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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Alden Ehrenreich and Patrick Ball: The Men in Becky Shaw on Broadway

    Excuse a bit of fangirl glee at seeing Alden Ehrenreich and Patrick Ball in “Becky Shaw,” each debuting on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theater. Handsome guys, yes, they each play a form of misguided masculinity in this Gina Gionfriddo comedy. 

    The Becky Shaw script is a tour de force of bad behavior, enriched by stunning performances. Under Trip Cullman’s deft direction, the timing is brilliant for a perhaps familiar family scenario of mismanaged money after the death of a patriarch. As Ehrenreich’s Max, a kind of adopted son—it’s complicated—attempts to salvage the financial situation, he sleeps with the woman he grew up with Suzanna (Lauren Patten) in kind of an “ew” moment. Fast forwarding, she marries Ball’s Andrew, a dim but sweet writer she’s met on a ski vacation. Eh, she does not ski. Working at a job he does not like, Andrew wants to fix up an office temp, the titular Becky Shaw (Madeline Brewer) with Max. Needless to say, this is a bad idea.

    Bookending the mismatches and icky male behavior all around is Linda Emond as Susan, the widow and uber-Mom here—who needs to downsize. That’s more than a real estate strategy. 

    With all the hilarious apparatus at play, including slamming doors as in a Feydeau farce, why is the play called Becky Shaw? The playwright said she was exploring the kinds of ideals we bring to relationships. 

    Dimple chinned Patrick Ball pops on screen in HBO’s “The Pit.” In this play he’s got a dumb rescue-the-damsel-in-distress code of chivalry—that makes him perfect for marrying Suzanna, an insecure psychology PHD. He commits to tending to Becky after a calamitous first date with Max. Tenacious, she keeps on going after him—even when, cad that he is, he ghosts her. She does not let go. If we met this woman in life, we’d be scared. Very scared. “You should be,” said Brewer at the afterparty. 

    A great night for theater, we were delighted to see many familiar faces: Cherry Jones, Mare Winningham, Anthony Edwards, and a handful from “The Pitt.” Tony Kushner gave notes to Emond. We ran into Joe Mantello, directing the upcoming “Death of a Salesman” revival starring Nathan Lane. Lane of course can do anything but it is still a stretch to imagine him as Willy Loman. “Just wait,” said Mantello. “He will surprise you.”

  • Audra McDonald and “Original Nepo Baby” Gwyneth Paltrow: Honorees at the NYWFT Muse Awards 23 March 2026

    With a nod to her mother Blythe Danner and evoking the spirit of her late father Bruce Paltrow, Gwytheth Paltrow graced the stage at Cipriani 42nd street for this year’s New York Women in Film and Television Muse Awards. Being the “original Nepo baby”—in her words– may have given her the platform to dive from, but taking her privilege to the next step was all Gwyneth. Yes, she epitomizes this year’s Muse theme of “Regeneration,” being a bona fide Oscar-winning movie star, and also a major business mogul with her company, GOOP. Resilient too, she’s revived her movie actress chops most recently in MARTY SUPREME.

    It’s not that it wasn’t easy. But more, she reminded the audience of 700 rapt attendees chomping down Cipriani’s signature filet mignon and apple pie a la mode, as a young woman, her moves were under the radar, and frankly, that was liberating. Really? Friends, agents, family poo-pooed when she wanted to start her high-end beauty product line. Yes, really!

    She never mentioned the quips about her owning Miramax when she won Best Actress for SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE. No talk of her critique of Harvey Weinstein’s behavior, her coining of the phrase “creative uncoupling” after her very public uncoupling with Coldplay’s Chris Martin –hey, her son Moses was in the room, as was her now husband, Brad Falchuk. Shout outs abound. 

    But if you really wanted to get into star power, another Muse stole the show. That would be the multi-TONY awarded Audra McDonald. Not only a mega-talent in theater—most recently as Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” she’s stunning in television—in HBO’s series, “The Gilded Age.” McDonald reminded everyone of the definition of “muse” to inspire and finished with mention of her nine-year old daughter –with Will Swenson who was present—delaying bedtime while singing a girl-power hit from TikTok.

    The Muse lineup featured actress Jamie Brewer, director Patricia Cardosa, producer Jane Raab –shout out to “Sex and the City” showrunner Darren Star who was in the room. A new Muse award was inaugurated with a statue for WNBA athlete Izzy Harrison for Achievement in Sports and Media. Joy Reid, honored with the Enid Roth Award for Excellence in Journalism ended her speech with “We represent the power to be loud.” 

