Willkommen? NOT. What Won't Be Playing Ric's Kennedy Center

'& Juliet'

What may be the last musical with drag content to play the Kennedy Center is this smart and delightful British import that reworks the plot of "Romeo and Juliet" if she had lived and moved to Paris. The national tour finished its run there in early January. The jukebox musical, with songs by pop wunderkind Max Martin, is likely too woke for Ric's new Kennedy Center, if only for its non-binary character May and her romance with a French playboy (obviously not in Shakespeare).

'La Cage aux Folles'

In 2012, the hit Broadway revival of "La Cage aux Folles" played the Kennedy Center; but if revived today Kennedy Center honoree Jerry Herman's 1983 hit would have to seek a stage elsewhere. That is because this adaptation of the cult French film features two men - one a star of a popular French Riviera drag revue – at its center, and its radical notion that a gay couple is really not much different than a straight one. That it was a hit during Ronald Reagan's presidency is proof that drag can transcend politics, at least back then. Not that Reagan was much of friend to the queer community. The show opened during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, but Reagan would not mention the acronym until his friend Rock Hudson would die from it in 1985. We do not know if Reagan attended a performance of the musical when its first national tour played Washington, DC the same year as Hudson's death, but in his diaries he wrote how he and Nancy saw the original French film in 1986 and thought it amusing.

'RENT'

Jonathan Larson's historic Gen X musical took Broadway by storm in 1996, in part because of Larson's untimely death as it moved from off-Broadway to Broadway. It was a phenomena due to its timely look into the lives of the young underclass living in New York's East Village who must come to age under the shadow of AIDS. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and continues to be one of the most revived musicals of the past quarter century; but don't expect it at the Kennedy Center anytime soon due to the non-binary character of Angel, despite having played the venue a number of times, most recently during its 20th anniversary tour.