The news zipper at One Times Square proclaimed “Trump’s Win Brings New Era of Uncertainty,” and Saturday Night Live cast member Kate McKinnon solemnly performed the song “Hallelujah,” then said: “I’m not giving up and neither should you.”
That was in November, 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected President of the United States.
Eight years later, there is no longer a news zipper at One Times Square, Kate McKinnon is no longer at Saturday Night Live, and its current cast members reacted to Trump’s re-election only in mock (and self-mocking) solemnity: “To many people, including many people watching this show right now, the results were shocking and even horrifying…Thanks to the Supreme Court, there are no guard rails…nothing to protect the people who are brave enough to speak out against him. And that is why we at ‘S.N.L.’ would like to say to Donald Trump: We have been with you all along…” — the joke being their effort to avoid being on his enemies list.
Eight years ago, by Election Day, Americans for the Arts had developed a report on Trump’s position on the arts, which was vague. This year, that organization promises a Post-Election Webinar: Impact on the Arts on November 21.
If it’s not clear what his plans for the arts will be, or even if he has any — the Republican Party’s official platform has no mention of culture, nor does Project 2025, the infamous blueprint for a second Trump term prepared by the Heritage Foundation – there is less vagueness or uncertainty about his attitude towards the arts. The “fourth-rate entertainer” and deranged performance artist (as one critic recently called him) has a track record from his first administration:
Immediately after assuming office, he placed a ban on visitors from a number of majority-Muslim countries that blocked entry for artists in every discipline.
Each year of his presidency, Trump’s proposed federal budget eliminated funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. But NEA survived, not because Trump ever changed his mind, but because Congress saved it.
Trump disbanded the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Coincidentally or not, its members had already resigned to protest his defense of white nationalists after the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
Trump gave out National Medals of Arts only twice during his term.
Such past actions arguably pale beside his campaign promises for a second term:
to enact mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, defund schools that teach critical race theory and transgender rights, to roll back incentives for electric vehicles and expand fossil fuel exploration, to impose 60% tariffs on goods and materials imported from China and to take revenge on his enemies.”
It is no secret that many in the theater community – including, by and large, New York theatergoers – did not support Donald Trump for president in any of the three terms in which he ran. There was an active Broadway for Harris organization (I’m unaware of any similar organization for her opponent)
“We know this week has been hard,” the Broadway for Harris team wrote on Friday. “But we will rise up another day…In the words of Shaina Taub [in “Suffs’] The path will be twisted and risky and slow but we must keep marching.”
Amid the words of solace and inspiration, the question looms whether we will see such signs of resistance in the Halls of Congress and the streets and stages of New York as we did eight years ago.
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Ragtime in light of the election
So much in “Ragtime” played out differently for me because I saw it after, rather than before, the results of the 2024 Presidential election…. Mother’s climactic song contains the refrain: “We can never go back to before.”… Tateh arrives in America with his motherless daughter on a “rag ship” loaded with “immigrants from every cesspool [country]”…The woman Coalhouse Walker Jr. plans to marry becomes a victim of violence when seeking help on his behalf by approaching the President of the United States; she is mistaken for an enemy within….Full Review
Long before he became a Tony-winning playwright, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins enrolled at NYU in hopes of becoming a downtown performance artist, and took a course taught by Carmelita Tropicana, which is the stage name – or alternative persona – of the Cuban-American downtown performance artist Alina Troyana.
Now, the two have collaborated on “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana,” a wild ride of a play that exults in the hallucinatory humor of Carmelita Tropicana’s performance art….The play is an act of nostalgia and an homage to an entire theater scene that closed up shop…Like the East Village plays it recalls, “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana” is confusing, but comically so — also amateurish but in a sophisticated way; and sometimes “excruciating” but mostly great fun. Full Review
La MaMa Puppet Festival: The Scarecrow, Kindred Widows, Secrets History Remembers
“I will do my best to serve ALL citizens of Oz,” His Majesty the Scarecrow tells his subjects, having been appointed by the Wizard of Oz and Glinda the Good Witch to rule over Emerald City, where there is apparently no democracy, and therefore no possibility of deep disappointment in the electorate.
“The Scarecrow,,” one of the three shows I saw that were separately presented for three performances apiece earlier this week at the La MaMa Puppet Festival, is yet another riff on “The Wizard of Oz,” this one the origin story of the Scarecrow — and a grim origin it is.
The Week in New York Theater News
The 6 Best Musical Theater Album Grammy Award Nominations 2025: Listen
Martyna Majok, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright (Cost of Living, Sanctuary City Ironbound) has been hired to write a stage adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, about a dystopian society where firemen, rather than put out fires, burn books, all of which have been forbidden. In an era when Republicans are pushing to ban books, the relevance is self-evident, but Majok adds “What struck me most in Fahrenheit 451 was its lens on our loneliness.”
Watch Stars at the Polls Vote-A-Thon
