A Cutting-Edge Impresario Leaves BAM: What Was His Best Work?
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Version 0 of 1. It is time for the next wave to roll in at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: Joseph V. Melillo, who has helped shape the academy’s cutting-edge aesthetic for more than three decades, will announce on Friday that he plans to step down as executive producer at the end of 2018. Mr. Melillo, 70, is the last link to the organization’s impresario and visionary leader, Harvey Lichtenstein, who hired him in 1983 as the founding director of the pathbreaking Next Wave Festival. In 1999, Mr. Lichtenstein anointed him as his successor. As executive producer, Mr. Melillo was a lower-key presence than his mentor, but the academy remained a place to catch the vanguard, as well as to see Derek Jacobi as King Lear and Simon Russell Beale as Hamlet. With Mr. Melillo’s departure, the academy will truly enter the post-Harvey era. (Karen Brooks Hopkins, Mr. Lichtenstein’s chosen successor as the institution’s president, stepped down in 2015.) It will have to find ways to keep its cutting-edge reputation now that it is part of the establishment, and to continue refreshing its avant-garde roster to keep it from seeming old guard. Five critics for The New York Times share some of their favorite moments of the Melillo era: Last September, five performers of uncommonly concentrated stillness appeared at the Harvey Theater, and a circle seemed to have been rounded into something like eternity. They were appearing in the great international director Peter Brook’s “Battlefield,” an epilogue of sorts to his fabled “Mahabharata” from 1987. For that truly epic work, Mr. Lichtenstein had restored a decrepit movie palace to Mr. Brook’s very exact specifications. Then called the Majestic, it was later renamed the Harvey. Of extravagant length and spectacle, “The Mahabharata” (adapted from the Sanskrit narrative) became one of the defining events of Mr. Lichtenstein’s tenure. “Battlefield,” in contrast, was a short, stark work, as concise as a proverb. It was also a near-perfect distillation of the aesthetic practiced and refined by the Mr. Brook, now 92, during six decades, and a resonant portrait of the echoing silence that succeeds war and cataclysm. Mr. Melillo’s presentation of “Battlefield,” on the very spot where “The Mahabharata” had unfurled 30 years earlier, became a deeply powerful testament to Mr. Lichtenstein’s legacy and Mr. Brook’s deathless genius. BEN BRANTLEY To raise money to fight AIDS, the Red Hot Organization has produced high-concept albums and concerts since 1990, often devoted to a place, a musician or a style, with new, border-crossing, collaborative versions of cherished songs. Its concerts at the Brooklyn Academy — among them “Red Hot + Cuba” in 2012, New Orleans in 2010, Rio 2 in 2008 and Arthur Russell in 2015 — have been genuine all-star events, assembling (and smoothly wrangling) gatherings of major figures for new audiences. Paul Simon was no unknown when he played three retrospective programs at the academy in April 2008. But the concerts focused on specific pockets of Mr. Simon’s catalog: “Songs From ‘The Capeman,’” — salvaging the strong songs from Mr. Simon’s Broadway misfire; “Under African Skies,” which paired Mr. Simon and his band with African and Brazilian musicians; and “American Tunes,” storytelling songs in which Mr. Simon was joined by Grizzly Bear and the Roches. JON PARELES The academy has long had two of the most distinctive performance spaces in the city, but what it lacked for years was something tiny, a theater designed for the 21st century’s explosion of intimate dance, theater and music. When the BAM Fisher opened in 2012, the first addition to the academy’s campus since 1987, it included a flexible black-box auditorium that seated around 250. In 2014 it hosted the premiere of a work that has stayed with me ever since: Ted Hearne’s WikiLeaks oratorio, “The Source,” a brooding, bursting reflection on Chelsea Manning and her epochal revelations that fully inhabited the space, making it seem looming and claustrophobic. ZACHARY WOOLFE In 2009, the Brooklyn Academy brought its long association with the choreographer Merce Cunningham to a climax on his 90th birthday, giving the 90-minute world premiere of his “Nearly Ninety.” An abundant outpouring of pure dance, featuring strings of exceptionally vivid solos and trios, it showed Cunningham in rich vein; he died three months later. ALASTAIR MACAULAY In 2002, Mr. Melillo, in an act of decidedly BAM-ian chutzpah, cobbled together a rare cycle of Claudio Monteverdi’s three surviving operas, borrowing from around the globe: “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria” from the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” from Dutch National Opera, and “Orfeo” courtesy of Chicago Opera Theater. Together the productions were a high point in the academy’s decades-long commitment to Baroque opera. At the same time, these three works by the same composer were thrillingly different: grandly stark (“Ritorno d’Ulisse”), slouchily modern-dress (“Orfeo”) and loopily galactic (“Poppea”). ZACHARY WOOLFE The choreographer Trisha Brown died this year of vascular dementia; it had been announced in 2012 that she had choreographed her final pieces in 2011. During those twilight years, the academy regularly honored her work. I single out the January 2016 season in which the Trisha Brown Dance Company danced a program of her “Proscenium Works” for — as it announced in advance — the last time. The program included “Set and Reset” (1983), with its designs by Robert Rauschenberg and score by Laurie Anderson, the most sensuous and beloved work of her 50-year career. ALASTAIR MACAULAY Among contemporary experimental theater artists, few directors scale the heights or brave the depths as extravagantly as Ivo van Hove does. He is probably best known for his intense Broadway productions of the Arthur Miller classics “A View From the Bridge” and “The Crucible.” But for experiencing Mr. van Hove at his most grandly audacious, it’s hard to top his “Kings of War,” staged at the academy in November. This pulsing four-hour work (performed in Dutch with supertitles) telescoped five of Shakespeare’s history plays — from “Henry IV” to “Richard III” — into one concentrated package of all-too-realpolitik and reset them in what felt like a contemporary surveillance state. That this group portrait of image-manipulating politicians and their pawns was presented only days before the latest American presidential election gave Mr. van Hove’s production a searing timeliness. This was an example of Mr. Melillo’s scheduling the right play in the right place at exactly the right time, and audiences left “Kings of War” highly stimulated and equally scared. BEN BRANTLEY In February, Mr. Melillo imported Caryl Churchill’s “Escaped Alone” from the Royal Court Theater in London. It was a no-brainer booking for the Harvey: an important, scary-hilarious new play by a lion of contemporary drama. But if the M.O. was reminiscent of Mr. Lichtenstein’s — valorizing the avant-garde by presenting it in a movie palace — it also couldn’t help demonstrating, by counterexample, what had happened to the avant-garde at the academy in the meantime. Admittedly, I’m rotten-cherry-picking, but in September, the ludicrous “Phaedra(s)” from Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe, starring a very brave Isabelle Huppert, stunk up the place, following on such recent cliché-ridden lowlights as the Robert Wilson-Rufus Wainwright “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” and the Ivo van Hove “Antigone.” Ms. Churchill’s chilling play stood out as a beacon but also as a warning about the way next waves become last waves. JESSE GREEN |