Lifestyle
Washington National Opera leaves Kennedy Center, joining slew of artist exits
A view of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which the current board is calling the Trump Kennedy Center, in Washington, DC, on Dec. 26, 2025.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images
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Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images
The Washington National Opera is leaving the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, its home since 1971.
Friday’s news, shared with NPR in a statement via email from the opera company, comes in response to new policies which the 70-year-old performing arts group said strain its financial model.
The Washington National Opera stressed the “amicability” of its decision to end its longtime residency at the Kennedy Center. But it said the center’s new business model, which requires productions to be fully-funded in advance, is incompatible with the usual mix of ticket sales, grants and donations that cannot all be secured ahead.
“Opera companies typically cover only 30-60% of costs through ticket sales, with the remainder from grants and donations that cannot be secured years ahead when productions must be planned,” the statement said.
The company added the model also does not accommodate its artistic mission, which aims to balance popular works such as West Side Story, slated for May 2026, with more obscure and experimental operas, such as the little-known Scott Joplin work, Treemonisha, scheduled for March. “Revenue from major productions traditionally subsidizes smaller, innovative works,” the statement said.
Artistic director Francesca Zambello, who has led the company for 14 seasons, shared her regrets in a statement with NPR, while also looking to the future.
“I am deeply saddened to leave the Kennedy Center,” Zambello said. “In the coming years, as we explore new venues and new ways of performing, Washington National Opera remains committed to its mission and artistic vision. Our repertory will continue to include diverse offerings, from monumental classics to more contemporary works, presented in bold visual productions with first-class musical values.”
In addition to a continued presence for now on the Kennedy Center website, the opera company launched its new independent website within a few hours of its announcement.
“After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with the Washington National Opera due to a financially challenging relationship,” the Kennedy Center wrote in an email to NPR on Friday. “We believe this represents the best path forward for both organizations and enables us to make responsible choices that support the financial stability and long-term future of the Trump Kennedy Center.”
On social media, Kennedy Center executive director Richard Grenell said it was the center’s decision to sever ties with the opera company — and not the other way around.
“The Trump Kennedy Center has made the decision to end the EXCLUSIVE partnership with the Washington Opera so that we can have the flexibility and funds to bring in operas from around the world and across the U.S.” Grenell said. “Having an EXCLUSIVE relationship has been extremely expensive and limiting in choice and variety.”
Grenell reposted his message on Saturday after he was alerted that his X.com account had been hacked and the original message had been removed.
President Donald Trump was named chairman of the Kennedy Center’s board in February 2025. His name was added to the Kennedy Center in December following a vote by the Trump-appointed members of its board. Since the power of the venue’s board to rename the center is currently in dispute, NPR continues to refer to the Kennedy Center using its legal name.
A string of exits
The Washington National Opera’s departure is the latest and perhaps most significant in a string of artist exits from the cultural institution since Trump took over the institution.
Backlash from ticket-buyers, slated performers, and certain board members—including Shonda Rhimes—was swift.
Artists are continuing to cancel performances. But one of the first to do so was a touring production of the musical Hamilton. In a statement on X in March 2025, producer Jeffrey Seller said he opposed the Trump administration’s ousting of many Democratic board members.
“The recent purge by the Trump Administration of both professional staff and performing arts events at or originally produced by the Kennedy Center flies in the face of everything this national center represents,” wrote Seller.
Actress and writer Issa Rae followed suit with a post on Instagram, cancelling her sold-out March performance.
A slew of additional artists and performance companies canceled after the board’s vote to rename the center “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” Congress has not yet authorized the name change.
Grenell has responded to many cancellations on social media, condemning the artists. After Banjo player Béla Fleck canceled his performance because he said the center had become “political,” Grenell wrote on X, “You just made it political and caved to the woke mob who wants you to perform for only Lefties.
“This mob pressuring you will never be happy until you only play for Democrats. The Trump Kennedy Center believes all people are welcome—Democrats and Republicans and people uninterested in politics. We want performers who aren’t political—who simply love entertaining everyone regardless of who they voted for.”
Find a running list of these cancellations below.
Sonia De Los Santos
On Jan. 8, singer-songwriter Sonia De Los Santos announced on Instagram that she was canceling her upcoming February concert at the Kennedy Center. “As an artist,” wrote De Los Santos, “I treasure the freedom to create and share my music, and for many years I have used this privilege to uplift the stories of immigrants in this country.”
De Los Santos, who was nominated for a Latin Grammy for best children’s album in 2018, stated that “I do not feel that the current climate at this beloved venue represents a welcoming space for myself, my band, or our audience.”
