What to Wear, an opera by Richard Foreman with music by Michael Gordon was revived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater on January 15-18, 2026. It was only produced once almost twenty-years ago at Redcat in LA, and remounted at BAM by Beth Morrison Productions/Prototype Festival, with creative direction by by Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson, and lighting by Joe Levasseur.
Known as a downtown avant-garde theatre renegade, Foreman (1937-2025) created this bitingly funny post-rock opera skewering the superficial pressures of society. This historic re-staging at BAM honors Foreman's trailblazing legacy, and confirms Gordon’s ceaseless musical vitality.
"This show was lit almost exclusively with N/C incandescent light," says Levasseur. "We had to work hard to find light bulbs to fulfill the aesthetic demands of a Richard Foreman show. The design is fairly aggressive, and there is a lot of light pointed towards the audience. There are four different systems of "eye lights" as Foreman used to call them: a row of R40 lamps on goosenecks mounted at the top of the set, two rows of softlights overstage, mini-tens (in this case some really fun old Mole units) for directly infiltrating the audience's eyes, and a set of "flash" units – in this case D60's for quick strobe-like interruptions."
