The opera filed a lawsuit Thursday alleging the Kennedy Center illegally took years’ worth of donor gifts, bequests and endowment funds. The two parties cut ties in January.
June 12, 2026 at 12:18 p.m. EDTToday at 12:18 p.m. EDT
The Washington National Opera on Thursday filed a lawsuit seeking to force the Kennedy Center to turn over $17 million in gifts and donations to the opera company.
The Kennedy Center has “wrongfully held” years’ worth of donor gifts, bequests and endowment funds that belong to the opera, according to the complaint filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, five months after the two institutions ended a roughly 15-year affiliation.

Towards of the end of the third show of Rush‘s Fifty Something Tour, the band experienced something nearly unimaginable for one of the most technically proficient and perfectionist acts of the rock era — a full musical train wreck that stopped the overture to “2112” right in its progged-out tracks. But no one actually made an instrumental mistake. Instead, two minutes in, Geddy Lee‘s bass went dead, and he whipped it off his shoulder, heading backstage for a replacement that failed to immediately arrive.
It took his bandmates a while to notice, leading to a brief, fascinating guitar-and-drums-only rendition of the track from Alex Lifeson and new touring drummer Anika Nilles. Finally, Lifeson became aware of the silence of the Geddy and signalled Nilles to stop, which felt a bit like trying to halt a Terminator mid-kill. “We’re going to take a break,” he said, looking genuinely nonplussed. Within seconds, Lee had a new instrument, and the band started again, hitting even harder.
A few hiccups for Rush in their first tour in 52 years without the late Neil Peart would be understandable, but the band’s 70-something co-founders and their new touring drummer are apparently more indefatigable than their own equipment. Here’s a look at a few key moments from Thursday night’s show at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum:
After playing the entirety of the first side of 2112 the night before, Rush brought out all of their most beloved album, 1981’s Moving Pictures, in order, at the beginning of set two. Since they had already played all but one track from Moving Pictures over the first two shows, this meant only one tour debut, an extraordinary rendition of the most sprawling and underrated track on the album, “The Camera Eye.”
In a rare and welcome moment of rearrangement for the band, keyboardist Loren Gold added some lyrical piano to the beginning, before the pulsing synths arrived. Lee once described some of the band’s early work as “soundtracks for movies that don’t exist,” and this performance was a reminder of how well “The Camera Eye” fits into the category. The instrumental passages, with their almost Neu!-like feel, viscerally evoked a sense of movement. Nilles was astonishing on her first-ever live performance of the song, somehow mastering its serpentine intricacies on top of the other 40 or so epics she’s absorbed. Throughout the rest of the album, meanwhile, you could hear her making subtle refinements, including laying back deeper into the groove of “Tom Sawyer.”
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Aimee Mann came back for a third performance of “Time Stand Still.” Mann only spent a couple days with the band back in 1987 when she sang on the studio version and popped up in the (very Eighties) music video, and then somehow never sang it with them again until this week. With each performance, she seems more and more excited to be onstage with the band, exchanging smiles with Lee and relishing her harmonies with him. The performance of one of Peart’s most personal songs is paired with video from throughout his life, and under the circumstances, hearing his lyrical plea to “freeze this moment a little bit stronger” is unbearably poignant every time.
The band debuted a killer “New World Man” for the first time since 2002. Eighties Rush is a beast of its own, with walls of synths and an evolving approach from Peart, who began to embrace polyrhythms and reggae à la his friend Stewart Copeland. If anything (not to be greedy), this tour could use even more of that sometimes unfairly derided era — “Force Ten” and “The Big Money” would be particularly welcome. But it was a kick to hear Nilles show off her ability to take on every step in Peart’s evolution, seamlessly taking on the track’s radically different feel, without feeling the need to match every hi-hat pattern.
Lee’s voice is holding up. After 11 years off the road, the frontman changed his vocal approach via coaching, somehow shaving decades of wear off his voice. But even Lee himself must have wondered if he could keep it going under actual touring conditions. So far, the answer is yes, and if anything, he’s getting stronger from night to night. On the evening’s second song, “Dreamline,” he went as far as to take the chorus up an octave, just for fun, an unmistakable sign of renewed vocal swagger.
