After a soaring start the Next Wave Festival crashed in a disaster so complete BAM may be following the The City Opera into oblivion. It seems the BAM has become too big to manage. A tragedy. I saw the Saturday performance but according The Times the Thursday performance was an equal embarrassment.
The insults began as we entered the theater as the lech who claims to be the ‘house manager, leering at the at the incoming theatergoers mostly the ones too young for him. He was dressed in his Wallmart best, his ass crack deciding weather to show itself or not.
. As we took our tickets and showed them to one on the bizarre slobs pretending to be an usher, His grotesque stomach hanging over his misfitting jeans. he insisted we we go up the stairs, because our tickets for row H and they said to to go up entrance 1. When I explained to him that my wife had a knee, problem and that entrances 2 and 3 were much closer he got belligerent and insisted we could not go in anywhere but the stairs or the elevator. After grabbing our tickets we finally entered the auditorium and walked the eight steps to our seats. The tickets were marked wrong, one can only assume that Karen Brooks Hopkins has never walked across the street to see the theater in person. Her gross incompetence is truly breathtaking.
Then began the most entertaining part of the evening the seating of the paying customers. While professional ushers did a great and courteous job, the Walmart clone at the lower right part of the auditorium was so drunk or otherwise impaired he was not even able to walk straight. He was no use at all so out of it that each time he tried to help someone he took several minutes to figure if they were on the right or left. One assumes he was a doing a promo for a Jerry Lewis festival at BAM Cinema. If Ms. Hopkins is trying to break an ushers union, if there is one, I think she will quickly find that we will all support the existing ushers.and BAM will cease to exist.
Now we come to bad part of the evening. The show simply consists of music the we are told was composed by 12 composers buts its all just a drone of boring music specifically meant to be devoid of any character or meaning. This music by the yard has the same purpose as the state music under Stalin and the Nazi regime. To make everything seem the same and encourage mindless drones. The group Ethel, named for a character on the I Love Lucy show, plays the simple score in total goose-step, you really can’t tell who is playing what at any given time. The whole point is to banish any kind of character from the score. The effect of sameness was made greater by over amplification, overmodulation made it impossible for the music anything but ugly. Something named Dave Cook, was given the blame for this, avoid him at all costs.avoid this fool at all costs. One thing for sure is the composers who ‘wrote’ this disgrace. will be forgotten as quickly as the composers who were willing to write this kind of state music in Germany and The Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s were.
There was a visual of EPA photos from the 1970s projected on four ripped panels of of paper. No one in the company bothered to fix them at the Saturday performance. Perhaps they knew the no none wanted to see the pathetic march of meaningless faded snapshots to do anything for the production. Steven Cosson is credited as director be he seems to have taken the money and run ,perhaps he was too busy trying to pick up more of the meaningless middlebrow awards he is so fond of.
Perhaps BAM is going the way of City Opera, perhaps they will learn from their mistakes, but as a Producers Council member and someone who has loved BAM for more than 35 years I will not give any more support until Joseph Mellio is either fired or learns what the evils of banality are. I hope all decent members do the same. For those who wonder what Fox gets for large contribution to BAM, know you know.
NEVER AGAIN
