Kennedy Center to present America’s great witch hunt

Washington National Opera and the National Symphony just announced next season’s plans under new management.

WNO is putting on Robert Ward’s opera of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a reconfoguration of the 1690s Salem witch-hunt as an allegory of contemporary McCarthyism. That should entertain the present regime.

The Crucible is a last-minute replacement for Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce’s ‘Fellow Travelers’ a work about two male colleagues in the US government who become lovers. That opera was withdrawn by its creative team in light of the new circumstances at Kennedy Center. backgrounds and beliefs.”

Also on the WNO bill: West Side Story, Marriage of Figaro, Aida and Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha.

The NSO has Shostakovich 8th, a Stalin-era work of arts-politics coexistence.

The arts aren’t dead yet.