Béla Fleck performs onstage during the 67th Annual Grammy Awards Premiere Ceremony at Peacock Theater on Feb. 2, 2025 in Los Angeles.
Leon Bennett/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
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Leon Bennett/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
Béla Fleck
Performing at the Kennedy Center “has become charged and political, at an institution where the focus should be on the music,” wrote American banjo player Béla Fleck about his scheduled appearance with the National Symphony Orchestra in an official statement posted to Instagram on Jan. 7. “I have withdrawn from my upcoming performance with the NSO at The Kennedy Center,” he wrote. “I look forward to playing with the NSO another time in the future when we can together share and celebrate art.”
The 18-time Grammy winner has performed at the Kennedy Center in the past.
Stephen Schwartz
The composer and lyricist for the beloved musicals Wicked, Godspell and Pippin was expected to host a gala fundraiser for the Washington National Opera in May 2026. On Jan. 2, Schwartz announced his withdrawal. According to NBC News, Schwartz reflected that the Kennedy Center was “founded to be a political home for free artistic expression for artists of all nationalities and ideologies.” Today, he said, making an appearance “has now become an ideological statement.”
Richard Grenell quickly responded to Schwartz’s withdrawal, calling it a “bogus” report in a statement posted on X and saying reporters were plagiarizing a “fake @RollingStone story.” Schwartz was “never signed,” Grenell wrote.
Reports from NBC and other outlets, including Variety, have refuted this claim, publishing screenshots showing that Schwartz was promoted on the Kennedy Center’s website prior to his cancellation.
Stephen Schwartz attends the 2025 Songwriters Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony at Marriott Marquis Times Square on Jun. 12, 2025 in New York City.
Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Songwriters Hall Of Fame
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Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Songwriters Hall Of Fame
The Cookers
The seven-piece band of veteran jazz musicians announced shortly before Dec. 31 that they would not perform at the Kennedy Center for “A Jazz New Year’s Eve:”
“We know this news is disappointing,” reads the statement on their website. “We are not turning away from our audience, and do want to make sure that when we do return to the bandstand, the room is able to celebrate the full presence of the music and everyone in it. Our hope is that this moment will leave space for reflection, not resentment.”
The statement went on to say, “We remain committed to playing music that reaches across divisions rather than deepening them.”
Chuck Redd
The American jazz drummer and longtime host of the Kennedy Center’s annual Christmas Jazz Jam chose to cancel his 2025 appearance when he “saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building,” according to a statement sent to the Associated Press.
On Dec. 27, the Kennedy Center announced its plan to file a $1 million lawsuit against Redd. “Any artist canceling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn’t courageous or principled—they are selfish, intolerant, and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people,” said Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi.
In a letter shared with NPR, Richard Grenell condemned Redd: “Regrettably, your action surrenders to the sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left, who have sought to intimidate artists into boycotting performances at our national cultural center.”
Doug Varone and Dancers
“The renaming for me has kind of pushed me off a cliff,” said choreographer Doug Varone on Dec. 31, when he spoke with NPR’s Morning Edition. Varone, who was set to showcase members of his Doug Varone and Dancers company at the Kennedy Center in April 2026, pulled the performance.
John F. Kennedy, for whom the Kennedy Center was established as a living memorial, “believed in the arts as kind of the beating heart of our nation,” said Varone.
“I believe that the level of artistry has dropped drastically since the administration change, and the employees that were responsible for the quality of the work at the center have all been let go.”
After canceling, the company started a crowdfunding campaign to help offset its financial loss. It raised over $42,000, exceeding its $40,000 goal.
Magpie
In a statement posted to Facebook on Jan. 5, Greg Artzner of the American folk duo Magpie announced the decision to pull their Feb. 28 concert, set to play on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage.
“There isn’t really anything defensible” about Trump, said the statement from Artzner and Magpie’s Terry Leonino. Although they had planned an evening of songs with messages of unity and hope, “We are personally and philosophically in agreement with the belief underlying the growing boycott,” they said. “The stand being taken by fellow artists we respect and admire has created a moral picket line. We stand with them in solidarity.”
An update on Jan. 9 said that Magpie would now be performing a longer version of that concert on Feb. 21 at Seekers Church in Washington, D.C., now called, “The Traveling John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restoration Roadshow.”
Kristy Lee
Folk singer Kristy Lee canceled her Jan. 14 Kennedy Center performance due to “recent efforts to impose political branding on the Center,” according to a statement posted on her website.
“Public arts spaces should be free from political influence,” Lee said in her statement. “I step back out of respect for artistic freedom and the Kennedy Center’s founding mission, not in opposition to its staff, artists, or audience.”
