Tag: Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

More territorial wolf urine sprays around Washington, as it was announced Sunday night, via social media, that the Kennedy Center will be shut down for two years for extensive renovations and remodeling. The proclamation comes at a time of escalating artist cancellations and dwindling ticket sales, spurred by the flabbergasting politicization and illegitimate renaming of the performing arts institution. According to the statement, funding is already in place for the upheaval, even though the plan and budget have yet to be authorized by Congress.

The timing is especially precarious for the National Symphony Orchestra, which makes the Kennedy Center its home, falling as it does at a time when orchestras are already in the process of announcing their 2026-27 seasons. Hopefully the organization hasn’t already printed and mailed out its brochures. In the scheme of things, it would actually be the least of its worries, as the NSO is now poised to go down with the ship unless it can find a life raft – alternative performance venues – pronto.

Such an announcement might be regarded as impulsive and reactionary, coming as it does on a Sunday evening on social media. The text is full of serpentine sentences and random capitalizations. It appears following a month of high-profile artist cancellations, including most recently that of Philip Glass, perhaps America’s most-recognized living composer of music in the classical tradition, who elected to withdraw his Symphony No. 15 from its scheduled premiere. The work was inspired by writings of Abraham Lincoln. Glass joins Renée Fleming, Béla Fleck, and Stephen Schwartz, among those who stepped away in recent weeks. Next season, cancellation will no longer be an option, because the center will be closed.

An unfortunate lack of notice for such a major disruption might lead some to question whether the decision was made out of thoughtlessness, at best, or perhaps to save face, or more troublingly, out of retribution or with intent to sabotage. The timing – construction set to begin on July 4th, the 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation – is convenient for no one save those embarrassed by the institution’s recent virtual collapse.

In the meantime, the White House is torn apart, the East Wing demolished (without going through proper channels) to prepare for the construction of a 90,000 square-foot ballroom, the Oval Office is gilded, the Lincoln Bathroom a marbled tomb.

Yet to come: a proposed 250-foot triumphal arch (for a sense of scale, the Capitol building is 288 feet), to be erected at Memorial Circle in Arlington, VA. The structure would overlook the Potomac River at the solemn site of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. The bridge was conceived to symbolically link North and South following the American Civil War. For generations, memorials to Lincoln and Robert E. Lee have been visible from either side of the bridge. Going forward, they may have to communicate like Pyramus and Thisbe, through a chink in the arch.

“I have determined that The Trump Kennedy Center [sic], if temporarily closed for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding, can be, without question, the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World,” the announcement says. (Note random capitalization.) The proclamation fails to mention that the Kennedy Center underwent a $250 million renovation and expansion in 2019.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts opened in 1971. Intended as a living memorial to the fallen U.S. president, for over half a century, the venue has presented countless musical, theatrical, and educational events, to honor Kennedy’s legacy in contributing to a better, more hopeful, and enlightened citizenry, country, and world. The structure encompasses three principal auditoriums – the Concert Hall, the Opera House, and the Eisenhower Theater – and a dozen other performing arts spaces.

This news preempts my annual, apolitical post celebrating the dual birthdays of Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler. Somebody wake me when we’re great again.