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    BAM Announces a Women-Led Next Wave and Fall Season

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    The arts institution, which has shrunk its programming in recent years, unveiled its fall lineup.The Brooklyn Academy of Music will welcome its 42nd Next Wave festival this fall, with most works created by female artists, the performing arts center announced on Thursday.“We led with women,” said Amy Cassello, who became BAM’s artistic director last year after serving in the role as interim. “It just felt like a good time to center women creatives.”The announcement comes at a time of leadership flux for the academy and financial fragility that was intensified by the pandemic. BAM’s staff has declined by more than a third in recent years, and its nearly $52 million operating budget is smaller than it was 10 years ago.But there is momentum, and audiences are growing.Next Wave will have 11 events, as it did last year, up from eight in 2023. That year, the festival scaled back to nearly half of the 2022 offerings amid staff layoffs.“I feel confident that we have the number of shows that make a coherent statement,” Cassello said, adding, “I wish there were more money to subsidize and support and invest in artistic work.”The festival opens with the choreographer Nora Chipaumire’s “Dambudzo” (Oct. 8-9), a blend of painting, sculpture, sound and performance, transforming the nearby performing arts space Roulette into a Zimbabwean house bar.The lineup also includes the French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s “LACRIMA” (Oct. 22, 24-26), a choral theater performance that, in a dark look at the fashion industry, traces the many hands across the world it takes to create a wedding dress for a British princess; Eiko Otake and Wen Hui’s “What Is War” (Oct. 21-25), a fusion of movement and video testimony about war and its aftermath on collective memory and the body; and the choreographer Leslie Cuyjet’s “For All Your Life” (Dec. 3-7), a solo performance interrogating the life insurance industry’s ties to slavery.Next season will also feature a revival of Richard Move’s dance-theater work “Martha@BAM — The 1963 Interview” (Oct. 28 -Nov. 1), in which Move recreates a 1963 interview between Martha Graham (Move) and the critic Walter Terry (the playwright Lisa Kron) at the 92nd Street Y.BAM will also present a screening of “The Mahabharata” (Sept. 18), a film adaptation of Peter Brook’s nine-hour theatrical presentation of the Sanskrit epic that BAM staged in 1987 atthe theater now known as the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong. The Harvey will be the site of the screening of Brook’s (much shorter) 1989 film, newly restored by his son, Simon Brook.The season concludes with a revival of the raucous post-rock opera “What to Wear” (Jan. 15-17) by the avant-garde theater maker Richard Foreman, who died in January at 87. The hallucinatory work, with a score by Michael Gordon, will be conducted by Alan Pierson and directed by Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson, and run as part of Prototype, the experimental New York opera festival.“BAM has always been artist-centered and adventurous and risk-taking,” Cassello said, “and I think that’s absolutely necessary. Always has been.” More

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      ‘Macbeth in Stride’ Review: A Leap and Stumble Into a Classic

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      One of the most performed and reimagined works of English literature becomes a fourth-wall-breaking musical revue.“You gon’ rework a 400-year-old play just for your ego?” asks one of three witches in the new show “Macbeth in Stride.” Whitney White, who stars as Lady Macbeth in this quasi-feminist concert reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, smugly responds: “Yup. Sure did! Sure did!”I don’t fault “Macbeth in Stride,” which is now running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, for its ego. We can always use work exploring what it means for a woman to proudly assert herself, to show her agency, to dare to grasp at power in spaces where she is meant to be secondary to a man. In this show, the artist invites us to see her through the role of Lady Macbeth, breaking the fourth wall to bring us into her process of recreating a character from one of the most frequently produced and remade works of English literature. But “Macbeth in Stride” is more ego than execution, more gestures than statements. And White’s heroine is much less substantial than the very character she’s critiquing and reworking in her own image.White, who wrote and performs this piece, is one of the city’s essential director-performers and is having an extended moment on New York stages this spring. Throughout her career she has focused on directing works by and about women and Black artists, including Bess Wohl, James Ijames and Aleshea Harris.In this work, White is centered as a kind-of Lady Macbeth (she’s just called “Woman” in the script) who’s a glam queen, a lead singer in a black bodysuit. She’s on a concert stage with a live band (the effortlessly talented Bobby Etienne on bass; Barbara Duncan, a.k.a. Muzikaldunk, on drums; and Kenny Rosario-Pugh on guitar), and those three witches (played by Phoenix Best, Holli’ Conway and Ciara Alyse Harris) are her backup singers and commentators.The main medium here is song, and “Macbeth in Stride” is an almost perilously eclectic mix of genres. The first song, “If Knowledge Is Power,” features the show’s music director and conductor, Nygel D. Robinson, on piano singing with glossy John Legend-style vocals. The melody suggests something lush and romantic, like a nocturne, but when the witches join in, they evoke the TLC days of 1990s R&B, with matching dance moves courtesy of Raja Feather Kelly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘Streetcar,’ Patsy Ferran Gives Blanche a Nervy New Read

