BAM At 150

When the opened 150 years ago as “a great place where men of all parties and creeds can meet on common ground in time of need and time of danger,” First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln attended the first-ever opera there—and the man who would become her husband’s killer, John Wilkes Booth, performed in William Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Theirs is not the only startling juxtaposition in an institution that has played host at one time or another to Frederick Douglass and P. T. Barnum, Gustav Mahler and Helen Keller, Mark Twain and Paul Robeson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Rudolf Nureyev, Enrico Caruso and Keith Haring.

Surely the most astounding contrast is in the evolution of BAM itself, which has burned down, flooded or burned out several times over the years, and several times been reborn (and which wasn’t called “BAM” until 1973).

BAM bills itself as the nation’s oldest performing arts center, but it also can lay claim to being the weirdest—or, put more precisely, the most cutting-edge. Avant-garde playwright Charles Mee recalls fondly audience members being so upset at a particular performance piece he attended that they didn’t know how to express their disgust – whether to walk out, or hurl insults or objects at the stage.

It was just such in-your-face experimentation that turned the Brooklyn Academy of Music from a “big, old, dark, neglected pile of stones off Flatbush Avenue” to “one of the greatest cultural institutions on the planet,” according to Mee, writing in BAM: The Complete Works, a thick colorful book marking the institution’s century and a half of history, set for publication next month.

The book is just one of the many ways both large and small that BAM is celebrating its sesquicentennial. There will a three-part, comprehensive exhibition of rare photographs, video, and unique objects in the lobby of the Peter Jay Sharp building.

There is also an extensive new section on the BAM website to mark the anniversary: Click on a lady in a classical robe with arms stretched to the Heavens, and learn about Isadora Duncan, a “pioneering founder of modern dance” whose dance company first appeared at BAM in 1908.  Click on a scantily clad man and woman and they turn out to be Julian Beck and Judith Malina of The Living Theater, which had “a seminal influence on artists from Pacino to Warhol” and first performed at BAM in 1968. There are essays to read and a timeline to download.

Every Thursday for the next 69 weeks, BAM will offer Free Ticket Thursdays posing a question to its Facebook fans, then randomly selecting winners to get two tickets to a BAM performance and an annual BAM membership.

Timed for the anniversary, the BAM campus will expand for the first time since 1987, with the scheduled opening in June of the Richard B. Fisher Building, with a 250-seat theater and classroom and studio space.

There will even be a special beer from Brooklyn Brewery—Brooklyn BAM Boozle.

But of course the centerpiece in what BAM promises to be a 16-month long celebration will be the special season of performances, beginning on Sept. 18 with the return engagement of the Opéra Comique production of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Baroque opera Atys.

BAM will also encore the 1976 Philip Glass/Robert Wilson landmark opera/performance piece Einstein on the Beach, which will be on stage in September 2012.

Robert Wilson (who has appeared at BAM more than 20 times since his 1969 production of The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud) will also be staging his new version of the Brecht/Weill opera  “The Threepenny Opera” and will be explaining the evolution of his work when he is interviewed as part of the Iconic Artist Talk series

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which made its first appearances at BAM in 1954, will return for the last time with the the Merce Cunningham Legacy Tour, featuring the late Cunningham’s collaborations with such artists as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, John Cage, Brian Eno, and Andy Warhol.

As part of this fall’s Next Wave Festival, in November, John Malkovich will star as a serial killer in “The Infernal Comedy” a play written and directed by Michael Sturminger that will include opera arias by Mozart, Vivaldi and Haydn. In December, John Hurt will performer in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. Also in Next Wave, Dutch director Ivo van Hove will direct a stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's 1972 film, "Cries and Whispers." Melvin Van Peebles will appear for free as part of the BAMCafe Live series.

In the concluding year of yet another BAM series, The Bridge Project, Kevin Spacey will perform as Richard III from January to March of next year—a century and a half after John Wilkes Booth performed the same role in an institution than now gets some 600,000 visitors a year. This is more than twice the number of residents in what was the city of Brooklyn when the Brooklyn Academy of Music began.