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.”
The academy says its 2024 financial reports are not yet ready. But in 2023, BAM laid off 13 percent of its staff — cutting 26 positions — to help fill what officials called a “sizable structural deficit.”
In a recent interview at BAM, Amy Cassello, the academy’s artistic director, said the academy is trying to be fiscally responsible while remaining artistically ambitious. “We are working on right-sizing our budgets, which obviously impacts our programming, but I also think that’s what puts us on the path to growth,” she said. “And in the path to growth, we will get back to where we were and maybe even bigger.”
BAM is far from alone in showing signs of strain. Cultural organizations across the country are struggling financially with reduced income and raided endowments, as the pandemic, aging audiences, rising labor costs, declining philanthropy and competition from streaming services take their toll.
The Guggenheim Museum last month announced that it was laying off 20 employees across the museum — or 7 percent of its staff — and the Brooklyn Museum announced layoffs to address a $10 million budget deficit.
“It’s a very difficult time for culture,” said Anne Pasternak, the Brooklyn Museum’s director.
But the decline at BAM predates the pandemic and speaks to what some view as the institution’s dilemma — some find its programming too safe now, others too risky. While it’s often mainstream fare that pays the bills, cutting-edge material has long been the academy’s brand.
“I used to go to BAM in the ’80s and ’90s once every couple of weeks and I’ve only been a couple times a year in the last few years,” said the performance artist Laurie Anderson, for whom the academy has long been a creative home. “Sometimes the programming wasn’t something I was so into — not as experimental. I like stuff that’s way out on a limb.”
“When BAM was at its peak, they had that part of the field to itself — exciting and different work that people hadn’t seen in this country,” said Michael M. Kaiser, chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management and former president of the Kennedy Center in Washington.
To its supporters, remembrances of what BAM once was are unfair and unrealistic, given a changed world. They also point to the institution’s strong spring lineup, which, in addition to “Streetcar,” includes the Berliner Ensemble production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera,” directed by the acclaimed Barrie Kosky; the Batsheva Dance Company’s “Momo”; and the composer Max Richter’s performance with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.
“BAM is getting Barrie Kosky to New York City and the Met is not,” Joseph V. Melillo, BAM’s long-serving impresario, said, referring to the Metropolitan Opera. “Yes, they have to do less, but the quality is still there. They’re rebuilding — everybody’s rebuilding.”
BAM also continues to be a crucial hub for Brooklyn, serving as a catalyst for other economic development in the area. There are now 60 institutions in the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance, including the Mark Morris Dance Center, Theater for a New Audience, BRIC and UrbanGlass.
“BAM’s historic role within Brooklyn is important, because it has given other cultural organizations the opportunity to partner,” said Toya Lillard, the executive director of 651 Arts, which is across the street from the academy and dedicated to African diasporic performance.
But others note the structural issues that continue to weigh BAM down. Recent fund-raising has been less robust and leadership turnover has been constant, with the announced departure last month of Gina Duncan after three years as president.
The academy’s previous stewards had served for decades. Harvey Lichtenstein was executive director for 32 years; Melillo was artistic director for 35; and Karen Brooks Hopkins worked 36 years for the academy, including 16 as president.
But Hopkins’s successor, Katy Clark, who left in 2021, served for only six years. The artistic director David Binder, left in 2023 after just four years.
“Particularly in times of financial stress, the quality and consistency of professional leadership and sound governance could not matter more,” said Reynold Levy, the former president of Lincoln Center and an expert on nonprofit institutions.
A Long, Illustrious History
For an organization noted for its fresh and adventurous pushing of boundaries, BAM has a long history as a New York cultural landmark. Founded in 1861 — eight years before construction began on the Brooklyn Bridge — people from Manhattan had to take ferries to attend performances there, such as concerts by the Philharmonic Society of Brooklyn.
In 1908, BAM’s new Beaux-Arts building opened on Lafayette Avenue in Fort Greene, but it initially struggled to attract theatergoers to what was then a gritty area. In 1968 the interest in attracting Manhattanites led to the creation of the BAMbus, which transported audience members back and forth to performances at the 2,096-seat Howard Gilman Opera House. (The bus was discontinued in 2013 because of declining ridership and financial pressures.)
BAM began to burnish its international reputation when Lichtenstein took over as executive director in 1967. In 1983, he created the Next Wave Festival, an important showcase for innovative dance, music and drama that established BAM as an incubator of the artistic vanguard.
