Kennedy Center Honors will move to Capital One Arena as closure drags on
With two months to go until the center’s marquee event, honorees and other details remain a mystery.
The Kennedy Center Honors will take place Dec. 7 at the Capital One Arena, the center announced Friday, breaking tradition by holding the tribute ceremony off-campus as a battle rages over its closure.
Most other details about the honors — namely, who will receive the awards and who will broadcast the show — remain a mystery, months after they would ordinarily be public.
A Kennedy Center spokesperson said these will be announced at a later date.
The annual black-tie gala and television broadcast is the center’s flagship program and usually its largest fundraising event. It generally takes place on a weekend in December, during which five honorees are recognized by the American government for their contributions to the arts. They traditionally received medallions, met the president at the White House and gave speeches during a dinner at the State Department before attending a star-studded Sunday ceremony in the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.
The honorees — which have included Leonard Bernstein, Queen Latifah, George Clooney, Led Zeppelin, Gladys Knight, Billy Crystal, and the Grateful Dead, to name a few of the almost 270 honorees since its inception in 1978 — are usually announced in midsummer.
Last year, amid turmoil from President Donald Trump’s takeover of the center and remake of its board, the announcement came late, in mid-August. The year before, it arrived in July along with both the broadcast and ceremony date.
It is October, and there’s no other word on the details.
We don’t know who is in the 49th class of honorees or what kind of crowd will greet them: The program’s venue, Capital One Arena, which can hold roughly 20,000 people at max capacity, dwarfs the 2,347 seats of the center’s Opera House.
We don’t know who will broadcast it. During a board meeting last year, Trump floated the idea of having networks bid to air the show, which has been broadcast on CBS since its debut. (Last year’s remained on CBS.)
Finally, we don’t know who would host it. Trump, who avoided the honors in his first term, famously played the role himself at last year’s ceremony, something a president had never before done. He also said he was “about 98 percent involved” in picking the honorees — Michael Crawford, Gloria Gaynor, Kiss, Sylvester Stallone, and George Strait — which are generally chosen by committee.
Asked for details this week, the White House referred us to the Kennedy Center, which provided the announcement.
The center had maintained that the honors, along with the Mark Twain Prize, would continue somewhere off-site during the building’s two-year closure for repairs.
“It will definitely go forward,” Richard Grenell told WTOP in February, before he departed as president of the Kennedy Center. At the time, he predicted “it will probably just be in a smaller venue, which just means ticket demand will be even higher.”
That full closure hasn’t started yet, according to the center. Instead, the main building is closed temporarily, leaders say, while they check on the building’s safety. Those checks could take another week or two, according to a Wednesday staff email reviewed by the Washington Post.
But “this is an assessment timeline,” the email read, “not a reopening date.”