On Jan. 14, Lee plans to host a live-streamed concert instead, titled “Showing Up: From the Kennedy Center to the Couch.”
Low Cut Connie
Philadelphia rock and roll band Low Cut Connie pulled their concert, set for February 2025, “Upon learning that this institution that has run non-partisan for 54 years is now chaired by President Trump himself and his regime,” according to a statement posted on their Facebook page.
“Maybe my career will suffer from this decision,” wrote band frontman Adam Weiner, “but my soul will be the better for it.”
Rhiannon Giddens
In Feb. 2025, folk singer Rhiannon Giddens announced her departure from the Kennedy Center lineup in a social media statement. “I cannot in good conscience play at The Kennedy with the recent programming changes forced on the institution by this new board,” wrote Giddens.
Giddens transferred her May 11 concert, “Old-Time Revue,” to The Anthem concert hall, also in Washington, D.C.
Balún
The Puerto Rican band, based in Brooklyn in New York City, canceled their Kennedy Center performance, which had been set for Feb. 27, 2025.
According to a statement posted to Balún’s Instagram account, “recent events made it clear that the space no longer aligns with our values. Our safety, integrity, and commitment to justice come first.”
Issa Rae attends HBO’s final season premiere of “Insecure” at Kenneth Hahn Park on Oct. 21, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.
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Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Issa Rae
“Thank you so much for selling out the Kennedy Center for ‘An Evening With [Me],’” wrote Issa Rae, the acclaimed star and creator of HBO’s Insecure, on her Instagram stories page in Feb. 2025. “Unfortunately, due to what I believe to be an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through all mediums, I’ve decided to cancel my appearance at this venue.”
“Hamilton”
In March 2025, Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller announced on X that the Tony-award winning musical phenomenon would no longer run as scheduled at the Kennedy Center. According to the statement, the decision was made both for political and for business reasons. Not only was there “a new spirit of partisanship,” the statement read in part, but “it would be “financially and personally devastating to the employees of Hamilton if the new leadership of the Kennedy Center suddenly canceled or re-negotiated our engagement. The actions of the new Chairman of the Board in recent weeks demonstrate that contracts and previous agreements simply cannot be trusted.”
The Kennedy Center was swift to respond to Hamilton‘s cancellation. On X in a now-deleted post, Richard Grenell accused Hamilton star and creator Lin Manuel-Miranda of being “intolerant of people who don’t agree with him politically,” and stated that the decision was “a publicity stunt that will backfire.”
In the months since the show’s cancellation at the Center, Hamilton has continued to sell out theaters on Broadway and in venues nationwide who host its North American touring company.
U.S. Marine Band
The U.S. Marine Band announced in February 2025 that the Marine Band would not perform in the Equity Arc Wind Symphony event, a collaboration between Marine Band members and selected high school musicians.
The U.S. Marine Band, known also as “The President’s Own” was founded by an Act of Congress in 1798, making it the country’s oldest professional music organization.
Composer Kevin Charoensri, whose music had been scheduled to be performed by the band at the event, stated in a Facebook post that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) orders resulted in the cancellation of the Equity Arc concert:
“It has come to my attention that the program, one based on equity and diversity of voices, is no longer supported at the federal level under this administration,” Charoensri wrote. “It was for this reason that the program and performance were canceled.”
The U.S. Marine marching band performs in the 120th Tournament of Roses Parade January 1, 2009 in Pasadena, California.
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
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Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
Jennifer Vanasco edited this story.
Jodie Foster has her first solo lead role entirely in French in A Private Life.
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Jérôme Prébois/Sony Pictures Classics
After dozens of films over a storied six-decade career, Jodie Foster is trying something new, playing the lead role in a French film for the very first time.
There’s hardly a trace of an American accent in Foster’s turn as Parisian therapist Lilian Steiner in A Private Life (Vie privée) and she appears to be very much at home.
The character she plays is an American woman who built her career in France. So director Rebecca Zlotowski added some small asides — and swearing — in English because of Foster’s brisk and fluent French. “People suddenly were just completely confused that I wasn’t a French person,” the actress said.
All apparent ease aside, “I have a different personality in French than I do in English,” Foster told Morning Edition host Leila Fadel during a recent visit to NPR’s New York studios.
Her voice has a higher pitch in French, something she attributes to the French ladies who taught her at the private school she attended, Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles. Foster also had some smaller roles in three French films prior to A Private Life, including in 2004’s A Very Long Engagement.
