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“Our show simply cannot, in good conscience, participate and be
a part of this new culture that is being imposed on the Kennedy
Center,” producer Jeffrey Seller said in a statement Wednesday.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop-flavored biography about the first
U.S. treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, won the best new
musical Tony Award, the Pulitzer Prize for drama, a Grammy and
the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American
History. It also earned Miranda a MacArthur Foundation “genius”
grant.
The show played the Kennedy Center in 2018 during Trump's first
administration and again in 2022 when Joe Biden was president.
It was scheduled again March 3-April 26, 2026. Those plans are
now off. Tickets had yet to go on sale.
“We are not acting against his administration, but against the
partisan policies of the Kennedy Center as a result of his
recent takeover,” said Seller. “These actions bring a new spirit
of partisanship to the national treasure that is the Kennedy
Center.”
The Kennedy Center has been in upheaval since Trump forced out
the center’s leadership and took over as chair of the board of
trustees. His decision to do so is part of his broad campaign
against “woke” culture.
Actor Issa Rae, singer-musician Rhiannon Giddens, author Louise
Penny and the rock band Low Cut Connie also have canceled
scheduled Kennedy Center events. Singer-songwriter Victoria
Clark went ahead with her Feb. 15 show, but on stage wore a
T-shirt reading “ANTI TRUMP AF.”
This is not the first time the musical has taken a political
stance. In 2016, the “Hamilton” cast delivered a curtain call
appeal to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who was in the
Broadway audience, asking that the Trump administration “uphold
our American values” and “work on behalf of all of us.”
The Kennedy Center, supported by government money and private
donations, attracts millions of visitors each year to a complex
that features a concert hall, opera house and theater, along
with a lecture hall, meeting spaces and a “Millennium Stage”
that has been the site for free shows.
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