Eva Bornstein is enjoying one of her finest and most successful seasons at the helm of the Lehman Performing Arts Center. It is the center’s 30th anniversary and Bornstein was just featured in the New York Times’ Sunday Metropolitan section. Attendance is up during a down economy. Life is good. But she is concerned. The antics of madcap actor Charlie Sheen are consuming all the country’s media attention. “It’s disgusting,” she says, both of the coverage and Sheen’s behavior.

“We are from the old school,” she says, attempting to explain her disgust.

Indeed, Bornstein, the face of Lehman Center for the past six years, seems almost a castoff from a different era. Her deep, luxurious Polish accent could have been plucked from a Bond movie starring Sean Connery. You can imagine her being perfectly comfortable rubbing elbows and smoking long cigarettes with Billie Holiday at a Harlem night club.

“Old school,” however, does not mean stuck in the past. She has adapted to the changing demographics in the Bronx by providing more Latin music than her predecessors and putting together a wildly diverse group of acts. This year, that lineup has included the entire gamut from salsa legends Ruben Blades and Gilberto Santa Rosa to Chinese acrobats.

“Eva brought a new energy and expanded the offerings,” says Andrea Rockower, who was associate director of programming at the center from 1985 until she retired in January (she continues to work there as a consultant).

Rockower says the Lehman Center audience has transformed from a more traditional older crowd that would subscribe for a full season of performances that included your standard classical events and ballet performances to a more diverse and selective group of ticket buyers.

“We’ve found that younger people no longer wanted to commit to being subscribers,” Rockower says. “They want to pick and choose what they want to attend. I think this has changed in many large urban centers across the country.”

At Lehman Center, Rockower says Bornstein has implemented a winning three-pronged approach to programming: cultural events (think Russian ballet) that “expand our vision of the arts,” celebrity artists that bring in the crowds (think salsa band, “El Gran Combo”), and community events (think high school graduations).
“My philosophy: bring in as much variety as possible,” Bornstein says.

In 2008, when the depth of the economic crisis began hitting cultural institutions everywhere, Bornstein says she knew she would have to get creative, in terms of programming and marketing. They would make up for a lack of grant money, by focusing on putting people in the seats. It worked.

Last year, Lehman brought in more than $1 million in ticket sales. This season, the center has already scored over $1.5 million in sales. Bornstein says part of that is the healing economy and part of it is fortuitous programming. For instance, Bornstein partly attributes the strong sales of its ballet production of “Swan Lake” to the success of the Oscar-nominated movie, “Black Swan,” which uses “Swan Lake” as a backdrop.

Also helping matters is the center’s new and improved state-of-art lighting and sound systems, which were paid for over the last few years by grants from the state legislature.

Bornstein doesn’t have the staff to accommodate a lot of perks for artists or pay extravagant booking fees, but she can offer great lighting and sound, which improves the audience experience and makes artists happy at the same time. In negotiations, Bornstein says she emphasizes the production quality and the opportunity to bring quality performance to the poorest borough in New York City.

The result is that “more and more artists want to come here,” Bornstein says. “We’re trying to present artists that make history in the world.”

Any discount Bornstein receives from booking the artists, she says she passes on to the customers. Rockower says the center’s focus on making performances more affordable — for most shows, children under 12 can purchase $10 tickets — has helped get people to buy tickets and keep them coming back.

The goal, Bornstein says, is to be not just the Bronx’s premier performing arts center, but a “regional” center.

To do this, Bornstein, who has directed performing arts centers from Ontario to New Jersey, says she will continue to mix her “old school” values with a willingness to adapt. “We have become like a chameleon,” Bornstein says.