This past school year, with the support of The Frederick Loewe Foundation, BAM Education launched BAM Online Study Guides, a new resource designed to deepen our engagement with the 15,000 students who attend our school-time performances and screenings each year. Developed with guidance from New York City teachers of all grade levels, BAM’s Online Study Guides empower students to make profound connections between BAM’s artistic work—including Next Wave, Winter/Spring, BAMkids, and cinematic presentations—and what they learn in the classroom. They incorporate BAM’s unparalleled artistic resources, from video clips to step-by-step enrichment activities that link themes and content with academic goals in literature, history, social studies, reading, writing, public speaking, and more.
The Frederick Loewe Foundation was established by the composer Frederick Loewe who, with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, wrote some of the world’s best-loved Broadway musicals and films, including My Fair Lady, Camelot, Brigadoon, Gigi, and Paint Your Wagon. Born in Berlin in 1901, Frederick Loewe was a gifted musician from an early age. At 13, he became the youngest piano soloist to appear with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. At 15, his original song “Katrina” sold 2 million copies throughout Europe. Loewe emigrated to the United States in 1924 and at first took a variety of odd jobs including boxing, cattle ranching, and playing piano accompaniment to silent films. He was enjoying moderate success writing music for the theater until a chance meeting with Lerner in 1942 led to the formation of one of the greatest musical partnerships in Broadway history. A clip from “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady by Lerner & Loewe can be found here:
BAM has been a grateful grantee of The Frederick Loewe Foundation since 2006. We are especially proud in this, the 60th anniversary year of the Broadway premiere of My Fair Lady (1956), to be honoring Loewe’s legacy by introducing him to a new generation of New Yorkers and, through the digital study guides, finding new ways to engage them in vibrant performing arts.
Want to learn more? Click here to peruse a sample study guide from BAM’s April 2016 school-time performance of William Shakespeare’s Henry V.