Connie | Messing Around | Debra Messing | Debra-M.com

The recent 150^th anniversary gala held by the Brooklyn Academy of Music brought out several of TV’s hottest stars: Debra Messing and Will Chase of Smash, who also happen to be a couple off-screen.

Messing, who starred previously in another TV series, Will and Grace, and portrays a Broadway lyricist in Smash, admitted she has “wanted to be on Broadway since I was three.”

This has not occurred so far, she said, “not from lack of wanting. It’s primarily been about scheduling and also considering the effect it would have on my son, because you disappear for a weekend and that’s a big deal. It has to be something really, really special for me to be able to make that kind of sacrifice. But it still is a dream of mine, a dream with a capital D.”

Looking ahead, Messing said executive-producing a TV show—which she did previously with another series, The Starter Wife, “down the line is something that is a natural place for me to be. I think I have a head for producing.”

Chase, who previously appeared on Broadway in Billy Elliot and Rent, downplayed the allure of the stage, saying he was having “fun doing television at the moment. Broadway musicals, especially, it’s a year of your life that you tie up. I love to have my weekends and summers off, you don’t have a summer or a weekend in the theater. There’s a lot of momentum right now for me in television, I love the medium.”

Messing, who moved to New York from Los Angeles to make Smash, said she loved the “culture that’s so readily accessible. It’s very easy to be sheltered and to close yourself away from the world in Los Angeles. New York doesn’t allow you to do that. It’s allowed me to be more social, I’ve been getting out much more in New York than I did in Los Angeles. I think that’s a healthy thing.”

BAM—whose anniversary gala Messing and Chase attended—is the oldest performing arts center in the United States, founded in 1861 in what was then the city of Brooklyn, the third largest city in the United States, after New York and Philadelphia. Although Brooklyn is white-hot today, in those days it was considered a cultural backwater, dwarfed by the artistic achievements of Manhattan. BAM initially offered classical music and famous actors, like Edwin Booth and Sarah Bernhardt, as well as speakers like Henry Ward

Beecher. But over time it began to decline, and by the mid-1960’s, it was renting space to a judo school.

Harvey Lichtenstein, who took over BAM in 1967, came up with a new strategy for its revival: presenting avant-garde performers, in music, dance, theater and the visual arts, often from overseas. This philosophy continues under BAM’s current administration, which this season, for example, has commissioned performances by everyone from Kevin Spacey, starring in Shakespeare’s Richard III, to Questlove, drummer of The Roots, who recently created an “immersive musical experience celebrating and reflecting our current shuffle culture.”

BAM’s beginnings, decline and renaissance are traced in a photographic history it commissioned, BAM: The Complete Works, as well as in a new documentary it produced, BAM150, which was screened at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, will be broadcast on Ovation TV the week of May 21, and have a free public screening at the BAM Rose Cinemas on June 4.

Its recent anniversary gala featured a concert by Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Dr. John—who had a three-week residency at BAM this spring–and fellow New Orleans musicians Irma Thomas, Ivan Neville, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Davell Crawford and Nicholas Payton.

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