Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025 | 2 a.m.
Eight years in the past after I was at a writing convention in Washington, D.C., I acquired in contact with a former workers author of “mine” — if you’re the editor of a newspaper, the vernacular makes it appear as in case you personal your reporters — who’d gone from the schooling beat to really educating center college. I requested him out to dinner, and he stated certain — however that he additionally had tickets that evening for Alvin Ailey on the Kennedy Middle, so we might eat first, take the subway to see the best dance firm in America later.
I don’t know a lot about dance, however I do know who’s good at it. And I used to be super-excited to get an opportunity to go to the Kennedy Middle, which I’d been listening to about for half a century, however had by no means been to. What a spectacular efficiency, in a knockout venue, the beating coronary heart of American tradition.
You already know who else has by no means been to the Kennedy Middle — not as soon as, regardless of residing on the town for four-plus years?
Donald Trump. And but now he’s put in himself as its chairman of the board.
Although not having darkened its doorways himself, he informed reporters after he purged the whole board that some reveals within the a number of theaters there “had been horrible.”
In a leaked audio of a telephone name he made to his new board members, which incorporates his chief of workers and her stepmother, he laid out his imaginative and prescient: “We’re going to make it scorching. And we made the presidency scorching, so this needs to be straightforward.”
You already know one factor that’s not going to be straightforward? Getting the famously low-cost new board chair to open his personal pockets and donate to the establishment — which is mainly the chair’s whole job. The billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein, who Trump purged as chairman, contributed $120 million to the Kennedy Middle over 20 years on its board. And he oversaw the event effort to get different People to provide over $100 million annually to the Kennedy Middle, which isn’t some authorities division however an impartial nonprofit.
We don’t know a lot about what sort of theatrical and musical tradition Trump is contemplating for his reign, though it’s stated he as soon as thought of stepping into the mug’s sport that’s Broadway producing, and that he’s a fan of “Cats.”
After all we additionally know that he likes nation music and The Village Individuals, each of that are nice, however laborious to think about filling the lots of of Kennedy Middle performances a yr with.
He did say that in his time as impresario the middle is “not going to be ‘woke,’ ” and wrote on social media: “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.”
Among the many tens of 1000’s of performances over the many years, there apparently have been a number of drag reveals, not up the president’s alley. And the middle did produce a kids’s musical known as “Finn,” the title character described on the Kennedy Middle’s web site as “a younger shark who simply desires to be his true self. He loves sparkles and vivid colours regardless of being a shark.” Yeah, its upcoming nationwide tour has been canceled already.
However the Kennedy Middle is the place Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to the opera collectively. It’s the place former Vice President Mike Pence noticed “The King and I.” Simply perusing at random the current calendar for the venue: Vasily Petrenko conducts Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony. Riverdance 30 — The New Technology. The New York Metropolis Ballet. A pageant known as “Arts Breaking the Sky”: “EARTH to SPACE will fill the Middle with musicians and astronauts, poets and researchers, visible artists and engineers, actors and environmentalists, architects and astronomers, dancers and scientists, filmmakers and area designers.”
Oops. Scrolling all the way down to Friday evening, we see: “Liberated Muse presents ‘The Soundtrack for Social Justice,’ a poetic and musical reflection on the methods we will manifest a world of equity and fairness the place human rights are acknowledged and upheld.” Equity? Too woke for phrases. The present should not go on.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California Information Group editorial board.