The physical plant also expanded. The BAM Harvey Theater opened in 1987, then a cinema complex, then the BAM Fisher building in 2012, which includes a theater, rehearsal studio and classroom. In 2019, BAM Strong opened, containing a renovated Harvey Theater, art gallery, roof deck and patron lounge. In January, BAM opened BAM KBH, which houses archives, a reading room, cinemas and a flexible performance space, in the L10 Arts and Culture Center, a multidisciplinary arts hub.
Programming flourished. In 2003, BAM presented the Royal National Theater and Market Theater of Johannesburg’s production of “The Island,” originally directed by Athol Fugard; William Christie conducting the Baroque musical ensemble Les Arts Florissants in the Paris National Opera production of Rameau’s “Les Boréades”; and Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s world premiere of “Split Sides,” to live music performed by Radiohead and the Icelandic band Sigur Rós.
Financially, the organization reached its heights in 2015, when BAM took in about $24 million in earned revenue. But the income began to slump even before the pandemic took its toll. Between 2015 and 2019, performance revenues dropped in half, to $8.6 million from $17 million, according to the academy’s audited financial statements.
Then the coronavirus in 2020 set BAM back even further. The budget was cut to $30 million. The academy laid off 25 employees and furloughed 80. The organization’s president and executives took salary reductions of up to 40 percent.
To rescue itself, BAM dipped into its $100 million endowment with a special distribution of $5 million and an additional $3 million the next fiscal year.
BAM’s private-sector donations decreased to about $11 million in 2023 from about $25 million in 2015. (BAM said they were projected to increase to $14 million in 2025.)
The academy was forced to rein in the scope of programming. Its Next Wave Festival, for example, went to seven programs in 2023, down from 31 in 2017. It went up to 11 in 2024 and is now at 13.
“When Karen and Joe left, it was hard to keep up the excitement that they had managed to generate for many years,” said Nigel Redden, the longtime director of the annual Lincoln Center Festival, which offered BAM-like programming uptown, but which was discontinued in 2017. “Finding companies, finding artists that are new and special and will excite and attract an audience — that seemed a little less the case. This year I thought that it was somewhat coming back.”
Encouraging Signs of Growth
Despite its hurdles, BAM reports that it has been slowly rebuilding. The audience has grown by 41 percent over last year. Yearly revenues from performances are already ahead of the sluggish years that preceded the pandemic. Since fiscal year 2019, the total number of shows has increased by 50 percent, to 241.
Between 2023 and 2025, BAM added six new positions to expand its curatorial reach in poetry, music and film — including the performance artist Helga Davis — and increased the board by four people, to 36.
“We have to embrace the chaos,” Davis said in an interview. “There are creative opportunities for thinking about finances, for thinking about programming.
“Maybe you don’t have a full production at the Harvey this year but maybe you have one in four years,” she continued. “That gives the institution an opportunity to catch up, to still be fiscally responsible and committed to the things that they’ve already programmed and made commitments to, but to also develop smaller maybe even site-specific projects.”
Despite BAM’s necessary contraction, Cassello insisted that its ambitions, mission and importance remain unchanged and undiminished. “We’re not moving away from adventurous programming, and I think that’s important, and it’s made us different,” she said. “The times do demand a different strategy. And I think if we get smaller, I don’t think it sacrifices the quality.”
“I’ve yet to meet an artist who doesn’t want to be at BAM or an artist who’s already been at BAM who doesn’t want to come back to BAM,” she added. “We need BAM because we’re serving an audience and artists who have the imagination and creativity and curiosity to move us forward as humanity. It sounds so grandiose, but that’s what it is.”
BAM has engendered deep loyalty from its artists over the years. Martha Wilson, the founding director of Franklin Furnace, the avant-garde institution, said in a recent interview, “I love BAM.” The choreographer Mark Morris said, “We love working there.”
The choreographer Bill T. Jones, who had a 30th anniversary revival of his once- controversial dance work “Still/Here” in the opera house last fall, said he wished the best for the academy and wanted to see it stay vital and brave.
“It’s an essential organization — it needs to be embraced, cared for,” Jones said. “I hope they’re fierce and that they’re able to commission new works fearlessly. They need to make sure they have an international footprint.”
Morris, recalling BAM’s elaborate presentations like opera from the Mariinsky Theater (formerly the Kirov) and Peter Brook’s epic “Mahabharata,” said: “You can’t maintain that. Times change.”
Acknowledging that BAM now operates in “a very different world,” Anderson said she hopes the academy will continue to take artistic chances. “In New York we need things that are really challenging to see and not just another musical,” she said. “If BAM can fight its way out of that to the place where it used to be, it would be very big. BAM has always been my place. I really do love it.”