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      The London-based actress has been heralded as one of the most talented of her generation. Still, she worried audiences would balk at her “very unconventional Blanche.”Patsy Ferran will not judge a book by its cover. But covers are important to her. “See?” she said, palming a copy of a Barbara Kingsolver novel at a Brooklyn branch of McNally Jackson bookstore. “Such a good cover. Aesthetics do matter.”Ferran, a London-based actress, is currently starring in Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, just up the road from the store. A latecomer to reading for pleasure, Ferran picked up fiction, particularly American fiction, during the pandemic lockdowns and has yet to put it down. Currently working her way through Percival Everett’s “James,” with Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” cued up next, she had promised herself that she wouldn’t buy any more books. But the shelves were calling.“I kind of explore cities via book shops,” she said. “That and good coffee.”In the store, Ferran, lively, shrewd and lightly self-deprecating, (“I do my own glam,” she said wryly as she shook out her hair from a woolly hat) picked up and put down several recent paperbacks, enthusing about their feel. “British paperbacks are so stiff, you have to crowbar them open, which I hate,” she said. Ferran decided that she might buy just one. Or two. Certainly not more than three.Ferran is starring opposite Paul Mescal in Rebecca Frecknall’s revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which is running through April 6 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFerran, 35, made her professional debut just after her graduation from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in a production of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.” More stage roles followed, including her first lead, as Alma in “Summer and Smoke,” also by Williams, directed by Rebecca Frecknall. “This young actor is a genuine marvel, as hilarious as she is heartbreaking,” one critic wrote of the performance. Soon she was recognized as one of the most talented stage actresses of her generation.Small and quick, with dark, curling hair, Ferran was an unusual choice for Blanche. A great American heroine, “an aging Southern belle who lives in a state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty” in Williams’s words, Blanche is typically played by willowy, languorous blondes. (Recent New York Blanches include Cate Blanchett and Gillian Anderson). Ferran knows this. She worried that audiences would dismiss her as the wrong cover for this particular book.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Brooklyn Academy of Music Is Fighting to Regain its Mojo

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      It is the sort of buzzy production that was once a staple of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” with its Oscar-nominated lead man, Paul Mescal, has people clamoring for tickets to BAM’s production this month.The excitement recalls a period when the performing arts center consistently drew crowds to see imports like the Royal Shakespeare Company or cutting-edge work by directors like Peter Brook, composers like Philip Glass or choreographers like Pina Bausch and Martha Graham.Over the past decade, though, critics say the academy’s pioneering triumphs have been scarcer, the schedule thinner and the productions more modest.BAM’s financial condition, while improving, is still fragile. In the five years ending in June 2024, the staff declined by more than a third, the endowment lost ground and its nearly $52 million operating budget is still smaller than it was 10 years ago.“Their inability to drive revenues and manage cost escalation makes it harder to pursue their artistic mission,” Declan Webb, a consultant to nonprofit arts organizations, said in a recent interview. “You have to do less and you’re much more risk-averse and that is not a recipe for artistic growth.”In 2016, Mikhail Baryshnikov appeared in “Letter to a Man,” based on the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, the dancer, and directed by Robert Wilson.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ Is Haunted by Brando and Ghosts of Actors Past

