On Wednesday, March 5, The New York Times reported that the Hamilton musical will skip the Kennedy Center next year—and it won’t return for the entirety of Donald Trump’s takeover of the arts center.
In the less than two months since he assumed office, Trump has named himself chairman of the 53-year-old venue, fired its outgoing president and many on its board of trustees (and lost other big names associated with the center in a series of resignations), and appointed Richard Grenell as its interim president. These moves prompted Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda to cancel the musical’s upcoming performance, which was scheduled to coincide with the 250th anniversary next year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“It’s not the Kennedy Center as we knew it,” said Miranda in an interview with The Times. “It’s not for all of us. It’s just for Donald Trump and his crowd. So we made a decision we can’t do it.”
This cancellation is one of many that followed Trump’s intervention. Writer-actress Issa Rae, J. Geils Band alum Peter Wolf, Philadelphia-based rock band Low Cut Connie, and singer-musician Rhiannon Giddens all backed out of scheduled performances. On social media, Wolf decried an “egregious firing of staff by the new administration” and Low Cut Connie expressed a desire for the Kennedy Center to “return to a non-partisan community-building model.”
Others who have announced cancellations of upcoming performances on social media include Saturday Night Live writer Sylvia Traymore Morrison (who characterized Trump’s new Kennedy Center as “disturbing“), electro-indie band Balún (which stated that the center “no longer provides the space we envisioned for this kind of work“), novelist Louise Penney (who argued that canceling was “far more important” than the “career highlight” of appearing at the center), and singer-songwriter Amanda Rheaume (who said she could not “in her right heart” go through with her upcoming performance “in a place that [Trump] is involved in”).
The annual series “RIOT! Funny Women Stand Up” also pulled the plug, as did the comedy play Eureka Day, and the Alfred Street Baptist Church choir that was scheduled to sing a Christmas concert.
Some artists and performance groups didn’t get the chance to leave voluntarily. Over the past month, The Kennedy Center has canceled the children’s musical Finn and the a performance by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC, which the center later said was planned before Trump’s takeover.
“We believe in the power of music to educate and uplift, to foster love, understanding, and community, and we regret that this opportunity has been taken away,” the chorus said in a statement. “We will continue to sing and raise our voices for equality.”
