The New Yorker:

What appalled and obsessed Victor Hugo most was the seemingly “normal nature” of the French regime, even as it committed acts of unprecedented authoritarian menace and cruelty.

By Adam Gopnik

On Wednesday evening, when the new Czar of All the Arts, Donald Trump, went to see “Les Misérables”—which is, we are told, along with “Cats,” and “Evita,” a favored musical of his—at the newly politicized Kennedy Center, in the company of his wife and his Vice-President and his wife, events proceeded about as expected. Some brave folks booed, some others cheered, and the Trumps and Vances made it through the show. (A delightfully audacious group of drag queens obtained a bloc of tickets and were heartily applauded as they took their seats. Victor Hugo, it might be mentioned, was legendary for championing sexual freedom; he even liked to write in the nude. No priest or prude, he doubtless would have enjoyed that little show.)

Several of the performers seem, bravely as well, to have skipped the performance—though that in itself is not a very effective gesture, since, as players who have performed in it assure us, the leads and the ensemble mingle in the piece, with many of the leads doubling as lesser characters. (Trump’s response: “I couldn’t care less.”) Creating a strong company, capable of recovering from any one absence, is, meaningfully, the point. Nonetheless, the missing performers were lectured by Richard Grenell, Trump’s new president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—a man with, inevitably, no experience in any of them—that performers must perform for people of all political parties. This truth, of course, is blurred when the people invoking the genuine universalism of theatre have, by seizing ideological control of what was once a genuinely bipartisan institution, moved so ruthlessly to end the pluralism they pretend to preach.

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