Fall 2010 - Lehman College

Diversifying Programming to Reach a
Wider Audience
From the start, the Center’s unofficial mission was not so subtle:
provide a counterbalance to the reputation of a borough on fire.
In an article assessing the one-year-old theater’s effect on the
neighborhood, a frustrated President Lief told The New York Times,
“It still amazes me. This is a borough of 1.4 million people—it’s
bigger than many states—and people just throw up their hands
and say it’s finished.”
It’s no surprise then that the first decade’s programming set
out to attract residents from the region’s tonier zip codes, like
Westchester and Riverdale, and the Times highlighted the theater’s
locale as being “40 minutes from Broadway.”
By 1985, Jack Globenfelt signed on as executive director and
shaped the image of the Center for nearly twenty years.
“He managed to bring in all the important artists of the time:
Nureyev, Ray Charles, Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Marcel Marceau,”
said Bornstein. “That stage had the giants of culture.”
But by the mid-nineties, Globenfelt said, attendance numbers
began to drop off.
Bornstein grew up in a “very grey and grim” communist Poland
where she found solace in Cracow’s theaters. “My mother took
me to this fantasy land,” she said. “Every day we would go. And
it was cheap! I fell in love with it and wanted to be in this
enlightened world.”
Andrew Grossman of Columbia Artist Management calls Bornstein
“one of the greatest producers in the industry and a true champion
of the classical and popular performing arts.”
“Let’s be honest, it’s a different demographic from what I was used
to,” she said of her Bronx audience, whose taste doesn’t always jibe
with her own. “But as a programmer this is not my living room; this
is the Bronx’s living room.”
Though the groundwork for diversity had been laid well before her
2005 arrival, Bornstein said that the audience remained segre-
It was a complete sell-out
for “Salsa Palooza” night
with Tito Rojas, Jerry Rivera
(shown here), and Eddie
Santiago (below).
“The audience was diminishing. People were either dying or
moving to Florida,” he said. Then, while vacationing in Montauk, he
got a call that changed everything: Rubén Bládes, a major figure
in Latin music, was available.
“He sold out right away,” Globenfelt said. “It was then that the
‘eureka’ phenomenon occurred.”
“Jack recognized that the Bronx was beginning to become a more
diversified place,” said Father Richard Gorman, chair of the Board
of Directors. “Eva has diversified [the programming] even more,
reaching out to our Asian friends and the Caribbean.”
Photo by Jason Green
Photo by Jason Green
14 Lehman Today/Fall 2010 – Winter 2011