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Washington Post
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Why artists should perform at Trump's Kennedy Center
A number of artists have chosen to pull previously planned acts from the Kennedy Center lineup. Two prominent examples are the tour of Lin-Manuel Miranda's 'Hamilton' and Washington National Opera's production of Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce's 'Fellow Travelers,' an opera about a gay couple trying to find their way during the McCarthy era's Lavender Scare (supported by WNO but withdrawn by members of the creative team). Likewise, some audience members have chosen to shun the venue, regardless of the nature of the performance.
Los Angeles Times
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Post-Trump purge, can the Kennedy Center save itself? How Mark Morris showed the way
Washington, D.C. — Like much else in the nation's capital, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is in a state of uncertainty. For 53 years, this massive performance complex has served — with bipartisan grace and, at its best, conspicuous American flair — to honor a single U.S. president. But in February the center was appropriated by another president who now also rules as chairman of a board of trustees, all of whom are his appointees. The takeover resulted in the firing of the center's long-serving president, Deborah Rutter, one of the country's most impressive arts leaders. Over the last decade, she expanded an already vast institution's offerings. The center's new temporary president, Richard Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany, lacks arts management experience. In the meantime, the new administrators warn that the Kennedy Center is impoverished, that the facility has become shoddy and that some of its programming ill serves the American ideal. Diversity and drag are out, which has led to the disinviting of, among others, the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington, D.C., from performing on the premises. Celebrating Christmas, promises Grenell, is very much in, as will be striving for profit-making programming. One suggestion is commercializing the center to take advantage of its real estate value and prime location on the Potomac. On a recent afternoon I wandered the Kennedy Center's grand hallways leading to an opera house (home of Washington National Opera), concert hall (home to the National Symphony) and the Eisenhower Theater (suited for drama and dance), all overseen by a super-sized bust of JFK. I visited the galleries and shops and restaurants, the Millennium Stage (where a free chamber music performance was taking place) and checked out a recent addition, the Reach, a $250-million complex of flexible venues, an investment the new administration bemoans. It was a beautiful spring day, and the Kennedy Center appeared to be well-tended but unusually quiet. Other than a small crowd listening to members of the National Symphony perform chamber music, I felt like I had the building practically to myself. A clerk in one of the gift shops was thrilled to finally have a customer. I was the only one in the galleries. Exhibits still reflected diversity. Rainbow flag Kennedy Center T-shirts remained for sale. There have been cancellations in protest of the takeover — notably Rhiannon Giddens, the Broadway production of 'Hamilton' and what was to have been the Washington premiere of Gregory Spears' moving opera 'Fellow Travelers,' based on the Lavender Scare, the 1950s federal persecution of gay men and lesbians in government. But Mark Morris' potentially controversial new ballet, 'Moon,' was having its world premiere that evening as planned. Morris may be America's leading choreographer, but he also can be a fanciful bad boy of dance. Tell him he can't do something and, I've been told, look out. It would be hard to imagine the current Kennedy Center welcoming Morris' manner of dispensing Christmas cheer. His brilliant yuletime hit, 'The Hard Nut,' based on Tchaikovsky's 'The Nutcracker,' has been delighting audiences of all ages for three decades, but it does happen to include a comedic maid in drag. When the Kennedy Center last fall commissioned Morris to make an evening-length centerpiece for its vast 'Earth to Space: Arts Breaking the Sky' festival, nothing more was intended than to honor JFK's initiative that led, in 1969, to Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin being the first Earthlings to walk on the moon. The festival is an exuberant example of the sweeping events that Rutter created. It includes concerts, opera, dance, film, talks, installations, exhibits, interstellar musical journeys of one oddball sort or another, appearances by astronauts and space-specialist celebrities, not to mention daily screenings of a new film, 'The Moonwalkers,' featuring Tom Hanks. All of this takes on new meaning, especially if we recall JFK's 1962 speech at Rice University in Houston. In it he defended the enormity of the Apollo 11 mission's expense by noting, 'There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet,' and warned that 'its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again.' NASA is preparing for a moon landing again in 2027. The temptation, this time, goes beyond scientific curiosity to colonization, mining rare elements and using the moon as a waystation to Mars. The two most zealous space buffs on Earth loom large in Washington, with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in a moon race with their respective rocket enterprises, Blue Origin and Space X. Enter Mark Morris. He had been cagey all along about what he had in mind, other than to include the moon landing and the Golden Record, the disc that astronomer and media personality Carl Sagan made for Voyager 1 and 2. Launched in 1977, these two NASA spacecraft were the first intended to leave our solar system. The recording includes sounds, voices and music of the Earth's peoples, in hopes that it just might reach intelligent life somewhere out there. 