“I’m just much more insecure and kind of vulnerable because I never know whether I’m communicating properly. And, you know, am I going to find that word at the last minute?” Foster said.
This frustration is also built into the script itself. When we first meet Steiner, she’s constantly frazzled, barely listening to her patients and hardly sparing a minute for her newborn grandson.
Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster) and Gabriel Haddad (Daniel Auteuil) find love again — for each other — years after their divorce in A Private Life.
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Jérôme Prébois/Sony Pictures Classics
Then, her eyes start watering constantly, something someone more grounded would call crying, but not Steiner, who grows increasingly frustrated that water is coming out of her eyes.
It turns out to be especially fitting for someone who is a Freudian psychoanalyst. “In true Freudian fashion [she] is having a physical demonstration of a psychic ill,” Foster explains.
That psychic ill is caused by the death of a patient (the Franco-Belgian social drama star Virginie Efira), purportedly by suicide.
But Steiner suspects her patient has been murdered and launches her own — inconclusive, darkly comedic — investigation, enlisting help from her ex-husband (played by Daniel Auteuil, a mainstay of French cinema), and rekindling their old flame in the process.
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All of those disparate plot lines play into the film’s French title, Vie privée, which Foster explains is a double entendre: “So private life, meaning everything that you think that would mean the opposite of a public life — an internal life. But private also means has been deprived of, so somebody who has been deprived of life, meaning somebody who’s died potentially.”
In her own life, Foster said she’s had to fight for privacy, ferociously. “I had to say I will go to Disneyland and I will not have a film crew following me… I will go to college and I will not give everything to the public eye, in order to make sure that I survived intact,” she explained.
After a frenetic pace of filming in her teens and twenties, Foster says she became more deliberate about the roles she accepted so that she could bring more depth to the screen. “I really was careful to make sure that I had real life and I worked more sporadically than most other actors,” she said.
In a hallucinatory dream sequence while under hypnosis, Lilian (Jodie Foster), left, is transported to WWII-era Paris, where she and her present-day patient Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira) were lovers.
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Jérôme Prébois/Sony Pictures Classics
Today, she’s especially excited about working with women directors. She also directs herself. Recounting that she only worked with one female director — Mary Lambert for 1987’s Siesta — in the first four decades of her career, Foster said she’s now working more with women.
“It’s been a shift that’s a long time coming… But it came very, very late,” she added, noting that the prevailing bias against women directors has only “recently” changed in mainstream cinema.
Foster also hopes to take part in more French movies, maybe even direct a film in France. “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do and something that would be a great challenge for me,” she said.
Director Rebecca Zlotowski, shown here on the set of A Private Life, says she had long dreamed of directing a film featuring Jodie Foster.
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Jérôme Prébois/Sony Pictures Classics
She urged American audiences to embrace learning to speak languages other than English.
“It’s surprising how Americans don’t hear other languages… how you can go your whole life without really hearing other languages spoken in your state,” she said. “We have to make an effort to connect to a wider world and understand that we’re all part of the same universe.”
The broadcast version was produced by Julie Depenbrock. The digital version was edited by Treye Green.
Gene Hackman And Wife
Death House Hits Market For $6.25M
Published
Gene Hackman‘s New Mexico estate is officially up for sale … less than a year after he and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were found dead in the sprawling compound.
Gene and Betsy’s Santa Fe house — which sits on a 53-acre estate in The Land of Enchantment — has hit the market with an asking price of $6.25 million.
At the time of their deaths, police body cam footage showed the place was in shambles, with rat feces and urine everywhere. But, we’re told the place has been completely cleaned up and looks absolutely amazing now!
The 13,000-square-foot estate sits in a gated community and consists of two separate buildings — the main 3-bedroom area, which features floor-to-ceiling windows, a grand living room, and a library, as well as the 3-bedroom guesthouse. The compound also includes a lap pool, hot tub, putting green and an actor’s studio.
Remember … Gene and his wife were found dead in their home last February 26 by maintenance workers after their bodies had been lying around for at least 9 days. Police said Hackman’s pacemaker registered its last known activity on February 17.
The Santa Fe County Medical Examiner ruled that Gene died at 95 from Alzheimer’s disease and Betsy died at 65 from hantavirus infection — a disease spread by rat feces and urine.
Tara S. Earley and Ricky Allen of Sotheby’s International Realty hold the listing … but they told The Wall Street Journal they know this house won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.
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But in her latest creative project, Tig turned the spotlight on a close friend of hers – the poet Andrea Gibson. Andrea died from cancer last year. Tig produced a documentary about Andrea’s incredible life – it’s called “Come See Me in the Good Light.”
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