Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

Visitors Information

651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene Brooklyn
718-636-4100
Schedule and tickets: www.bam.org

About BAM's Harvey Theater

BAM's Harvey Theater on gritty Fulton Street, off Flatbush Avenue and a few blocks from the Barclays Center, is one of the most evocative theater environments in New York City. Originally built as the Majestic theater in early 20th-century in Downtown Brooklyn's heyday, then renovated into a movie theater, left as an abandoned building in the post WWII era, it has been rejuvenated since the late 1980s as one of the mainstays of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's small artistic empire.
And, it's got character.


With its windowless bar and cafe area downstairs, and chic-ragged theater interior, the Harvey space puts an audience on alert that something left-brain, interesting and perhaps psychologically or emotionally moving is about to occur. Visually, the theater space transports one to some indeterminate time and place of faded glory in Venice— but after the flood.

Why is the Harvey Called the Harvey?

This fabulous theatrical space is named after Harvey Lichtenstein, BAM’s president and executive producer from 1967 to 1999. He was the powerhouse behind many of BAM's innovative programs and the rejuvenation, a slow process that occurred over decades, of the greater BAM area into a highly regarded multifaceted cultural destination.
It is fitting that this moody, theatrical environment was the product of a search for a place to perform something unusual. As the story goes, former BAM Executive Producer and guru Harvey Lichtenstein discovered this raw space when "looking for a new kind of theater venue" for British director Peter Brook (described by the Guardian in 2008 as "perhaps the most influential stage director alive," in his staging of an eight-hour (i> Mahabarata, one of BAM's landmark marathon theatrical innovations.

Making a virtue of the necessity of fiscal constraint, the design kept many of the building's original architectural elements.

"The award-winning renovation that followed preserved the deconstructed beauty of the space, creating a striking venue with the ambiance of a timeless ruin. The Harvey has since served as a unique setting for major stage and broadcast productions," according to BAM.

Early 20th Century History of the Harvey Theater

According to BAM historians:

• 1904: The "Harvey" first opened in 1904 as the Majestic Theater, one of the many theaters in this bustling entertainment district. The Majestic showed a variety of dramas, light opera, musicals, and vaudeville, with stars such as Katherine Cornell, and it became an important trial theater for productions headed to Broadway, including Noel Coward's Home Chat.
• 1942, the Majestic was transformed into a first-run movie house in elegant European style by a Parisian and his two sons, wealthy showmen who had fled the Nazis.
• 1960s, however, the advent of television and a shift in the population resulted in the closure and re-purposing of theaters in the district.
• 1987: The theater reopened. It was renamed and dedicated as "the Harvey" in 1999.