UPDATE: Patti LuPone brought her Carnegie Hall concert to a close last night — and the New York audience to its feet — with a fervent call to protect the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. from President Donald Trump.
With the speech, LuPone, who won a 2008 Tony Award for her lead performance in a revival of Gypsy, completed a triumvirate of notable Mama Roses who have taken a stand against Trump in the last 24 hours.
Yesterday, Tyne Daly, who won a Tony in 1990 for the same role, made a rare public resurfacing since dropping out of a Broadway revival of Doubt two years ago due to undisclosed health reasons. In an Instagram video posted yesterday, Daly denounced Trump “and his enablers” as “paid domestic terrorists.”
“They need to be restrained and removed from office so we will be able to repair the damage done to our reputation in the world and our belief in ourselves,” Daly said.
Betty Buckley, who won a Tony in 1983 for Cats and played Mama Rose to acclaim in a 1998 Paper Mill Playhouse production of Gypsy, responded to Daly’s post with a series of handclap and heart emojis. Although neither Daly nor Buckley made specific reference to the Kennedy Center situation, the timing seemed inescapable.
LuPone, an outspoken critic of Trump, closed a two-hour Carnegie Hall show – a show that had included virtually no off-the-cuff political remarks between songs devoted to love – by directly addressing the audience during her good-nights.
After saying she was filled with anger over recent news from “the buffoon,” the Agatha All Along star and three-time Tony winner raised her considerable voice to say: “This is now about the Kennedy Center. It’s time for us — it’s over time for us! — to rise up and speak.” Urging everyone in the audience to take to social media “or however you can to get the information out” that Trump “cannot! cannot! cannot! touch the Kennedy Center!”
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“I’m sorry but I’m so mad,” she continued. “This actually strikes close to home because art is the soul of the nation. And think about it, when was the last time you heard the words ‘art’ and ‘culture’ in a conversation in this country? We have to speak up again. We have to elevate it, and one of the ways we’re going to elevate it is to keep the buildings standing.”
See the video below.
Trump, who took over the Kennedy Center last year installing his own picks for the institution’s board and putting his own name on the building to read “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” recently announced that he was shutting down the center for two years for renovations. Critics of the administration suggest the real reason is the Center’s much-publicized artist cancellations and a dearth of programming.
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While rumors spread that the president would simply demolish the structure — as he did with the White House East Wing — he insisted on Monday that he was not planning a tear-down, though his assurances won’t exactly be heartening to Kennedy Center supporters.
“I’m not ripping it down,” Trump told reporters Monday. “I’ll be using the steel. So we’re using the structure, we’re using some of the marble, and some of the marble comes down.”
In her video yesterday (see below), Daly, a six-time Emmy winner (Cagney & Lacey, Christy, Judging Amy), said, “The current resident of the disfigured peoples house and his enablers are paid domestic terrorists. $400,000 annual salary plus $50,000 for ‘expenses’”’ from us. They need to be restrained and removed from office so we will be able to repair the damage done to our reputation in the world and our belief in ourselves. Remove. Repair. Restore our reliability as allies and our responsibilities as a country founded on the understanding that laws can be made and obeyed, legally challenged and amended, and improved to serve the greater good. Gold is not God. Might is not right. Silence is violence. Use your Voice. Stop them.”
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