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Lifeson is having fun. From the beginning of the run, Lee’s joy was palpable — he keeps literally jumping for joy, getting some serious air for a 72-year-old, which has got to be making the tour’s insurers slightly nervous. Other than his nightly stand-up routine at the mic (he’s claimed he got into a fight with Paul McCartney and talked about a clip of a dog and a goat on Instagram), Lifeson seemed a bit more reserved the first two nights, focusing on nailing his parts. But he loosened up on night three, moving more around the stage, mugging for the cameras with his old friend, and stepping out even harder on his solos.
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Rush Setlist: June 11, 2026
Set One:
“Xanadu”
“Dreamline”
“Subdivisions”
“Headlong Flight”
“Bravado”
“Red Sector A”
“La Villa Strangiato”
“Anthem”
“New World Man”
“The Spirit of Radio”
Set two:
“Tom Sawyer”
“Red Barchetta”
“YYZ”
“Limelight”
“The Camera Eye”
“Witch Hunt”
“Vital Signs”
“Time Stand Still”
“Closer to the Heart”
“2112 Part I: Overture”
“2112 Part II: The Temples of Syrinx”
“2112 Part VII: Grand Finale”

The Washington National Opera, which recently severed its longstanding relationship with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, has filed a lawsuit that demands more than $17 million from the center that the opera company estimates it is owed.
The suit, filed Thursday, says that since the opera company struck out on its own this year, Kennedy Center officials have refused to release the money, which the court papers say includes endowment funds, other donations and income that was collected for the company’s benefit.
“W.N.O. reluctantly files this case to preserve its future and to protect its donors and artists,” lawyers for the opera said in court papers, which identify the funds as donor gifts received over years that are “critical” to its operations.
In a statement responding to the lawsuit, Roma Daravi, a spokeswoman for the center, said that the relationship with the opera company “financially burdened” the center for more than a decade. The statement noted that taking into account the company’s endowment, an external accounting firm had calculated that the company had “accumulated a $72 million deficit to the center” between 2011 and 2026, the years it was an affiliate of the institution.
“The center has acted transparently and in the best interests of the public throughout this process,” Ms. Daravi said. “This lawsuit is meritless, and we plan to pursue a countersuit to defend the institution.”
The opera left the center in January, nearly a year after President Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center led to an exodus of audiences, artists and donors. Officials at the center said then that they had decided to part ways with the opera, which had played there since 1971, “due to a financially challenging relationship.”
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Taylor Swift took the stage at the Songwriters Hall of Fame on Thursday in NYC still hoarse from cheering on the Knicks at MSG the night before.
“The quality of my speaking voice is the product of two things that I am not sorry for… One is that I was lucky enough to go to a Knicks game last night,” the “Shake It Off” icon said croakily while explaining her raspy tone after accepting an award from presenter Steven Spielberg, whose latest film was about to open in a few hours.
“I screamed for 100% of it,” she said of the Knicks game. “And then I got home and was like, ‘I gotta stop screaming’… And then I got to witness the amazing performances I saw tonight. I just never stopped screaming, and so this is what you get.”
Swift did not mention that she’d also arrived at Zero Bond earlier that morning at about 1a.m. flanked by Este and Alana Haim in a T-shirt that read “Stevie Knicks.” The pop star trio were seen exiting at about 3a.m.
Performers at the Songwriters gala included the contempo crooner Sombr, who did a rendition of Swift’s 2020 classic, “Cardigan” and her ballad, “Dear John.” (Sombr had also been out at Zero Bond the night before.)
Spielberg said that after accepting the gig as Swift’s presenter for the show, he instantly fretted because, “What could I possibly say about Taylor Swift that has not already been said? Just thinking about how much true, false and just plain crazy stuff has been written about you boggles the mind!”
So the “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” filmmaker asked AI, ironically, if it could tell him how many words have been written about Swift, and also how many words Swift has written. Both queries apparently stumped the bot. “She is such a force that the depths of her achievements defy AI,” the “Disclosure Day” director said.
Also honored at the Songwriters Hall of Fame gala were Alanis Morissette, Kenny Loggins, Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, Kiss rockers Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, Walter Afanasieff and Terry Britten and Graham Lyle.

Earlier this year, former President Obama made waves in an interview when he said that he believed aliens were real, though he hadn’t seen any evidence of them during his time in office. President Trump accused Obama of revealing “classified information,” but then said that he would direct government agencies to release a number of images showing alien and extraterrestrial activity. The Pentagon rolled out those photos last month, but they were largely deemed fuzzy and inconclusive.
All this might sound like free publicity for Steven Spielberg’s new thriller, Disclosure Day, which is about a massive U.S. conspiracy to hide the fact that aliens have been visiting Earth for decades. If anything, though, the movie’s pleasures feel more retro than timely. It harks back to Spielberg’s greatest alien-themed hits, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and War of the Worlds. But it also feels like a throwback to the ’90s and early 2000s — the era of conspiracy-minded sci-fi series like The X-Files and M. Night Shyamalan’s eerie crop-circle thriller, Signs.
Disclosure Day stars Josh O’Connor as Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity expert who decides to blow the whistle on his employer, Wardex. That’s a powerful agency, operating outside the boundaries of the government, that, for decades, has suppressed evidence of alien visits to Earth. Daniel has stolen video footage of these creatures, and he feels duty-bound to disclose it to the public — and to expose the sinister Wardex for having captured, detained and even tortured its share of aliens.
Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Mo., something strange happens when a TV meteorologist named Margaret Fairchild, played by Emily Blunt, tries to deliver her morning weather report. She freezes up on the air and begins making strange, guttural clicking noises, speaking what appears to be a kind of alien language. Around this time, Margaret also finds that she can read the minds of the people around her — a gift that comes in handy once she, too, goes on the run, with Wardex agents in pursuit.
Although Margaret and Daniel don’t know each other, they share a mysterious connection. Noah Scanlon, the head of Wardex, played by an unusually terrifying Colin Firth, is determined to stop them before they can make contact.
One of Scanlon’s deadliest weapons is a form of mind-control technology that he uses to try to get Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane, played by a very good Eve Hewson, to betray him. Whatever aliens might be capable of doing to us, the movie suggests, we have far more to fear from some of our fellow humans.
The mind-control bit is one of the movie’s cleverest sequences; a scene in which Margaret stages an almost Houdini-level escape is another. At 79, Spielberg is still the nimble filmmaker who delights in treating cinema as a magic trick. He’s also as skilled with actors as ever. Firth injects a palpable sense of anguish into the role of the movie’s big villain, and O’Connor brings an Everyman likability to his truth-telling tech whiz. But the most dazzlingly inventive work comes from Blunt.
Often a tough, sardonic screen presence, as in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Blunt gets to flex her proven action and comedy muscles in a more earnest emotional register. Like Richard Dreyfuss’ obsessed alien seeker in Close Encounters, Margaret is the kind of madly eccentric character Spielberg instinctively gravitates toward — someone who has little idea where she’s headed, but is convinced, rightly, that the truth really is out there.
There are other memorable characters, too. Colman Domingo gives a warm turn as a fellow whistleblower, who steers the operation from afar. And Elizabeth Marvel delivers a fine performance as a Catholic nun who, in one of the film’s more thoughtful asides, claims that the existence of aliens doesn’t threaten her belief in God. If anything, she says, it affirms that God, like the universe he created, is far bigger and more complex than humans like to acknowledge.
That’s a profoundly beautiful idea, though I wish Disclosure Day itself were a more complex movie. Spielberg’s storytelling is often described as overly sentimental, which isn’t always fair; his previous work, the semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans, was one of the most genuinely moving films of his career.
But sentimentality does ultimately overwhelm Disclosure Day, especially in the big finale, when the movie strains to bring its characters and indeed all of humanity together. Having shown us some of the terrible things powerful people are capable of, Spielberg makes a third-act lurch toward catharsis, as though desperate to suggest we aren’t beyond redemption as a species. Like the existence of alien life, our essential goodness is easy enough to believe in, but a lot harder to prove.