'Moon,' which is a series of short dances that lasts just under an hour, begins with an animated display of five-pointed stars in a semicircle on a screen that served as the backdrop for the Eisenhower stage. The stars slyly become the circumference of the U.S. presidential seal. But rather than leading to outrage, an image of JFK appeared beneath the seal, and then one of the moon. The audience laughed and then warmly applauded. Morris' silvery moon was a place of mystery and wonder. Musical choices were agreeably eccentric. Beyond the Golden Record's greetings in many languages to aliens, Morris turned to gloriously schmaltzy swing, bluegrass and country recordings from the '30s, '40s and '50s. These included Al Bowlly's 'Roll Along, Prairie Moon,' Bill Monroe's 'Blue Moon of Kentucky,' Bonnie Guitar's 'Dark Moon' and Hildegarde's 'Honey-Coloured Moon.' Pianist and organist Colin Fowler, joined by bassist Jordan Frazier, added their contributions from the pit. A few of György Ligeti's startlingly strange solo piano numbers from 'Musica Ricercata' showed up. Dancers rolled by on wheeled stools like little space people to some of Marcel Dupré's eerie '24 Organ Inventions.' With gorgeously impressionist lighting (by Mike Faba), intriguing outer space projections (by Wendall K. Harrington), elegant costumes (by Isaac Mizrahi) and little toy spacemen scattered about, the Morris 'Moon' became a luxuriant dreamlike escape from Washingtonian reality. Most important of all, his company had never been better, and the dancers themselves provided the real fantasy. Otherworldly movement somehow matched the different music in ways that seem rational but not needing to make sense. Movement, itself, was adventure, around every turn an imaginative new surprise. To walk into a newly uncertain Kennedy Center can feel fraught. But in his program note, Morris asks us to 'observe and enjoy Moon and Space, without understanding a thing.' The genius of 'Moon,' however, is to remind us that wonder can be around the least expected corners. Can 'Moon' remind NASA to go to the moon to wonder, not to plunder? Probably not. But it can remind artists that if 'Moon' matters, so still must a Kennedy Center that nourishes and produces such work. Following the three Kennedy Center performances, 'Moon' will be visible in the next seasons over parts of America, including Southern California, where Morris has a large following and favored status in many venues. (The head of the Broad Stage in Santa Monica came to D.C. for the premiere.) In the meantime, Morris' 'Pepperland' reaches the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills next month and the Music Center Plaza in downtown L.A. is offering daily two-minute afternoon breathing and Morris-choreographed movement 'microbreaks,' meant to help us 'pause, reflect and recharge.' Kennedy Center, please, before it is too late, pause, reflect and recharge. America needs you. And you, if you decide to understand a thing or two, will need us.
The Independent
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Matt Bomer reflects on being ‘unfairly' outed by media
The actor Matt Bomer appeared on Monday's episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson 's podcast, speaking about how he felt when the media outed his sexuality. Bomer came out as gay publicly in 2012 during the Chase Humanitarian Awards, thanking his partner, Simon Halls, during his speech. However, Bomer told Ferguson that outlets such as Perez Hilton took 'over [his] own personal narrative before [he] even had a chance to'. Speculation around Bomer's sexuality was rife before he came out, with tabloid media outlets discussing his personal relationships before he ever had. 'It wasn't because I didn't want to,' Bomer emphasised, 'I didn't even have an opportunity to.' The actor also spoke of his concern that he didn't want his family 'to feel like they were some kind of shameful secret or something I was sweeping under the rug so I could have a great career'. Although Bomer had never 'officially' come out to the media, he never hid his sexuality when out in public. Bomer said he didn't feel that he had the platform to actually announce his sexuality, adding that his right to come out publicly was 'stolen by people who did have a microphone at the time'. As well as not being given the agency to come out on his own terms, Bomer also previously claimed that being outed as gay meant he lost out on the chance to play Superman in the 2000s. However, Bomer found success as Neal Caffrey in White Collar and, more recently, as Hawkins in Fellow Travelers. Fellow Travelers, which aired on Paramount in 2023, explores the effects on LGBTQ people who are forced to live in the closet in the 1950s. Set in Washington, DC, Bomer stars opposite Jonathan Bailey. The two start an intense affair as Senator McCarthy (Chris Bauer) launches the 'Lavender Scare', a persecution of gay people in the United States. Bomer said it was refreshing to play the part of a gay man, particularly after both White Collar and Magic Mike cast him in the mold of ' a straight leading man'.
