Cesario, a handsome Lupita Nyong’O, Viola in suited disguise, in love with the very buff Orsino (Khris Davis). Couplings take place as they do, mixing gender and identities. As the picture-perfect night unfolded so do the charms of Nyong’O and her younger brother Junior Nyong’O, playing twins parted in a shipwreck, each thinking the other is dead. If twins are said to speak a secret language, they do here, saying their Shakespearean lines in Swahili.

    If romcom is your thing, hasten to the park.

    The play’s subtitle, “What you will,” in giant caps across the wide stage speaks to the raucous mishaps of the comedy’s clowns. The unholy trinity of the dissipated Sir Toby Belch (John Ellison Conlee), Andrew Aguecheck (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), and Marie (Daphne Rubin-Vega) add to the spectacle, as the trap doors open to a tub where they languish and scheme. God only knows what they’ve imbibed. With Belch living up to his name, debauchery leads to shenanigans galore.

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  • Jazzy Norah Jones Illuminates Montauk’s Lighthouse

    Perhaps with a nod to her legendary father, the great Ravi Shankar, pop music superstar Norah Jones, attired in an India-inspired sequined tiger on her green jacket, performed on Long Island’s East End to benefit the Montauk Lighthouse. You cannot beat this yearly event, especially for bringing together a warm community, contributing to the Montauk Historic Society, under the Montauk moon.

    Opening for her, comedian, writer, and Montauk local Seth Herzog riffed on the venue meeting all of his criteria: one bathroom for a huge crowd, empty seats at the VIP section, and diversity. Yes, he could see many shades of white now filling in the beach chairs perched on a slope beside the legendary lighthouse. The part time Upper West Sider also wanted everyone to picture his NYC neighborhood: Bernie Sanders multiplied exponentially. Herzog nailed his description of Montauk, describing store signs: the Fudge Shop, Sloppy Tuna—all you needed was to evoke sex, he nodded to the 110 foot phallus standing over the charity event.

    Then Jones took the stage singing her signature “What Am I to You?” Accompanied by a first-rate band she introduced songs from her 2024 Grammy winning album, “Visions.” This being the very tip of Long Island, surrounded by ocean, she sang from “Queen of the Sea: ““I Just Want to Dance,” slow moving and sexy, “Sunrise, Sunlight, ooh, ooh, ooh,” and “Come Away with me at Night.” At times on keyboards, and then on guitar, she’s a virtuoso musician, jazzy, and with Sasha Dobson providing additional vocals and guitar, the pair resonated girl power.

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  • “The Marvelous Marilyn Maye” Kicks Off The Hamptons Summer Songbook By the Sea

    Quip for quip, tune for tune, Marilyn Maye does not miss a beat. People will remember this one-night only performance, –Hamptons Summer Songbook by the Sea kickoff at LTV on Saturday– for a long time. This chanteuse, a queen of cabaret, elegant in a blond bouffant, and gold and black sparkly ensemble with bling at her wrist and throat, created shows featuring tunes by Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Stephen Sondheim –songs we all know and love. This time the focus was her appearances on “The Late Show.” A clip has Johnny Carson introducing Maye for her many guest shots—59th of 76, she said later. “That’s more than me!” jokes Johnny. And that was 1975. Of course, everything Maye says comes with a jolt: she is 97 after all. Onscreen, she sings “Cabaret” then, a young waif of a woman, and in the flesh sashays onstage singing “Cabaret” completing the tune. Jazzy and true, her voice is like her, ageless.

    Whatever you picture of that landmark year melts away as she sings for the next hour and a half with standards such as “Memories,” a Fats Waller medley including “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose,” another medley: “Those Were the Days”/ “I Will Survive,” and ending with “Here’s to Life,” accompanied by a first-rate trio: Ted Firth, her longtime arranger and pianist, Tom Hubbard on bass, and drummer Bryan Carter.

