Washington National Opera Bids Kennedy Center Adieu
By • January 12, 2026 One Comment 527
Whether Washington National Opera closes its 70th anniversary season with “West Side Story” or not, the company’s song of the moment is “Somewhere” — better known as “There’s a Place for Us.”
On Jan. 9, the New York Times reported that WNO will end its affiliation with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, its home since the center opened, “in perhaps the largest artistic rebuke yet to President Trump’s campaign to remake the Kennedy Center in his image.”
Changes to the remaining half of WNO’s 2025-26 season are likely. On the Kennedy Center website until recently: a Jan. 24 concert performance, featuring Cafritz Young Artists, by WNO’s American Opera Initiative of three one-act operas in the Terrace Theater (490 seats); Scott Joplin’s opera of 1910, “Treemonisha,” from March 12 to 22 in the Eisenhower Theater (1,161 seats); Robert Ward’s 1961 adaptation of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play “The Crucible,” from March 19 to 29, also in the Eisenhower; and “West Side Story,” from May 8 to 23 in the Opera House (2,364 seats).
According to the Times story, “new sites in Washington have been lined up but … no leases have been signed.”
Venues comparable in size to the Eisenhower but somewhat larger include: George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, the company’s original home (1,482 seats); Howard University’s Cramton Auditorium, an intriguing choice for “Tremonisha” (1,500 seats); and the National Theatre (1,676 seats). The only halls in the Opera House’s ballpark sizewise are the Warner Theatre (1,847 seats), George Mason University’s Center for the Arts in Fairfax (1,935 seats); the Music Center at Strathmore (1,976 seats) and DAR Constitution Hall (3,702 seats).
Oh yes, the Filene Center, which opens in late May at Wolf Trap in Vienna, has covered seating for 3,868.
Making the existing dates work at venues with their own seasons, and/or securing artists for new dates, will be daunting challenges.
Also in need of a new venue: WNO’s spring gala, set for May 16. On Jan. 2, would-be host Steven Schwartz, composer of “Godspell,” “Pippin” and “Wicked,” stated that the Kennedy Center — which opened in 1971 with a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” for which Schwartz, then 23, wrote English lyrics — “is no longer apolitical, and appearing there now has become an ideological statement. As long as that remains the case, I will not appear there.”
The list of staff members and artists who have left the center, voluntarily or otherwise, since the Trump administration’s hostile takeover in February of 2025 — when President Deborah Rutter was fired and board chairman and foremost donor David Rubinstein replaced by Donald Trump, whose name was attached to “the nation’s living memorial to President Kennedy” in December after a controversial if not illegal board vote — continues to lengthen.
Prior to WNO’s announcement, the largest-scale exit was of Washington Performing Arts, which located none of its 2025-26 events in any of the center’s halls and spaces: Concert Hall, Opera House, Eisenhower Theater, Terrace Theater, Family Theater, Theater Lab, Millennium Stage and the various locations in the Reach expansion.
Francesca Zambello, WNO artistic director since 2011, when the company’s affiliation with the Kennedy Center began, shared her frustration about the sharp drop in ticket sales and donations, and the withdrawal of contracted artists, in an interview with the Guardian in November.
A Jan. 10 letter about “the difficult decision to seek an end to our 15-year Affiliation Agreement with the Kennedy Center,” addressed “To our friends, artists and supporters” and signed by Zambello, General Director Timothy O’Leary, Board President Andy Pharoah and Board Chairman Eric Larsen, cites as contributing factors the “current requirement from the Center’s management … for WNO to demonstrate that each production or event is fully underwritten … before it can be approved,” challenges to the company’s tradition of “balancing popular opera with lesser-known work” and the loss of centralized services and positions, “leaving an already lean group of WNO staff to take on multiple functions.”
The Times story also referred to the unresolved question of how much of WNO’s $30-million endowment the company will continue to control.
Founded in 1956, the Opera Society of Washington became the Washington Opera in 1977. The name Washington National Opera was announced in 2004, following the company’s designation by Congress as the national opera company in 2000.
The Jan. 10 letter states: “Our formalized affiliation with the Kennedy Center was never intended to be permanent, and this has become the ideal moment to move forward on different paths.”
The National Symphony Orchestra, which became an affiliate of the Kennedy Center in 1986 and has likewise suffered declines in ticket sales and withdrawal by artists, most recently banjo superstar Béla Fleck — not to mention preemption of concert dates — has yet to give any indication of a change in status.
Though Alvin Ailey Dance Theater will appear from Jan. 30 to Feb. 8 at the Warner rather than at the Kennedy Center this season, still on the center’s spring schedule are performances by American Ballet Theatre in February, the Martha Graham Dance Company, celebrating its centennial, in April, the Washington Ballet and San Francisco Ballet in May (a petition calling for SF Ballet to pull out is circulating) and New York City Ballet in June.
Next two productions, Treemonisha and The Crucible, will be at Lisner (see Post story)