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Signs Executive Order To Remove 'Improper Ideology' From Museums, National Monuments
President Donald Trump today signed an executive order titled 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.' The document asserts there has been a 'widespread effort to rewrite our Nation's history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.' More from Deadline Trump White House Deploys 'Blame The Media' Strategy As It Deals With Fallout Over The Atlantic's Bombshell Report The Atlantic Publishes Attack Plans That Pete Hegseth Shared On Signal Messaging App Nikki Glaser Says She Now Considers Possibility Of Death Threats Or Being "Detained" Before Doing Political Humor: "It's Like A Real Fear" Claiming the Biden Administration fostered a 'corrosive ideology,' Trump's order asserts that, 'rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.' The order names the Smithsonian Institution specifically, saying the directive's purpose is 'to remove improper ideology from such properties,' including the Institution's museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo. The order directs that the Vice President and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget work with Congress to 'prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.' It also says the Smithsonian is will 'not recognize men as women in any respect.' It further directs The Secretary of the Interior to 'determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior's jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.' If those conditions are found to exist, the secretary is to 'take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments.' Said monuments cannot, under Trump's declaration, 'contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).' In recent weeks the president has sought to cleanse another American institution: The Kennedy Center. Earlier this year, Trump ousted the board of the center and had himself named himself as its new chairman. Among his grievances are what he calls the institution's 'woke' programming. Since Trump's takeover, dozens of high profile productions have canceled performances. Just today, the composer and lyricist of Fellow Travelers, an opera based on Thomas Mallon's 2007 novel about the anti-gay lavender scare of the 1950s, withdrew the work from the 2025-26 season. The producers of Hamilton pulled out of a staging next year, and comedian Issa Rae canceled an appearance, while Ben Folds and Renee Fleming withdrew as Kennedy Center advisers. In a 26-show list of total cancelations put out by the Kennedy Center earlier this month, the center notes that most have been canceled by the artist or artist availability, or by the producers. Greg Evans contributed to this report. Best of Deadline '1923' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? Which Colleen Hoover Books Are Becoming Movies? 'Verity,' 'Reminders Of Him' & 'Regretting You' Will Join 'It Ends With Us' Everything We Know About Amazon's 'Verity' Movie So Far
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Under Trump, Kennedy Center's Classical Offerings Will (Mostly) Go On
The Kennedy Center's flagship opera company and symphony orchestra announced Thursday that they plan to present robust and fairly typical programs next season, the first full season since President Trump took over the institution. But one prominent work was missing from the lineup: Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce's 'Fellow Travelers,' an opera set in the 1950s about two men working for the government who become lovers. The work was withdrawn by its creators because of concerns about Mr. Trump's takeover, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times. Washington National Opera said the 2025-26 season would include classics like Verdi's 'Aida' and less commonly heard works like 'Treemonisha,' an opera by the ragtime composer Scott Joplin. The National Symphony Orchestra is planning warhorses by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich and world premieres by Carlos Simon, the Kennedy Center's composer in residence; Valerie Coleman; and others. In a sign of the political sensitives at the Kennedy Center, the leaders of the opera and the symphony declined to be interviewed about the new season. The center has been in flux since Mr. Trump purged its previously bipartisan board of Biden appointees and had himself elected chairman. The president's actions have prompted an outcry, leading some artists to cancel engagements there in protest. The musical 'Hamilton' scrapped a planned tour there next year. The classical field, in which seasons are planned years in advance, has largely been unaffected. But the creators of 'Fellow Travelers,' an opera based on the 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon, confirmed this week that they were pulling the work, which was supposed to have its Washington premiere next year. The creators said in a recent letter to Washington National Opera that Mr. Trump's takeover ran counter to the values of 'freedom and liberty for all people' that are highlighted in the opera. 'We have made the impossibly difficult decision that the Kennedy Center is not a place the team feels comfortable having the work presented,' said the letter. In a statement, the leaders of Washington National Opera, Tim O'Leary and Francesca Zambello, said they were disappointed by the decision to withdraw 'Fellow Travelers.' 'We deeply regret that the creative team of 'Fellow Travelers' has decided to deprive W.N.O. audiences of the chance to experience this opera,' Mr. O'Leary and Ms. Zambello said. 'Art and music have the power to rise above division and bring people together to find common ground. The W.N.O. has long been a place for everyone to enjoy the power of the opera and it will remain a place for patrons of all backgrounds and beliefs.' 'Fellow Travelers,' which is set in Washington and premiered at Cincinnati Opera in 2016, will be replaced by a new production of Robert Ward's 'The Crucible.' It will be conducted by Robert Spano as part of his inaugural season as the opera company's music director. The season announcement came as the Kennedy Center undergoes significant change under Richard Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany, whom Mr. Trump appointed as the Kennedy Center's new president. This week, the center gutted a community outreach program known as Social Impact, firing several employees and deleting some references to the program on its website. The program had worked to expand the audience for opera and symphony performances; to commission works by underrepresented voices; and to 'advance justice and equity.' (The Trump administration has shuttered many diversity-themed efforts across the federal government.) Marc Bamuthi Joseph, who was dismissed as a vice president at the center who oversaw Social Impact, lamented the end of the programs. 'They were wildly successful, they were growing, there was a positive trajectory,' he said in an interview. 'There was no evidence at all that the programs were a detriment to the institution.' The Kennedy Center did not respond to a request for comment about the cuts. But Donna Arduin, the center's new chief financial officer, wrote in a letter to staff on Wednesday that the center was facing serious fiscal challenges. 'The road out of this economic environment will not be easy and the shift will be felt across the center,' she wrote. Mr. Grenell, in a social media post on Wednesday, said the center would begin by 'cutting executive pay and downsizing the staff where possible.' Despite the upheaval, many artists and employees have chosen to stay on. The conductor Gianandrea Noseda recently renewed his contract as music director of the National Symphony through at least 2031. And Mr. Simon, the center's composer in residence, said in an interview that he would maintain his affiliation, saying he felt his music could 'reflect what's happening in the world — unapologetically.' Mr. Simon, who will premiere a double concerto for violin and cello next season with the National Symphony, said he felt he had creative freedom at the center. 'Now is not the time to pull back,' he said. 'Now is the time for artists to create.'