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  • Wynton Marsalis Swings at Guild Hall

    “Let’s swing,” exclaimed Wynton Marsalis from the rear of the Guild Hall stage, leading into a stellar night of sublime sound featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra. Of course, this was Wynton’s triumph—a recognition of jazz as American classical music and the final stop in a U. S. and Canada tour. The 90-minute set focused on original work by these tuxedo-clad composer/musicians and included classics: Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite,” and trombonist Vincent Gardner’s vocals on “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.”

    Introducing his players as they soloed on trumpet, piano, or sax, showcasing their compositions, he kept the stories to a minimum, such as a Clifford Brown tribute featuring his own trumpet from concerts in Spain’s Basque region. “They speak their own language,” he informed the packed crowd in his New Orleans drawl, “they have great food.”

    He likened another composition to a Romare Bearden’s depiction of Harlem as seen from writer Albert Murray’s apartment on 137th street. Later on, at the garden reception, Wynton Marsalis told me how he was at Murray’s place all the time when he arrived in New York. He knew the books such as The Omni-Americans. I told him how Stompin’ the Blues was instrumental (pun intended) at a time when, a journalist and writer on Jack Kerouac, I needed to know how jazz works. Nodding, he said, “It makes my time to know someone remembers him.”

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  • Carrie Coon: The Guilty Pleasures of The Gilded Age

    Not to judge her too harshly, Bertha Russell as played to perfection by Carrie Coon, is a piece of work. Machinations galore do not make this doyenne of new money a bad person, just one you fear, and one you hope will succeed. That is the triumph of Season 3 of “The Gilded Age:” a guilty pleasure to be savored, week to week on HBO, or binge watched. This is after all a drama of early twentieth century America, with change and upward mobility built into the ethos.

    Season 1 was a bonanza for theater actors newly available during the Covid theater shutdown. Audra McDonald, Donna Murphy, Nathan Lane, Michael Cerveris, Celia Keenan-Bolger—top, top TONY winners and Broadway draws in the mix for juicy roles in this series. Kelli O’Hara as Aurora Fane is particularly wonderful in Season 3, in a role marking transitional status for divorcees—one instance of society moving forward in this time. It was a new “dawn” indeed.

    To say more would require spoiler alerts—and no one wants to miss the fun of who will be paired with whom in twisty plots that one-up the demure marriages in any Jane Austen novel. Agnes Van Rhijn and Ada Forte nee Brook, characters played by Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon vie for power upstairs, as Jack (Ben Ahlers) from downstairs cashes in on his clock invention, becoming master of his own house.

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  • Jack Kerouac: A Vision of an Alt-America Screens at the Tribeca Film Festival

    Midcentury author Jack Kerouac is the least dead of dead writers. When he died in 1969 at the age of 47, he left behind unpublished manuscripts and an untoward legacy as the so-called “King of the Beats.” His most famous novel On the Road, a road trip, a bromance, a linguistic tour de force, went far to change the ethos of American culture—finding new readers in each era. A triumph at the recent Tribeca Film Festival, director Ebs Burnough’s smart documentary KEROUAC’S ROAD: THE BEAT OF A NATION, locates Kerouac’s pervasive vibe and influence. As he did in a smart documentary about Truman Capote, Burnough turns his lens to the writing.

    KEROUAC’S ROAD is not an indie biopic, but an illuminating study of how Kerouac’s writing changed America. Voiced by Michael Imperioli, Kerouac’s words speak to democracy and what it meant to him from a working-class French-Canadian family in Lowell, Massachusetts where his mother labored in a red brick shoe factory. His father was a printer before that industry grew from linotypes to massive corporate presses shutting out mom-and-pop businesses. Kerouac was not looking for the American Dream. He was looking for America.

    Each generation appreciates this quest. Influenced by jazz, by fast-talking Neal Cassady, prototype for the book’s hero, On the Road speaks to an individual’s coming-of-age, a spiritual journey, as other Kerouac classics: The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, Mexico City Blues, and more limn that immigrant hunger to experience America’s promise.

