TASTE MAKERS : HARVEY LICHTENSTEIN

Calendar’s choices of Taste Makers--people who move and shape our arts and entertainment in 1988--run the gamut. If the eight faces on the cover form a rather curious collection, it’s because creative abilities come in many forms.

As a result, our group’s pursuits range from directing the distinguished PBS series “American Playhouse,” to fronting the hard-living, hard-rock band Guns N’ Roses. All eight individuals have been significant players in 1988 and we feel will continue as leaders and creators in the future--as have the Taste Makers of previous years.

In this fourth annual survey, we hope to present an insight into what stimulates and influences these people of influence.

President and executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, noted for its nurturing and presentation of avant-garde artists. His concern: The direction of the arts should be towards a “world culture.”

Whether presenting Jerzy Grotowski’s daring Polish Laboratory Theatre as far back as 1969, taking a risk with once-unknown choreographers Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp or encouraging new music works from Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Harvey Lichtenstein has had the same goals: “Shaking things up. Not doing things that people can go to sleep to. Making connections for people (which are) beyond the ordinary.”

A religious music series due at the Brooklyn Academy of Music around Easter will include jazz, mime, rock and puppetry, for instance. But most of Lichtenstein’s experimentation occurs at BAM’S ambitious Next Wave Festival, an annual avant-garde bash featuring the sort of exotic fare--and sometimes exactly the same exotic fare--that Robert J. Fitzpatrick brought to Los Angeles via the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival and 1987 Los Angeles Festival. Among this season’s music/theater entries: “The Warrior Ant” from Lee Breuer and Bob Telson and, earlier this month, “The Forest,” from David Byrne and Robert Wilson.

Given the risk--something noted even in fairly negative reviews of BAM projects--some of these ideas fall flat: The New York Times called “The Warrior Ant” a throwback to “The Ed Sullivan Show,” noting along the way both its “smorgasbord aesthetics” and “alternately pretentious and facetious script.” But Lichtenstein’s clever and extensive marketing efforts (which have themselves been criticized) have drawn huge, young audiences across the bridge to Brooklyn.

Lichtenstein’s current challenge is getting them to both untraditional and unfamiliar opera productions. Inspired by BAM’s longstanding interest in new operas by such composers as Glass, Breuer and John Adams, the new BAM Opera Project brings what Lichtenstein calls a “more contemporary point of view” to both familiar and rarely-produced operas of the past.

“Opera isn’t just something you listen to. It is a theatrical medium and the idea is to make (it) interesting and exciting theatrically. And you don’t do that by putting on the same production year after year after year (or) getting uninteresting directors or directors who have no ideas or no imagination either intellectually, philosophically or visually.”

His solution: Import the Welsh National Opera production of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” directed by West Germany’s Peter Stein in his American debut, then follow with a new production of Kurt Weill’s “Kleine Mahagonny” directed by Los Angeles Festival director Peter Sellars. Add in the Paris Opera’s production of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s long-neglected “Atys” which Lichtenstein saw “stunningly staged” at Versailles last year and which “shows one can do 17th-Century opera without it being boring and static and uninteresting.”

At first glance, Lichtenstein and BAM are studies in contradiction:

BAM itself is 127 years old and produces Wilson, Glass and others out of a grand, neo-Renaissance building located in the tough, run-down Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. Lichtenstein, on the other hand, presents a crisp picture, greeting a visitor wearing a black pinstripe suit--and a purple shirt and red tie.

The 59-year-old Lichtenstein is as likely to be in Europe or Asia on any given day as he is in Brooklyn. Next month, for instance, he plans a visit to three European countries in four days. He is scheduled to see American dancer-choreographer Morris, currently in residence at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, as well as two German dance companies, one working out of France, the other out of Germany, which are being considered for the 1989 Next Wave Festival.

When he can’t get out to see a performer or performance BAM might want to produce, he brings the world in. He just bought a new CD player and cassette machine (which he will share with his 15-year-old son John) for his home, and listens to work-related tapes on airplanes as well as while driving. Among the stack of audio and video cassettes on his desk: Performance tapes from a controversial, underground rock band from Texas, the B.H. Surfers; a German contemporary chamber music group, and an Algerian musician.

On one recent Sunday, as his wife Phyllis watched a video of “The Mission,” Lichtenstein “caught pieces and glimpses of it” between watching “A Perfect Spy” on PBS, and later listening to two different productions of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice”--one on record, one on CD. (BAM and the Metropolitan Opera may produce that opera together, directed by Sellars, in 1991.)

In the past few years, Lichtenstein has raced off to Australia, Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as to Japan and China (“a couple of times.”) Citing both the United States’ growing ethnic population and the increased economic and political power of nations outside Europe, Lichtenstein foresees a global future for the arts. Tossing off terms like “worldwide culture,” the Brooklyn-born and educated producer says, “that’s a direction that the arts are going to go and (where) we should be going.”

P As one example of this philosophy, BAM plans to co-produce a Pacific arts component of the next Los Angeles Festival. BAM had been approached by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts about a bi-coastal Pacific Rim festival, says Lichtenstein, and when Peter Sellars was appointed director of the Los Angeles Festival, Sellars expressed interest, “so we made it a triumvirate.”

Lichtenstein would like to do more international theater, noting that Ingmar Bergman’s production of “Hamlet” earlier this year at BAM, “was really an important occasion in New York.” He still worries that language problems “make it difficult to do, financially,” but wants BAM to present more people like Bergman, Germany’s Stein and Italian theater director Giorgio Strehler (whose production of “The Tempest” played the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival). “I think they’re important artists. Their work should be seen here.”

This project was edited by David Fox, assistant Calendar editor.