Kennedy Center: Renewal
President Trump to fire the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees
Yesterday, President Trump announced he was firing the board of trustees at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and naming himself chairman. In doing so he continues a long line of tradition stretching back to President Eisenhower. As a regular attendee at the Kennedy Center, I applaud Trump’s resolve.
A national cultural center came to prominence in D.C. circles when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt discussed it as an employment mechanism during the Great Depression of 1933. Congress held hearings in 1935 on plans to establish a Cabinet level Department of Science, Art and Literature, and to build a monumental theater and arts building on Capitol Hill. The theater and arts trend survived well into the 1970s, when the Kennedy Center hosted student theatre troupes performing Shakespeare. A 1938 congressional resolution called for construction of a "public building which shall be known as the National Cultural Center" but nothing materialized. It wasn’t until the 1950s when congressional plans for funding developed. Even then, President Eisenhower personally involved himself with fundraising for the site. Eisenhower’s leadership was carried by President John F. Kennedy into the 1960s, and it is after our prince of Camelot the center is named.
The Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts has fallen a long way since it performed regular masses in its opera house in the 1970s. For years, the Kennedy Center featured drag shows not only for adults but also youth (“Dragtastic Dressup”). The elegant dress code exemplified by the Kennedys at the opening gala in 1971 has gone down the drain, with attendees now in jeans and sneakers. During a National Symphony Orchestra performance in 2023, I sat behind someone who reeked of so much marijuana I complained to an usher.
The annual Nutcracker ballet performance, highly anticipated by many families in the DMV, shocked this past winter as it contained no nutcracker ballerino! The erosion of the most basic cultural norms is alarming. It should be no surprise instead of focusing on its own programming, or lack thereof, the Kennedy Center funded 1081 performances beyond its walls in 2022. In its 2022 annual report, the Kennedy Center listed a deficit of over $23 million but tried to make up for it by counting future performance revenue.
Revitalizing the Kennedy Center would be a huge win for art on the East Coast. Federal funds currently must be used for the Kennedy Center’s maintenance, and who knows where those funds are used since if you get up close to the Kennedy Center stages you can see they are falling apart. Delving into our musical past would be a great way to bring in new donors. A revitalization of Disney’s 1940 Fantasia, for example, with a repertoire of Bach, Tschaikovsky, Dukas, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Ponchielli, Mussorgsky and Schubert would bring us back to basics. Maybe Disney would chip in too after realizing a change in course needed (see their billion-dollar loss in 2023).
Frankly I don’t know how we can do much worse than drag brunches for children, missing ballerinas, no dress code and crumbling stages.