    Natalie Merchant, Joyce Johnson, Ann Charters, David Amram, all interviewed in the film wrest Kerouac from the limitations of the “beat” label. But Burnough’s vision includes the “road” of several travelers on this journey. What is its meaning today? A woman who, like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, wants to connect with “the father we never found.” Or the interracial couple in a van, eluding the concept of staying put. That’s an alt-America.

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  • Parker Posey at the Gotham Television Awards: A Legend’s Last Retort

    The Gotham Awards in the fall celebrated excellence in film just as the awards season was heating up. Television awards used to be included in the program. Now, the small screen is having a moment with a ceremony all its own.

    “Let’s keep the arts alive.” The sublimely arch Parker Posey could not have said it better this week at the second annual Gotham Television Awards at Cipriani Wall Street, adding a serious note to the accolades recognizing television’s craft and vital contribution to culture.

    The “Legend Tribute” to Parker Posey is apt, bringing on the need to parse that word. “White Lotus” co-stars Sam Rockwell and Leslie Bibb presented the award—as guests dined on filet mignon and Cipriani’s signature layered cake, food fit for kings, and the ultrarich. Posey’s character in the latest “White Lotus” iteration in Thailand wants nothing to do with poverty, she deadpans to her husband who is about to face white collar jail time as the family, including the hot young actor Sam Nivola, makes its way back to civilization from the island paradise where Nivola’s character almost dies from a plant-infused smoothie.

    The Palladino’s, that’s Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, the masterminds behind “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and their current “Etoile,” think of their hit series as covering the parent bases: “Mrs. Maisel,” Amy Sherman’s homage to her father, a professional comedian; “Etoile” to her mother, a dancer. “Etoile” takes place in the ballet world, shifting locations between New York and Paris, with rivalling dancers; and equally competing sex partners.

    Mrs. Maisel’s Rachel Brosnahan and Luke Kirby—Lenny Bruce in Mrs. Maisel– cheered the Palladinos on. Kirby also stars in “Etoile.” Sherman-Palladino’s fast paced language was particularly difficult for the French actors, Lou de Laage told me at a recent publicity event in Grand Central Station involving a live ballerina pirouetting in a music box. Fingers crossed for a second season of this series illuminating dance’s most fine art.

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  • Remembering Ira Cohen: At the Cosmic Hotel on the Bowery

    Ever asking the question, “What is this mystery, this you and I,” Ira Cohen was a giant frump with a full fuzzy beard, a shaman, a guru, a poet/ photographer/ filmmaker. Long a fixture of downtown New York, he was beloved by many. At the Bowery Poetry Club, he was celebrated by surrealist art impresario Timothy Baum and Romanian poet Valery Oisteanu, and Moroccan restaurateur and master chef Hamid Idrissi. At the Bunker, Penny Arcade emceed, ushering onstage poets and well-wishers for yet a new collection of Ira verses. Many told wild stories of encounters with him, in Europe and Africa, in Paris and Tangier.

    Most affecting were the words of his daughter Lakshmi Cohen, now grown up with orange hair and tattoos, who spoke of her fondest memories of her dad as she and her brother lay on the never-vacuumed matted green rug in a room infused with the aroma of pot and incense as their dad motor-mouthed on the phone to friends in Amsterdam and Katmandu, in the days of land lines when phone bills went through the roof.

    The smartest man, said Arcade of Cohen, she used him as people now google. A graduate of the Horace Mann School and Cornell, he knew everything. Baum had also attended Horace Mann, and when the two met they talked through the night, a memory shared by the poets and scenesters at both venues. I for one have the memory of Cohen screening religious figures swinging their pierced penises at the Ganges, images that I cannot unsee.

    A word about the Bunker, erstwhile home of William Burroughs, and later John Giorno. A former YMCA, the building on the Bowery now houses Lynda Benglis and other artists. Back in the day, the area was so menacing that Burroughs always carried mace as a defense. Nevertheless, he was routinely mugged. The people surrounding him could not protect him from street violence, but put off Ira Cohen on many an occasion, so it seems fitting that Cohen be celebrated in this space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • White Lotus in Rajasthan: Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright 

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

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

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

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

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  • Grand Central Terminal: Always in Vogue 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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