Few New York cultural institutions are as beloved as the Brooklyn Academy of Music. After opening in Brooklyn Heights in 1861, BAM moved to the edge of Fort Greene in 1908. Now in its 150th year, it has expanded both its footprint and its purview. It presents dance, theater, music and film in two venues — with a third one on the way.
BAM’s programming has always mixed the classical and the weird, sometimes in the same show. And it’s also attracted its share of stars, often before they broke big, and often in unlikely settings. Here’s a look back at some of them.
1. Christopher Walken and Irene Worth in “Sweet Bird of Youth”
Two acting generations and styles shared the spotlight in the 1975 revival of the Tennessee Williams drama. Walken, then 32, was fresh off Jim Steinman’s off-Broadway musical “Kid Champion,” while stage icon Worth, 59, was a frequent collaborator of avant-director Peter Brook in England.
Lighting designer Ken Billington recalls that after he put on some flattering spots, Worth did the unthinkable for an actress: “Turn those lights off,” she instructed him. “I’m supposed to be old and going downhill — don’t make me pretty up here.”
2. Ian McKellen in “King Lear”
In the winter of 1974, McKellen, then 34, appeared in four shows — including “King Lear” and Chekhov’s “The Wood Demon” — at BAM. Yet it wasn’t overwork but public transportation that made the British thespian nearly miss a matinee.
“I’m trapped on the Brooklyn subway which breaks down between stations,” he wrote in his diary. “All the carriages, inside and out, are covered with engaging graffiti so I settle down to decipher . . . We clatter to my station in time to apologize to my understudy and face the critics, who presumably take cabs to Brooklyn.”
3. Ellen Burstyn in “The Three Sisters”
In 1977, BAM decided to launch its own company, run by the British director Frank Dunlop. He staged “The Three Sisters” with Burstyn, Denholm Elliott and Tovah Feldshuh. Before rehearsals started, Dunlop invited the cast to a fancy Russian eatery.
“Ellen and Denholm [Elliott] have this love affair in the play, so I wanted them to get to know each other,” he says, but little did he know the introduction never happened. “There was vodka and everybody was having a wonderful time. As we walked back in the street, Denholm said to me, ‘Who was that lady?’ I thought, ‘There goes my savings!’ ”
He also directed a revival of “The New York Idea,” starring a pair of moms named Blythe Danner and Rosemary Harris. “Their girls used to play in the dressing room while they were onstage,” Dunlop tells The Post. “So BAM was the host to the aspirations of those two young ladies.” The kids’ names: Jennifer Ehle and Gwyneth Paltrow.
4. Richard Dreyfuss in “Julius Caesar”
In 1978, Dunlop hired Dreyfuss for Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” Fresh from shooting “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the actor wanted to get back onstage.
“I asked him to play Brutus,” the director recalls, “and he said, ‘Nobody would cast me as Brutus.’ Back then, people who were smaller than usual didn’t get to play heroic leads.”
Also in 1978, Sam Waterston and Austin Pendleton played the bickering tramps in “Waiting for Godot.”
The production was going so badly that one night, Pendleton decided he would retire from acting at the end of the performance.
“I began the second act thinking, ‘What the hell, why don’t I actually listen to Sam?’ ” Pendleton says. Suddenly, “everything became miraculously easy to do. The applause that night was triple what it had been. The stage manager leapt on to the stage after the audience had left and joyfully yelled, ‘What happened?!’ ”
5. Christopher Lloyd in “Kaspar”
In 1973, New Yorkers were introduced to Peter Handke’s avant-garde play “Kaspar.” The production “made early and prolific use of multi-media,” recalls Bob Kalfin, whose Chelsea Theatre Center produced the show at BAM. “Kaspar” was ahead of its time in other respects: It introduced Lloyd, who was picked out of 120 candidates for the title role and went on to star in “Taxi” and “Back to the Future.”
6. Morgan Freeman in “The Gospel at Colonus”
In 1983, BAM scored a surprise hit with “Colonus,” which mixed the myth of Oedipus with the music of the black Pentecostal church, and revealed the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. The company also included a little-known actor, Morgan Freeman.
“Morgan just hung out with the Brooklyn Institutional Radio Choir and the women would cook in between the matinees,” BAM executive producer Joseph Melillo recalls. “You could have the best soul food in town in the green room.”
elisabeth.vincentelli@nypost.com