Kennedy Center reopens to audience
mainpress release:
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announces the first performance in front of a live audience on one of the Center’s famed stages in more than six months. Featuring two of America’s most celebrated vocalists, Renée Fleming and Vanessa Williams, the concert launches the innovative On Stage at the Opera House series, designed to safely bring back live performing arts to the National Cultural Center. The configuration of the theater has been re-imagined to place the artists on a 30 x 24-foot stage extension built over the orchestra-level seating area. An invited audience of 40 people will enter through the wide loading doors on the Center’s front plaza and will sit in physically-distanced pairs on the stage facing the iconic red interior of the hall.
The *former* “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts”.
Soon the be renamed “The Angela Davis People’s Hall of Anti-Elitist, Non-Privileged Intersectionality”.
Any Day Now.
You are not off base. The KC is run by Deborah Rutter who holds total disdain for the western art music . She is well on her way to transforming the KC into a mass entertainment center with an emphasis on the hip hop genre. All of the NSO players I know despise her.
“An invited audience ”?
Oh my!!
Sounds highly discriminatory as they are chosen. Must they be rich or another dog whistle label??
40 in the audience? Why bother? There’s more children in my son’s classroom during pre-covid times.
DC is still in Phase 2, which limits public gatherings to 50 people. In this case, I imagine that has to include the artists and any stage crew on-site. Classical Movements is hosting socially-distanced backyard concerts with a similar audience size. This seems to be an effort to bring live performance back, to the extend that it can be done safely.
Let’s hope the pianist is not a white male…
Not to worry. Vanessa Williams.
How are the 40 audience members being selected?
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