#kennedy-center

#kennedy-center

A year ago just a year ago the Kennedy Center in Washington DC was a world-class centre for the performing arts. It had a resident opera company, respected artistic teams, and a run of the acclaimed musical Hamilton to look forward to. It had a bipartisan board that upheld the dignity of an organisation that, since it was conceived of in the mid-20th century, had been treated with courtesy and supported by governments of both stripes.

In the wake of a slew of artist cancellations, Kennedy Center leadership says it wants to book "performers who aren't political." Apparently, that ethos doesn't extend to its film programming, as the Washington, DC venue is set to host the premiere of a new Melania Trump documentary on January 29th. The film, simply titled Melania, will be released in theaters worldwide by Amazon MGM on January 30th, 2026, reportedly as part of a $40 million licensing deal.

Toby Morton, a TV writer and producer who has worked on the long-running and joyfully offensive sitcom, said he purchased the domain in August after predicting the president would change the name from the Kennedy Center to the Trump Kennedy Center after he installed himself as chair and stocked the board with loyalists. The name change has brought turbulence to the institution, with several performers abruptly pulling out of scheduled concerts in protest.

Prior to changing its name to the Trump-Kennedy Center, its board reportedly adopted bylaws limiting voting to members appointed only by Donald Trump.

Recently, the Trump administration faced a similar situation. After Donald Trump purported to rename the Kennedy Center after himself, the jazz musician Chuck Redd withdrew from a planned Christmas Eve concert. The administration's response was somehow both more authoritarian and comic than the one in the movie. The Kennedy Center's president, Richard Grenell, announced that the Center intends to sue Redd for his impudence. Grennell's letter threatening legal action depicts Redd as a sad loser suffering "dismal ticket sales and lack of donor support" and "lagging" attendance whose withdrawal, paradoxically, is "very costly to a non-profit Arts institution."

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Screenshot via Comedy Central A prescient writer for the irreverent Comedy Central show South Park correctly predicted that President Donald Trump would slap his name on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, so he bought up Trump-Kennedy Center web domains to troll the president. Writer Toby Morton bought the trumpkennedycenter.org and trumpkennedycenter.com domains back in August and is now plotting how best to parody Trump's vanity, according to The Washington Post.

I think it wasthese days you don't know what has to be confirmed or notbut it looked like, on the Kennedy Center, they started putting the name Trump on it, Segura began. Rogan confirmed, Yeah, he added his name to it. Segura replied, Yeah, it's crazy. And he took out the Kennedy Rose Garden. You're like, what? Take it away. Now it's like a cement f*cking plot.

I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building. Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation.

On a blustery evening in October, Daniel Foster sat onstage at the Kennedy Center, viola in his lap. The National Symphony Orchestra was about to play "Don Juan," an 1889 tone poem by Richard Strauss about a young libertine in search of the ideal woman. The opening is fiendishly tricky for viola. It has a fast and technical harmonic line that's musically demanding and strange. Thirty years ago, in his audition to be the NSO's principal violist, Foster played that excerpt. He won the job.

When the sculptor Joel Shapiro created Blue, the piece that stands around the back of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, looking out over the Potomac River in Washington, he wanted to tap into a number of elements. The giant matchstick figure denotes movement and energy, risk and possibility. As Shapiro himself has said, it is supposed to reconfigure depending on how you look at it.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has fired another staffer: Kevin Struthers, a senior director of music programming who had been at the D.C. arts institution for 30 years. Struthers confirmed his termination to NPR on Thursday. His dismissal is the latest upset in a line of firings and resignations at the Kennedy Center since President Trump became its chair in February and appointed Richard Grennell its new president.