The Kennedy Center has announced its upcoming season lineup. For a theater that has supposedly banned performers wearing drag, its shows include an awful lot of men dressed as women.
When President Donald Trump purged the Kennedy Center’s bipartisan board of directors in February and took over as chairman of the new board, he announced an immediate ban on events featuring performers in drag.
“Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP,” he wrote in a Truth Social post announcing a return to a “Golden Age in Arts and Culture” for the storied theater.
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The president is reportedly a long-time fan of “non-woke” musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber, particularly The Phantom of the Opera and Cats.
And yet the 2025-26 season announced Monday will include Chicago, Moulin Rouge! The Musical, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Monty Python’s Spamalot, all of which typically feature performers in drag, The New York Times reported.
The entire plot of Mrs. Doubtfire revolves around a man dressing as an elderly woman in order to pose as a nanny and spend time with his children after he and his wife divorce. Spamalot pokes fun at the medieval practice of male actors playing female parts with a number of drag bits.
And then there are the queens.
In Chicago, a character named Mary Sunshine is typically a male soprano in drag whose wig is dramatically removed to emphasize a character’s assertion that things are “not always as they appear to be.”
And Moulin Rouge! features a literal drag queen named Baby Doll who is one of the courtesans performing alongside Satine at the Moulin Rouge cabaret.
Spamalot and Moulin Rouge! continue the theater’s previously standard practice of featuring unionized casts, while Chicago and Mrs. Doubtfire are non-unionized national tours, which tend to both pay less and cost less to present, the Times reported.
The Kennedy Center has been mired in chaos since Trump took over and vowed to make the theater of all places “non-woke.” In response to the president’s ideological demands, several famous artists have refused to perform there.
The musical Hamilton canceled a planned run there, while the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater—which is typically an annual fixture—won’t take part in this year’s ballet season.
The actor Robert De Niro, a 2009 Kennedy Center Honor recipient, ripped into the changes last week during his acceptance speech for the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or lifetime achievement award.
“America’s philistine president has had himself appointed head of one of our premier cultural institutions,” De Niro said. “He has cut funding and support to the arts, humanities and education.”
During his speech, the nine-time Academy Award nominee and two-time winner added, “The arts are democratic. Art is inclusive. It brings people together, like tonight. Art looks for truth. Art embraces diversity. And that’s why art is a threat. That’s why we are a threat to autocrats and fascists.”
Last month, the Kennedy Center quietly canceled several Pride Month events that were scheduled for June. At a dinner for the Kennedy Center board on Monday, Trump boasted that the arts institution had balanced its budget, eliminated DEI initiatives, and “brought back family-friendly programming that will attract large audiences once again.”
