JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Shakespeare’s “King Lear” has been a different play every time I have read or seen it. It’s a parable about the inevitable abuse of power, a vivisection of the profoundly complex relationships between parents and children, a reflection on the seemingly pre-determined cycles of violence and decay that characterize political society. It is a moral…
Thanks to a million dollar grant from the Leon Levy Foundation, the Brooklyn Academy of Music has been able to digitize their archive. According to the new archive website “The Archives contain approximately 3,000 linear feet of materials dating from 1857 to the present, including newspaper clippings, photographs, books, playbills, promotional material, video, architectural plans,…
The infamous story of the 1894 conspiracy against French Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason is being dramatized at Brooklyn’s BAM Fisher in a multi-media production, “The Dreyfus Affair,” based on texts and music from that period. The performance by The Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC) includes excerpts from the politically charged opera “La…
Yesterday, we reported on the death of Stanley Bard, the former head of the Chelsea Hotel, which for decades served as a meeting place and living space for artists of all kinds. Today, we report on another deceased titan of the New York creative scene, Harvey Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein, who led the pioneering Brooklyn Academy of…
As Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet prepared for the first performance of its brief residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a gale-battered audience made its way to the doors. Speaking a mix of Russian and English and clad in an inordinate amount of fur, they came to pay homage to one of Russia’s premier ballet companies,…
Some sand, some buckets, a few brooms, some paper cut outs, a handful of toy cars, trucks and tanks, a kieg light, a video camera hooked up to a live feed, and a single puppet. This is all Zvi Sahar and his Puppet/Cinema team of precision performers require to tell a story that encompasses all…
Photo: Alex Rivas/Twitter “Hiney ma tov u’ma-na’im shevet achim gam yachad.” “How good and how pleasant it is when brothers sit together.” That campfire classic came to mind as I sat in the Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this month for the second of three concerts featuring Steve Reich and…
To say that you’ll never think of Lot’s wife the same way after seeing Maya Beiser’s “Elsewhere,” a new “cello opera” that recently played at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, would be a gross understatement. In the Genesis story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife has no name — let alone speaking lines…
