For better or occasionally for worse, Patti LuPone always speaks her mind. She’s reached a status in the theater world that she can stop a show and air a grievance if she wants to, as she has famously before. Last night during a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, she also performed an impassioned speech defending not just the Kennedy Center—which Trump claimed yesterday he’d close for two years for “complete rebuilding”—but arts and culture in the United States in general.
“I think all of you are people that appreciate the arts and culture. This is now about the Kennedy Center. It’s time for us, it’s time for us, it’s over time for us to rise up and speak,” the three-time Tony winner says after referring to Trump as “the buffoon” in a video obtained by Deadline. “[Use] social media or however you can to get the information out that he cannot! cannot! cannot! touch the Kennedy Center!” she continued to cheers. “I’m sorry but I’m so mad. 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 just have to elevate it, and one of the ways we’re going to elevate it is to keep the buildings standing.” Then LuPone went into a song that she said a drunken Scottish woman taught her.
Trump has claimed he wouldn’t tear down the Kennedy Center, though he also made similar assurances about the East Wing when he announced his plans for his new ballroom, per NPR. In any case, LuPone has been a vocal critic of Trump for years. In an especially viral moment from 2017, when she was in the Broadway musical War Paint, LuPone said on a red carpet that she wouldn’t perform if Trump came to a performance. When asked why, she responded, “Because I hate the motherfucker, how’s that?” When asked about the clip again on The View in 2024, she said, “He has always been a Page Six joke in this [city]… it was a stupid question to ask on the Tony red carpet.”