So you’re a Brooklynite and theatergoer, and you want to do the hometown proud. Whatever can you do that would both fill your need for artistic stimulation and give a holla out to Red Hook?

Or, conversely, you are one of those people who laughs merrily at the idea of venturing even one tiny, Williamsburg-sized stop into another borough in the search of entertainment. The L train makes you shudder, and you are content to live and die, never having journeyed on the G.

The marketing campaign for “Brooklyn: the Musical” wants you to know that the best of both worlds can be found in the comfort and safety of Times Square. The grittiness! The whiff of reality! It’s like “Rent,” but with even more street cred. After all, in “Rent,” they moped around with unlit candles in a two-story, 28-foot-wide loft. Seriously, all the suffering in the world won’t make me feel sorry for people with a two-story loft. In “Brooklyn: the Musical,” street musicians in fingerless gloves narrate the story – complete with spare change clinking and Brechtian spray-painting.

All too soon, however, you will realize that this “Brooklyn” isn’t quite the ode to the fairest borough you were hoping for. Our heroine’s name is Brooklyn. She is French. She comes to America to sing at Carnegie Hall. She does go home to Kings County in search of her father and re-spect – but for all the sight-specific atmosphere those scenes invoke, she might just as well have been named Staten.

Everybody know that, for several years now, the best place to get a real taste of Brooklyn and see foreigners in the theater – or in productions of opera, classical music, or dance – has been at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival. It kicked off last night with British troupe Cheek by Jowl’s production of Othello and this year includes eight theater, three dance, and two music productions, and two performance works.