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      With a revival starring Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran in Brooklyn, a look at the carefully weighted balance that actors playing Blanche and Stanley need to strike.“John Garfield should be doing this part, not me.”This declaration of self-doubt was muttered by a scruffy, largely untried 23-year-old actor at the first table read for a new work by a fast-rising young American playwright. The year was 1947; the setting, a rooftop rehearsal space on West 42nd Street; and the play, after some vacillation on what the title should be, “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Its author: Tennessee Williams.As for that seemingly unsure young actor, who had heard that his role had already been refused by the go-to working-class film favorite John Garfield? His name was Marlon Brando. His raw, eloquently inarticulate subsequent portrayal of a sexually magnetic blue-collar lout named Stanley Kowalski — the role he was reading that day — would not only make him a star but also help to change the very nature of American acting.Brando may have once felt he was trapped in the brooding shadow of Garfield. But that was nothing compared to the shadow Brando’s performance — captured for eternity in the 1951 film adaptation of “Streetcar,” which, like the play, was directed by Elia Kazan — would cast over every actor who dared to portray Stanley Kowalski in the years to come.Rebecca Frecknall’s London-born production of the play, starring Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Paul Mescal as Stanley, is now running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe latest of this courageous breed is Paul Mescal, who has donned Stanley’s historic T-shirt for the director Rebecca Frecknall’s London-born production of “Streetcar,” which runs through April 6 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Initially, some doubts were expressed among star watchers about the casting of Mescal, who had become an international heartthrob after he appeared in the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s “Normal People.” Wasn’t he too sensitive, too slender, too young to play Stanley? (Never mind that he was in fact a bit older than Brando had been on Broadway.)But when this latest “Streetcar” opened in London, critics heaved a gratified sigh of relief. The interpretation by Frecknall, known for her high-concept approaches to classics (including the “Cabaret” now on Broadway), was unorthodox but persuasive, they said. So was the casting of Patsy Ferran, a last-minute substitute for an injured actress, as the play’s heroine, Blanche DuBois, whose fragile illusions are crushed by Stanley, her brutish brother-in-law. The general reaction to Mescal was summed up by Andrzej Lukowski’s review in London’s Time Out: “He’s good! Actually very good. (Also: stacked.)” (While admiring the play’s stars, Jesse Green in his New York Times review, was less enthused about the production in Brooklyn.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Ferocious Paul Mescal Stars in a Brutal ‘Streetcar’

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      Desire comes a distant second to violence in a Brooklyn revival of the Tennessee Williams classic.“The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay.”Not bloody likely.Those stage directions from Tennessee Williams’s published script for “A Streetcar Named Desire” may amount to a mission statement and an artist’s credo but, 78 years after the play’s debut, they are no longer marching orders.At any rate, no one follows them. The New Orleans neighborhood in which Williams set the action — called Elysian Fields, no less — has for decades been radically reimagined: as a shoe box, a hangar, a manga, a loo. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley called that last one, directed by Ivo van Hove, “A Bathtub Named Desire.”Now Rebecca Frecknall, whose Broadway production of “Cabaret” is no one’s idea of subtle, takes up the cudgel. In the revival of “Streetcar” that opened Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a transfer from London starring the ferocious Paul Mescal, she literalizes the idea of brutal relocation. You will not find a tender blue sky or even a white building, let alone any lyricism, on Madeleine Girling’s square, wood-plank set. Elevated on concrete blocks, in the gritty dark of the Harvey Theater, she makes the world of Stanley and Stella Kowalski — and of their frail interloper, Blanche DuBois — look like a boxing ring.There is some justice in that: Stanley is, after all, Williams’s half-despised, half-beloved icon of a brute. He enters the first scene bearing a package of bloody meat, which he throws at Stella to cook — a gesture she finds briefly annoying but that also turns her on. No less than her husband, she looks forward to making what he calls “noise in the night” and getting “the colored lights going.” That’s his kind of lyricism. And when Blanche, Stella’s impoverished older sister, arrives in desperation for an indefinite stay, we see its flip side as he sets out to destroy her because he can.In Anjana Vasan’s excellent performance as Stella, our critic writes, we sense her love for her sister, even more than the usual weak-tea toleration.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Barrie Kosky Is the Director New York Has Been Waiting For

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      One of the busiest stage directors in Europe is fully arriving, at last, with “The Threepenny Opera” this spring.When “The Threepenny Opera” returns to New York this spring, for an all-too-brief visit to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it will be notable for a few reasons.For one, it will be a homecoming. Although “Threepenny” was born in Berlin, an artifact of Weimar-era culture, with music by Kurt Weill and text by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, it had a midcentury resurgence on the level of a pop-culture phenomenon when it was revived Off Broadway in 1954.And it will be performed by the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and still operates out of the theater where “Threepenny” had its premiere in 1928. The group is a trustworthy custodian of a work that is often mishandled today, especially in recent New York productions.But what is most important about this run of “Threepenny,” presented by BAM and St. Ann’s Warehouse April 3 through 6, is that it will be the first real opportunity for New York audiences to see the work of the director Barrie Kosky.Though Kosky, 58, graced local playbills once before, when his production of “The Magic Flute,” a collaboration with the company 1927, came to the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2019, “Threepenny” will be the first show that is purely his own. Which should come as a shock, since Kosky is one of the busiest and most brilliant, not to mention entertaining, directors working in Europe today.He is a director accomplished in theater and opera. His work could fit easily on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera, with a balance of intelligence and showmanship that would breathe new life into both. This “Threepenny” will be an opportunity for him to win over New York audiences. Will impresarios be watching?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Brooklyn Academy, Musical Journeys Through Minefields

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      The Silkroad Ensemble’s “American Railroad” and Alarm Will Sound’s “Sun Dogs” used music and images to engage with difficult topics.The completion of the transcontinental railroad was a herculean achievement. In 1850, the United States had 10,000 miles of track; by 1900, trains carried people, goods and ideas from coast to coast over 215,000 miles of track. Recently, historians have begun to tally the human cost of this construction project, especially among the people who performed the dangerous and backbreaking labor and the Native tribes whose lands and livelihoods were slashed through by the tracks.On Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Silkroad Ensemble brought this history to life in “American Railroad,” an evening of multimedia storytelling that probed collective scars while letting musical lineages tangle in beguiling ways. Carried by the joyful collaboration of brilliant improvisers, the performance proved that this ensemble has lost none of its verve since Rhiannon Giddens, a musical polymath and scholar of Appalachian music, became artistic director in 2020. (The ensemble was founded in 1998 by Yo-Yo Ma to celebrate the cultures along the ancient Silk Road.)A haunting tune from Appalachia, “Swannanoa Tunnel,” anchored the program. A work song created by incarcerated Black laborers, it describes the deadly cave-in of a railroad tunnel. Giddens sang it with a voice splintering with emotion over a background of harsh percussive thuds.Individual numbers paid tribute to dispossessed Native Americans, Irish famine refugees and Chinese laborers cut off from their families by racist immigration laws. While each time the cultural context was deftly sketched through specific sounds — a Celtic harp, a pentatonic tune — the interplay of instruments native to other regions revealed new affinities. Historical photographs, projected above the stage, added visual poignancy.Rhiannon Giddens, the artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble, singing “Swannanoa Tunnel.”Ellen QbertplayaAt times, though, the program had a didactic streak that felt at odds with the polycentric spirit of the music making. The inclusion of an Indian-inspired segment with fiery tabla solos by Sandeep Das was a musical highlight. But the accompanying text slide, drawing links between the transcontinental railroad and industrialization in British-ruled India, brought an unnecessary whiff of the classroom. Silkroad is involved in curriculum design in middle schools in underserved communities across the country, and at moments like these, the desire (stated in its publications) to “reset the narrative” in historiography feels heavy-handed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Murder as Family Tradition in ‘Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists’

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      Tiago Rodrigues’s play is intentionally a work of provocation, but it is also stylized to create a helpful distance from events and ideas.When the booing started, and the yelling, and then the exodus of audience members, the fascist had been orating for quite a while, spewing hatred of the usual groups: women, migrants, vaguely defined minorities. The picture of presentability in his suit and tie, he sneered at constitutional restraints.“Those who voted for us have a dream for this country,” he said. “That Constitution isn’t going to be the thing to stop us realizing that dream.”It’s not a sentiment likely to win approbation from any audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a deep blue corner of this deep blue city. But it may have been even more nettling on Wednesday night, when the headlines were filled with President-elect Donald J. Trump’s appointments to his incoming administration. In any case, it was around that line that the jeering from the crowd began.Which meant either that Tiago Rodrigues’s play “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” was working as the provocation it’s designed to be, or that after more than two hours without an intermission, people were unwilling to endure a poisonous monologue by a despicable character that went on and on. And on.“Wrap it up!” someone shouted, which was not exactly ideologically pointed. Others hurled obscenities, seemingly venting anger about real-world politics. The disturbance never approached gale force, however; an opera audience, more acquainted with expressing outrage, might have summoned greater energy.What superb timing, though, for this strange, contemplative, enticingly titled play to arrive in New York, as part of BAM’s Next Wave festival, in association with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival. For many of us, theater is secular church. Performed in Portuguese with English supertitles at the Harvey Theater, this is a service well worth attending.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More