Washington National Opera may move out of Kennedy Center due to Trump ‘takeover’ | Washington DC
Washington National Opera (WNO) is considering moving from the Kennedy Center, which has been the company’s home since the US’s national performing arts center opened in 1971.
According to WNO’s artistic director Francesca Zambello, this possibility was imposed on the company as a result of the “takeover” of the center by Donald Trump. The president declared himself president of the institution in February, dismissing and replacing its board and leadership.
Zambello said leaving the Kennedy Center was a likely scenario following the collapse in box office revenues and the “shattering” of donors’ trust following Trump’s takeover.
“It is our desire to perform in our home at the Kennedy Center,” he said. “But if we can’t raise enough money or sell enough tickets there, we have to consider other options.
“Two things that financially support a company are seriously compromised by the takeover,” he said.
Zambello said ticket sales were about 40 percent undersold compared to the period before Trump declared himself president. Many decided to boycott the centre. He says he receives protest messages every day from former loyal members of the audience.
“They say things like: ‘I’ll never set foot in there until the ‘orange threat’ is gone.’ Or: ‘Don’t you know the history? Don’t you know what Hitler did? “I refuse to give you even a penny,” he said.
“People send me their season brochures in a torn envelope and say: ‘Never, never, will I go back: Not while he’s in power.’”
Before the February coup, opera performances were held at 80-90 percent capacity. Those rates are now 60%, Zambello said, with the appearance of fuller houses at times as free tickets are distributed.
He said philanthropic donations, a major source of the company’s finances, have declined. “Donor trust is shattered because a lot of people think: ‘If I give to the Kennedy Center, I’m supporting Donald Trump,’” he said.
“The building is dirty,” he said. “It has been politicized by the current administration.”
Previously, trustees “were always a mix of Republicans and Democrats. It didn’t matter whether one was a Republican or a Democrat. What mattered was that they were running a large, important institution.”
He said the institution’s new management “has no experience in the arts.” The center’s Trump-appointed director, Richard Grenell, previously held a variety of foreign policy positions, including as U.S. ambassador to Germany.
He also said that staff in key areas such as marketing and development were also vacated in terms of both experience and numbers. “There was a promise that the new administration would help us find new donors, increase contributions, but they did not do it to our benefit,” he said.
The center’s new management had not vetoed any of Zambello’s programming choices, but “they suggested we produce more popular operas,” he said. “This season we are producing The Marriage of Figaro, Aida and West Side Story… I don’t see how we can get any more popular than that.”
Zambello said when he joined the company in 2012, it committed to making 50% of its cast members of color.
“Management questioned some aspects of this, and we explained that these were the best people for these roles,” he said. “America is an incredibly diverse country, and so we want to represent every part of this country on our stage.”
He said they also questioned the singers’ fees: “They said: ‘Can we consider cheaper artists?’ We are the feeding ground for larger corporations in this country. That’s why we’re hiring people who are already on the rise and whose wages will become much more expensive down the road.”
Zambello said Grenell issued an edict requiring all shows to be “net neutral,” meaning that costs are covered entirely by box office returns and donor contributions. But he said: “We’re now at a point where we can’t deliver a net neutral budget without massive external funding or knowing our users will come back.”
According to the analysis, the decline in ticket sales was reflected throughout the center, including concert seasons and theaters. Published by Washington Post Last week showed the box office was down 40% from its 2018 baseline.
According to Zambello, box office figures are no longer distributed internally among the center’s creative teams as part of the standard system of daily program reports.
The president announced his intention to become president of the institution by dismissing the bipartisan board of trustees on February 7. He replaced them with things of his own choosing; days later they unanimously elected him to office. The head of the center was dismissed and replaced by Grenell.
The moves were widely condemned. Weeks later, when J.D. Vance and Usha Vance, the second lady Trump added to the Kennedy Center board, attended a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra in March, patrons booed them.
Usha Vance was already on the board of trustees of WNO, which had an independent board and its own endowment. “She was a supportive board member as a senator’s wife and a supportive board member as the second lady, and we are grateful to have her patronage,” Zambello said.
“I believe he is an equalizer,” he said. “We can’t turn our backs on half of this country. We have to find a way for all of us to communicate and act together. I don’t believe in ‘us’ and ‘them’.”
Zambello says artists generally remain loyal to WNO. But in March the creative team behind the opera Travel CompanionsA love story set during Eisenhower’s purge of gay employees from federal jobs in the 1950s. retreated their work from the program.
The show was replaced by a production of Robert Ward’s opera PotAn adaptation of Arthur Miller’s allegory about the anti-communist witch hunts of McCarthyism.
WNO is an independent company, but it has a partnership agreement with the Kennedy Center, which means it has agreed to perform a certain number of shows in the building; shares back-office functions such as marketing and development; and receives a subsidy from the center of about $2 million to $3 million a year.
partnership agreement It was done in 2011, shortly before Zambello became artistic director, in an attempt to stabilize the company’s finances. It was renewed shortly before Trump declared himself president of the Kennedy Center.
WNO is understood to be looking at alternative venues in D.C. for its upcoming season, which runs from October 2026 through May of next year. Theaters of the scale required for mainstage opera production are few, but auditoriums used by the city’s Shakespeare Theater Company can occasionally be used for smaller-scale works.
The Kennedy Center declined to comment.