  • Zach Bryan Buys the On the Road Scroll/ Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!

    Country music star Zach Bryan never made it to Christie’s auction house, but nevertheless made a killing.

    For Jack Kerouac’s On the Road scroll purchase, the night could not have been more dramatic. Here’s how it went:

    Deadheads filled Christie’s auction house on Thursday March 12, eager to bid on “Tiger,” Jerry Garcia’s guitar. That went for $9.5 million, not even the highest priced instrument from Jim Irsay’s expansive collection of rock guitars. The most dramatic went to David Gilmour’s “Strat,” ($12.1 million) after a brisk bidding war between an in-house buyer and someone shopping by phone. The purchase garnered enthusiastic applause, and on my part, a wistful recognition that some people had money to burn. For me, the most exalted item, even beyond a crimson cape worn by James Brown, or a white robe from Mohammed Ali, was the 120-foot scroll text of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. 

    I had been here before, in this room, in 2001 to see Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, swoop in accompanied by Doug Brinkley, at the time writing a biography of the so-called “King of the Beats.” Irsay paid a clean $2.47 million, and that’s without the right to quote a single phrase from Kerouac’s poetic epic. That was the highest price ever paid for a literary manuscript, even more than James Joyce’s Ulysses. John Sampas, at the time the head of Kerouac’s estate, was pleased. He took me and Joyce Johnson out for celebratory drinks at a nearby Rockefeller Center bar, Joyce being Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time On the Road was published in 1957 and the author of Minor Characters and The Voice is All, perhaps the best of the dozens of biographies written to date. I am the author of several books on Kerouac including Spontaneous Poetics. At the time, I was commissioned by the estate to assemble and introduce Kerouac’s Book of Haikus.

    Now so many years later, the scroll was again up for grabs, and after a pissing war between a mild-mannered man in house and someone on the phone, the man took it for a clean $10 million plus trading fees. I was with Kerouac’s latest biographer Holly George Warren and Jim Canary, the man Irsay hired to take care of the scroll text as it traveled like a rock star making appearances in exhibitions all across America and abroad. We rushed over to the buyer to find out who he was and what was he going to do with it? I don’t know. I did not get it for me, he said. So now we are left to find out, who bought Kerouac’s masterpiece? Immediately calling Joyce to let her know, I heard her say she was astonished at what was paid for the artifact, and then she reminded me, Jack was the poorest person I ever met. 

    Eventually, it was revealed that Zach Bryan was the buyer. Bryan, a country superstar who writes evocative lyrics, has long been known as a Kerouac aficionado. Last year, he bought the Saint 

  • William S. Burroughs/ Nova ’78 at MoMA/ Remembering James Grauerholz

    The prestigious MoMA Fortnight documentary series opened with Nova ’78, a performance film from Howard Brookner’s footage of the Nova Convention, a three-day arts celebration at the Intermedia Theater on Second Avenue, the downtown event of the year 1978. At center was William S. Burroughs.

    The Nova evening at MoMA was for many of us a nostalgic romp through a vital time in yesteryear: The brainchild of Sylvere Lottringer, founder of Semiotexte, and James Grauerholz, Burroughs’ homme d’affaires after he relocated from London to New York, The Nova Convention celebrated art. Burroughs had just published a book, The Third Mind, a collaboration with artist, writer, restaurateur, raconteur, Brion Gysin, with whom Burroughs had a longtime friendship. The book, a cause celebre in France was an instruction manual for creating cut-ups and fold-ins, a useful collage method for literary arts –and, in the hands of David Bowie and others, rock lyrics. Gysin discovered the technique when he and Burroughs lived in Paris’ “Beat Hotel” in the ‘60’s. 

    A who’s who of downtown artists, The Nova Convention featured poets Anne Waldman and John Giorno, Patti Smith performing, and Frank Zappa doing his utmost on the “Talking Asshole” section of William S. Burroughs’ classic Naked Lunch. Zappa was a stand-in for Keith Richards—not too shabby.

    Howard Brookner’s documentation remained lost for decades until his nephew Aaron Brookner found this footage. Becoming a filmmaker in his own right, he restored his uncle’s brilliant Burroughs biopic, and shaped these performances into the doc. Before Aaron’s excellent work, who even knew this existed?

    Just a few weeks before, the Burroughs fellowship gathered at the Bunker on the Bowery, a windowless loft in a former YMCA where Burroughs lived when he returned to the States in the mid-‘70’s; everyone met James in the Bunker, so it was a fitting site for a memorial remembering James Grauerholz who had died on New Year’s Day. Patti Smith wore a plaid shirt in his honor and sang. Speakers included John Waters, Anne Waldman, Stu Meyers and Ira Silverberg. A Buddhist ceremony sent Grauerholz to the Bardo. And others, Steve Buscemi, Oren Moverman, Victor Bockris, Lee Ann Brown stayed on to remember their time in heady Bunker glory days.

  • Jacob Elordi in Wuthering Heights: Monster Mash

    Is Jacob Elordi now type cast as a sexy beast? The new Wuthering Heights, as reinvented by Emerald Fennell, finds fatal attraction in its leading man Heathcliff played by Jacob Elordi who seduced us as Frankenstein this season. While Guillermo del Toro found the sweet soul, the innocent child of the monster in the actor, Fennell, putting her perverse stamp on the character, plays his monstrous passion. Those eyes, smoldering yes, a veil of lashes, lush for outsized emotion. A swoon in every close-up. 

    In Emily Bronte’s creation, the character of Heathcliff is dark and brooding, called a monster, and brought into light by Catherine Earnshaw. Blond and blue eyed, Fennell’s child Cathy (look out for Charlotte Mellington) is simply naughty, the adult the humanized Barbie in the form of Margot Robbie bedecked in gaudy gems as opulent as her room as she begins to live a false life in marriage to Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), the rich man next door. 

    With Heathcliff, she’s wild and open, the sex tender—even if played against the ocean, in nature, and in the rain. Being drenched is a thing. But everyone has to come in out of the elements.

    Emerald Fennell is a master at exposing the claustrophobia of massive houses, and the boredom of those who live in them. See Saltburn, for example. Wuthering Heights was a no-brainer for her talents at teasing out the untoward behavior nurtured in these vast estates. Wanting to hurt Cathy for marrying Edgar Linton, Heathcliff marries Isabelle, Edgar’s ward. Barely a woman, she takes to Heathcliff’s brute abuse willingly, a substitute for her room full of ribbons. Mr. Earnshaw, once a man of wealth and social standing, drinks and gambles away his riches. Oh and, be wary of servants. Nelly (Hong Chau) wields her own hand at fate before Heathcliff, a dirty underling, desperate for love, turns the tables.

    At its heart, Wuthering Heights is a sublime Valentine’s Day gift: Maddening love consummated. In this sick heat, someone has to die. But as we know from Elordi’s Frankenstein, death is not the worst of it. Just ask Lady Gaga’s minions. Being alone, without the other is far, far more tragic—and dark. If Bronte’s novel was influenced by the Gothic genre in her time, Fennell has defined a Gothic for ours. 

  • Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent: A Cool Brazilian Gets an Oscar Nod

    International films have made it to top honors at the Academy Awards. Witness Parasite (South Korea), 2020 Best Picture. This year, on the Best Picture nomination list, The Secret Agent (Brazil) and Sentimental Value (Norway) have each taken victory laps at the Golden Globes, New York Film Critics Circle, Gotham Awards, and with other esteemed groups for Best International film. 

    Other top distinctions have included Best Director for Iranian Jafar Panahi (It Was Just An Accident, from France) –until now. Among international directors, Sentimental Value director Joachim Triet made the cut, alongside his castmembers, Best Supporting Actor nominee Stellan Skarsgard and a Best Actress nod for Renate Reinsve. Best Actor recognition for Brazilian Wagner Moura, whose director Kleber Mendonca Filho created the role with this superstar in mind, seemed a no brainer; he’s swept the season. While predictions are always betting odds, here’s my take:

    For Best Picture, on this year’s stellar roster of nominations, One Battle vs. Sinners—that’s the race. To give The Secret Agent its due, I predict this film will take Best International Feature. As to Wagner Moura for Best Actor, it would be hard to beat the frontrunners Timothee Chalamet and Michael B. Jordan. That’s the race.

  • Now on Oscar’s Short List: Holding Liat, a Documentary about the Harrowing Wait for a Hostage Freed from Gaza

    The documentary HOLDING LIAT tells the story of a kibbutz dwelling couple awaiting the fate of their daughter Liat Beinin Atzili, who with her husband Aviv Atzili had been kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The triumph of this film is how, under these grim circumstances it manages to hold in emotional and dramatic proportion all sides of the latest stage of the Middle East conflict. 

    The very powerful film — eligible for an Oscar, now playing at New York’s Film Forum and starting Friday in Los Angeles — should be seen by everyone because it humanizes a horrific time that resonates even more today. 

