BAM gone blah?

The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) has established a deserved reputation for excellence in the arts – in music, dance and theater. I have blogged on many of these, including Grupo Corpo, Trish Brown Dance and Roman Tragedies.

Brutus absorbs the impact of Antony's speech.

Brutus absorbs the impact of Antony’s speech at BAM in 2012.

Thoughtful, sometimes even entertaining, the productions have been well worth the time and expense.

This, however was not the case in this fall’s highly-touted New Wave Series, offering instead half-baked exercises in esoteric nonsense. While my sampling is limited, having attended only four evenings, of those four, three were hardly passable – We Have an Anchor, An Enemy of the People & Hans Was Heiri and one – Bodycast – was probably the worst thing I’ve ever seen in New York. 04bodycast-articleLargeBAM has taken a turn for the worse, indulging in this directionless, tedious stuff and, to add the insult, changed their ticket policies, almost blackmailing attendees into subscriptions. Bad, BAM. No.

And so we’re thinking of doing something different, perhaps subscribing to another theater or maybe even being more drastic than that.DC_Leafs_Rangers10.jpg

Hurricane Sandy XI – Egg and cheese

There were only a few people in the streets of Lower Manhattan last night, nothing compared to the crowds in Brooklyn. We went to see the the BAM Opera House to see the Brazilian dance troupe, Grupo Corpo.The performance was very enjoyable, most invigorating really and enthusiastically received by the packed house.  And then we had our cold walk home through Brooklyn, around the long lines for shuttle buses and across the Brooklyn Bridge – 41 degrees now – back into Manhattan, many of the buildings on the lower end still dark. We returned to Ward III in Tribeca, our refuge after the storm, to see what it would be like with power and lights. It was still dark, bu it wasn’t the same. It was loud – both the music and the people – and crowded. Our drinks were great, but the Narragansett was now in a glass and the Negroni had ice. We were still content and waxed sentimental about the Days of the Surge before going home to watch Saturday Night Live’s parody of Bloomberg’s press conference, all very amusing, especially the jokes on Bloomberg’s mastery of the Spanish language.

It is cold and bright again today and much of the wreckage remains.The Con Edison trucks are everywhere. As are the emergency relief vehicles, the used hoses and sandbags. But Leo’s Bagels is open again! Amazingly, the line is not yet out the door. And that is most definitely something. Egg and cheese, please.