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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.
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, “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”.
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.
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 general director, said.
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.
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.
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.
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