    A mother of 3 and an educator Liat remained a captive for 54 days. No spoiler here. She is now also a widow. While perhaps you might want to know what it was like, how was she treated, was she fed adequately, could she go to the bathroom in privacy, did they abuse her, Liat, who I had the opportunity to meet at a luncheon at Serafina to talk about the doc, does not want to say. Rather, her awareness that others were not so lucky is at the forefront of her thoughts, as well as the understanding that she did not have to be held for 54 days, nor did others have to remain for 200 such horrific days; she was simply not the priority of her government.

    Did that mean that her captors were humane? Her “luck” is bittersweet. Liat let on that she had the thought: she was not far from her family—her extraordinary father Yehuda and mother Chaya—if only she could write them and the children an email to say she was all right. They could maybe drop her off at a place in Gaza. She could find her way home. These daydreams occupied her. They were Hamas, after all, much younger than she was; they had made their choices.

    Filmmaker Brandon Kramer had met this family, when he and his brother Lance, a producer on the film, had gone to Israel on Birthright. When the October massacre occurred, he got in touch to find out how these distant relatives were, not even thinking they would respond. They met up with Yehuda when he came to Washington as part of a delegation to help free the hostages. 

    The Kramers began the film just hoping to document a family story, but found so much more as the speakers included Yehuda’s brother, Joel, a professor who lives in Portland, Oregon, whose views differ radically from his brother’s. Liat’s younger sister Tal, who moved to Portland, adds her voice. The family becomes a microcosm of differing opinions on Israeli/ Palestinian politics. Brandon Kramer allows the close-ups on Yehuda’s rolling eyes to tell a story itself, recognizing how much his family members are pawns in an emotional drama that sacrificed Israelis and Palestinians alike. And Liat, despite the recognition that the priorities of those in power do not align with hers, like many hopeful Israelis, works to find a path to peace.

  • Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Film at the 91st NYFCC at TAO Downtown

    Image by: The Associated Press respectfully – January 8, 2026

    The New York Film Critics Circle celebrated its 91st anniversary this week, at TAO Downtown. As celebrations go, this one was tame, not raucous, until Isaac Misrahi, presenting the screenwriting award to Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, likened performing his cameo in MARTY SUPREME as having his cock sucked by . . . I didn’t get the name. 

    Just as well. An actors’ night, many presenters and winners spoke about the craft of acting. Ben Stiller, calling the NYFCC’s Best Supporting Actor choice Benicio del Toro mesmerizing, recounted a time when the actor was asked to cross the road, which he did but not before putting his ear to the ground in an unscripted hilarious gesture. Ethan Hawke, presenting Rose Byrne the Best Actress award for her outrageous “woman on the verge” in IF I HAD LEGS I WOULD KICK YOU, noted how the “Bridesmaids” actress was asked to use all her powers at once in the role created by writer/ director Mary Bronstein. It is rare for disturbed/ disturbing women to be at the forefront of films. 

    In an adoring tribute to Amy Madigan, who pulls off a terrifying “Aunt Gladys” in the movie WEAPONS, Gabby Hoffman said they had actually met when they worked together in FIELD OF DREAMS and UNCLE BUCK, when Hoffman was six. Women are a force behind the camera as well. Filmmaker Ellen Kuras, off to Budapest to film the next “Dune,” presented the Best Cinematographer winner Autumn Durald Arkapaw for her work on SINNERS. 

    Wagner Moura won Best Actor for his role in THE SECRET AGENT which brings up another important theme for this celebration, politics. Brazil’s era of disappearances, subject of films by Walter Salles, for example, can also be written as a crime thriller. On the run, Moura’s character navigates tricky moves while maintaining the film’s moral center in Kleber Mendonca Filho’s movie, awarded for Best International Film. Expect the film to contend with Jafar Panahi’s IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT for the Foreign Film Oscar. Panahi was here awarded Best Director, and while he is working the awards season in the U.S., as has been widely reported, he faces prison when he returns home in Iran.

    Political activity is at the forefront of the NYFCC’s pick for Best Film, Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, set in the politics of 1984. PTA said he did tweak the timeframe to more closely resonate for today’s political moment. “One Battle” features a stellar cast including Chase Infiniti, who presented the award to PTA; he agreed, the film’s star Leonardo DiCaprio remains under-recognized. PTA said in an after-ceremony chat, “He’s like Tom Hanks, and Jimmy Stewart, taken for granted.”

  • 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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