Kennedy Center Honors: Disappointing?
Did you watch the Kennedy Center honors last night? In the tribute to David Letterman, one of the five honorees, the comedian Jimmy Kimmel had a lot of nerve to knock “the ballerina” among the group, Natalia Makarova, for being somehow rarefied in this company, which also included Dustin Hoffman, Buddy Guy, and Led Zeppelin. Thank God for the Makarova segment! It featured talented dancers like Tiler Peck and Marcello Gomes, as well as informative clips of Makarova in performance. The Hoffman section, featuring Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts, was disappointing; the Buddy Guy section was worthy but perhaps most of interest to devotees; and the Letterman stuff was amusing to the audience of Washington insiders and New York stars who could get a rez in Acela first class but not much more. The Led Zep section concluded the evening in pretty rousing fashion, but I’m a huge Led Zep fan. I don’t, however, approve of honoring non-Americans at this gala evening: there’s so much homegrown talent that’s never been honored and should be. I realize that such a viewpoint means we’d have lost the Makarova section last night: I can live with that.
