Box office poison
Donald Trump gets publicly humiliated as his takeover of the renowned Kennedy Center results in a total collapse in ticket sales — with tens of thousands of seats left empty at the primary performance venues.
So much for making the center “hot” again. And of course it gets even more embarrassing…
“This downturn isn’t just about pricing or programming — it feels directly tied to the new regime’s leadership shift and the broader political climate,” one current staffer told The Washington Post. “I’ve heard from ticket buyers who say they’re choosing not to attend because of what the Kennedy Center now represents. The brand itself has become polarizing, which is unprecedented in my experience.”
43% of the once thriving center’s tickets remain unsold according to an analysis conducted by the Post on the Opera House, Concert Hall, and Eisenhower Theater from September 3rd to October 19th.
“That means that, at most, 57 percent of tickets were sold for the typical production — and some tickets may have been ‘comps,’ which are given away, often to staff members or the press. That compares with 93 percent sold or comped in fall 2024 and 80 percent in fall 2023,” write Travis M. Andrews, Jeremy B. Merrill and Shelly Tan in the Post.
But it’s not Trump’s money, so he won’t care. He had fun trashing the Kennedy Center, and that’s what matters.
Astonishingly, the Center has lost out on roughly $1 million in revenue just 45 days into show season and numerous artists have cancelled performances or outright refused to perform so long as Trump maintains his crooked iron grip over the center.
“Depressed ticket sales not only cause a shortfall in revenue; they also bode unfavorably for future fundraising revenue,” stated Michael Kaiser, former president of the Kennedy Center wrote.
The habitual lack of taste displayed by MAGA apparatchiks is also contributing to the center’s decline. With Trump ally Richard Grennell installed as interim president of the center, there has been an uptick in performances by “Christian artists” to combat the supposed trend of “woke” artistry. It’s worth pointing out that any “Christian” willing to support this cruel, fascist, murderous administration is Christian in name only.
Who wants “Christian” artists anyway? What are they gonna do, an all-singing all-dancing Pilgrim’s Progress? Paradise Lost starring Mel Gibson?
Speaking of christian artists, I subscribe to Hank Hill’s take on chrstian rock in particular.
Well, Paradise Lost would be appropriate.
A “Pilgrim’s Progress” musical might be kind of fun. Like following the yellow brick road.
This could be where their heads explode. Christian nationalism meets the free market. These are not compatible bedfellows, and right now it looks like the free market is winning. People are staying away in droves.
There are actual great artists who were also practicing Christians. I think of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Georges Rouault and Edward Elgar. Of course, their work would all be too highbrow for the MAGA crowd.
Well of course – to say nothing of John Donne, Jane Austen, the Brontes. But it depends what is meant by “Christian artists” – and in Trump-speak it means aggressive theocrats who think they get to force their religion on everyone else.
I shall only say that, despite my being very far from being a Christian, The Pilgrim’s Progress is a remarkable book — I read it first when I was seven or eight, skipping the the theological discussions, which I couldn’t understand, and still love it today (I shan’t say the same for Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which is a desperately painful book, but which provides an extraordinary account of what Calvinism may do to the mind of a good and brave man, as Bunyan was). As for Milton’s Paradise Lost, I finally read it in my mid-twenties, after refusing to read it since from my late teens I had been swept up, in true adolescent fashion, by Modernist ideas, and had blindly accepted Eliot’s, Pound’s & Leavis’s strictures, and was overwhelmed by it (to the extent that instead of Modernism putting everything from the past in its place, the poem seemed to me to put Modernism in its place). It is a very great poem. Then there is Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, whom I hugely admire. I think it was Simone Weil who claimed that Herbert’s “Love” (the third of that title, I think) — “Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back…” was the greatest poem ever written. Then there is Blake’s eccentric Christianity — and what morality I have derives from reading the Songs of Innocence & Experience, with their subtle and searching questions, in youth. The hymns of William Cowper and Isaac Watts. And, in the last century, the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins.
There is Dante. There is the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize and whom I greatly admire.
Not to mention music: J.S. Bach, of course, Buxtehude, Thomas Tallis, William Byrd… there are so many.
Architecture, art…
And there’s also Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, which I’ve quoted here more than once over the years.