Monday, Jan. 14, 1974

Rebirth in Brooklyn

When the city of New York issued its visitors' map of points of interest in the early 1960s, the Brooklyn Academy of Music was nowhere to be found. Never mind that it is New York's oldest performing arts complex, founded in 1861. No matter that in its first golden age its stages presented Sarah Bernhardt in Camille, Admiral Peary showing lantern slides of his discovery of the North Pole, Anna Pavlova dancing The Dying Swan and Enrico Caruso giving one of his final operatic performances. Changing times had made the Academy as outdated as the hobble skirt. Manhattan had taken over as the focal point for the arts in New York City; the Depression and a decline in the surrounding neighborhoods had turned the institution, economically, into a ward of the city. A decade ago, it was dozing along mostly with lectures and film programs.

Then in 1967 the Academy appointed a 37-year-old former dancer and fund raiser named Harvey Lichtenstein as its new executive director. Lichtenstein turned out to be one of the best things to happen to Brooklyn since the Dodgers won the World Series. Armed with a $300,000 Ford Foundation grant to stimulate modern dance, Lichtenstein concentrated in his first three years on lining up topflight contemporary dance groups who could not afford Manhattan production prices. He organized regular appearances by more than a dozen companies, including the American Ballet Theater, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Martha Graham, Alwin Nikolais and Maurice Bejart's Ballet of the 20th Century.

All the Arts. Lichtenstein's goal was to revive the Academy as a center for all the arts. In 1968 he persuaded Manhattan's Chelsea Theater Center to be the resident repertory company in the Academy's small (250 seats) fourth-floor theater (the facilities also include a 2,200-seat opera house, a 1,200-seat music hall and a 125-ft.-long grand ballroom). A year later, the Chelsea company's production of LeRoi Jones' Slaveship was so successful that it moved to off-Broadway after its three-week Brooklyn run. The same thing happened to a 1971-72 production of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and a 1973 Academy staging of Jean Genet's The Screens. Lichtenstein has also brought in a wide variety of visiting theatrical attractions, from Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Theater Lab to the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey to the Peter Brook-Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which appeared following a Broadway run.

Last year Lichtenstein hired Composer-Conductor Lukas Foss as director of the Academy's orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonia. Jazz, blues and gospel are heard throughout the year in the Black People's Music program, highlighted each fall by a festival of performing groups from Africa and Asia.

Another thing that Lichtenstein has brought in is people. This season an estimated 700,000 will pay $1,000,000 to see the Academy's offerings, compared with fewer than 100,000 people paying less than $200,000 in 1967. By adding a series of state, federal, foundation and private grants to the box office receipts, Lichtenstein has been able to increase the Academy's budget from $650,000 in his first year to $2.5 million last year.

Half of its audience, Lichtenstein estimates, comes from Brooklyn, and he regards community support as vital. The other half comes from Manhattan and other areas of New York, and that is important in another way. Brooklyn, with a population of 2.5 million, is larger than most U.S. cities, yet Manhattanites tend to regard it as an outlying province.

Lichtenstein realizes that one of the Academy's biggest problems is that "we are where we are--in New York, but not in the heart."

Lichtenstein's most successful solution to that problem, aside from his dance programs, has been in the area of theater, where he has been able to offer more venturesome seasons than anything available on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge. This year, for example, he has already put on Robert Wilson's twelve-hour epic The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (TIME, Dec. 31) and the Chelsea Theater Center's sparkling revival of Leonard Bernstein's Candide. This week Lichtenstein unveils his greatest coup yet: a three-month season by three top British repertory companies. Playgoers will be able to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Young Vic and the Actors Company hi productions ranging from Shakespeare's Richard II through Chekhov's Wood Demon to a semidramatized reading of Sylvia Plath's poems.

Roots and Flowers. A tall, bear-like figure whose bywords are "life" and "energy," Lichtenstein works in a ramshackle, sometimes abrasive manner.

Despite his ability to lure outside funding, he has not yet removed the Academy from the financial state of siege under which most cultural institutions live. In one instance in 1971, only a private gift from a board member saved the staff from a payless payday.

Brooklyn born, raised and educated (Brooklyn College), Lichtenstein studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, then danced with the New York City Opera and the Dance Drama Company. He quit to spend three years as a fund raiser for Brandeis University. This was followed by a Ford Foundation fellowship on which he activated the subscription program of the New York City Ballet, an accomplishment that brought him to the attention of the Academy's board of directors.

"When I came here, I tried to make this place come alive," Lichtenstein says. "Life can take root in the strangest places. I think we have another five years before we are in a stable situation. It won't be a quick spring flowering. It has roots. But I can feel this place beginning to flower."

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