BFS
Our Strategic Vision

Caring for Community with Gifts of Music

  On May 2nd, BFS 7th grade students Ana N. and Cal S., 8th grade student Breyten N. and a student from Poly Prep performed a thirty minute chamber concert for a homebound older neighbor in her Brooklyn Heights apartment. The neighbor lives alone but participates in the Heights and Hills Case Management Program through […]

BFS history, the video

“This Is Our Quiet Time” BFS ordinarily shares brief clips in its Video Archives, but we make an exception this week with the full version of the original BFS musical, Forward to the Past. Written and performed by the BFS community in 1989, Forward to the Past: the Historical Hysterical Follies of Brooklyn Friends School, relates our school’s […]

A truly phenomenal woman

A Truly Phenomenal Woman BFS Dance Concert 1989 With Maya Angelou’s passing last week, let’s go back 25 years to 1989, the year which saw the creation and first performance of “A Truly Phenomenal Woman” at the BFS Dance Concert. This short dance was set to Maya Angelou’s poem “Phenomenal Woman.” Choreographed by Monique N. […]

Mysteries from the Video Archives

Dance Concert Rehearsal, probably 1998 Digitizing much of the BFS dance department’s video collection for the BFS Archives video collection yielded unidentified rehearsal videos and one music concert video. Most of these videos seem to have been created after 2000. One dance concert rehearsal video seems to be from 1992 or 1998: that video was […]

A shy princess from BFS’s Once Upon A Mattress, 1988

1988 Once Upon A Mattress – Shy From the 1988 BFS musical production of Once Upon A Mattress comes the song “Shy” in which Princess Winnifred the Woebegone expresses her true nature as she tries to find Prince Dauntless the Drab for the very first time. And this after she swam the moat to get […]

Feeling your Blue Pride? Make that Indigo

It’s a throwback this fine Thursday to the “Mood Indigo” scene from the 1989 BFS original musical A Small Cabaret. A Small Cabaret was a departure from the traditional BFS musical: this ensemble production featured standards like Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” yet it also […]

A bolt from the blue, it’s true, it’s you…

1987 Dames At Sea Take two minutes to enjoy a charming duet in the BFS Middle School’s 1987 production of Dames at Sea, capturing the moment when our romantic leads Dick and Ruby first meet, she swoons into his arms and they both know it’s true love. You might also get a kick out of […]

Stretching ourselves once upon the Natchez Trace

1987’s The Robber Bridegroom, Upper School Musical Scanning a 1920s scrapbook by hand can be monotonous, so I’ve been multi-tasking by going to my family’s collection of BFS videos once again since I know video did not always survive in the school’s collections over the years. My own home was the source of last week’s Forward […]

Video archives return with Forward to the Past, 1989

Forward to the Past – Finale – 1989 Do you remember Forward to the Past: Historical Hysterical Follies of Brooklyn Friends School? That was the 1989 musical about BFS – written and produced by BFS community members who also starred in the production. Forward to the Past was about an alien named T.E. from the […]

Archival Updates and Theatrical Enigmas

The Pajama Game, 1970s The photos in BFS Sampler 2 photo album have finally been corrected and re-uploaded, meaning better quality images for visitors. The class photos originally in that album have now been moved to the appropriate class photos albums. Many of the photos in BFS Sampler 2 can now also be viewed in person in […]

That Show Took My Breath Away…

  Always fun to find playbills from BFS theatrical performances, so we are making some available as they emerge from the school’s archives and from personal collections. While more playbills are in the archives, we have scanned only a few programs from the personal collections of The Price Family and The Garrell Family at this […]