Perhaps you’ve already read the headlines about how members of the cast of Les Misérables, slated to play at the Kennedy Center next month, are opting out of the performance that President Trump plans to attend, which is tied to a fundraising event for the Center, where he has declared himself chairman. The stories thus far suggest that performers have been given the option to take the night off if they wish, while a CNN headline blares that they are boycotting the performance, which would suggest less accommodation and more precipitous action.
Whatever the precise circumstances, this reflects the politicization of art by outside forces – in this case the federal government – since the new administration came in, in line with the dismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Humanities Endowment and public broadcasting now underway. Even where the administration’s wrecking ball has been stayed by judges, such as with the reinstatement of reporters at Voice of America, we learn that the famously non-partisan VOA will now start carrying news reports from the specious OANN. That Les Misérables, a story about fights for justice large and small, is one of Trump’s favorite musicals suggests that he is drawn to the scale and grandeur but completely incapable of appreciating the politics buried within the show itself. The central story is about a good man forced to petty crime to feed his child and an implacable foe whose campaign to punish the man is wholly out of proportion with the infraction.
Buried within the news reports of the latest Kennedy Center contretemps comes the intemperate reaction of Richard Grennell, installed by Trump seemingly as the Vichy leader of the Center. Informed of cast members choosing to absent themselves from the performance when the president attends, Grennell made a statement about wanting to “out those vapid and intolerant artists to ensure producers know who they shouldn’t hire.” This is, without question, a new blacklist – names that the government doesn’t want hired if they won’t perform for the king, exposed in such a way as to make future employers think twice about engaging them and exposing them for a rabid subset of MAGA supporters to harass and intimidate.
In the current Broadway show Good Night and Good Luck, and in the movie upon which it is closely based, audiences see the story of Edward R. Murrow’s efforts to expose the perfidy of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch-hunt against supposed communists in the 1950s. What the film and play don’t really show is the impact of those witch-hunts on the creative community – screenwriters forced to work under assumed names if they could work at all, actors who couldn’t be cast in films, artists turning against one another and outing their friends and colleagues to McCarthy’s minions, led by the rapacious Roy Cohn, later a Trump mentor.
Yet that is what Grennell believes is the proper treatment of actors who won’t assent to amuse the monarch, and he doesn’t even need a Senate hearing room to do it. Today, thanks to social media, all he needs to do is activate the center’s social media, or take to Truth Social, to make life hell for these conscientious objectors. In doing so, he will heighten the tension within the Les Misérables troupe, possibly provoking even more performers to opt out, in an “I am Spartacus” moment of solidarity.
When arms of the government publicly threaten people with exposure – and Trump’s bloodless coup at the Kennedy Center makes all official actions there part of the government – the witch-hunts have begun. From some actors choosing to sit out, we need more people to stand up, because we no longer have a Joseph Welch with the humanity, the dignity and the sanity to say “Have you no sense of decency” or even a government or a country that might be sufficiently chagrined to step back and come to its senses.
