The Kennedy Center’s final musical, for now, is a road company of “Moulin Rouge.”
Ticket sales are terrible. Most shows are sold at 45%. There are chunks of empty seats everywhere, for every performance.
It’s not because “Moulin Rouge” is no good. It’s because the core audience of the Kennedy Center has been driven away by Donald Trump and his handpicked board.
Until a court order stopped him, Trump was shutting the Kennedy Center down on July 7th for grossly overstated repairs. Now the court has told him to remove his name from the building, and not to close the Center.
As retribution, Trump is refusing to allow new entertainment to be booked. The doors will be open for the exhibit honoring President John F. Kennedy. But that”s it. Also, a tarp covers the name of the Center, so that Kennedy’s name is blocked. If Trump’s name is still there, no one knows. Trump, like a two year old screaming in a supermarket aisle, won’t listen to reason. He wants to render the Kennedy Center dead.
There will one more big event at the Center: taping of the Mark Twain Prize for Humor on June 28th. Bill Maher is the recipient. The special will be shown Netflix shortly thereafter. So far the guests are lame and tame, with little possibility of a repeat of last year’s hilarious takedown of Trump while honors went to Conan O’Brien.
Trump is basically gutting as much of our cultural institutions and media as possible. This must be so heartwarming for his backers — not just the redneck crowd of MAGA, but the wealthy people who’ve made him possible and think this is all very satisfying. (Hollywood’s Brian Grazer, I mean you.)
Every performance of “Moulin Rouge” looks like this:
