WASHINGTON (AP) — Celebrities, cultural icons and some shock friends are gathering for the annual Kennedy Center Honors celebration Sunday night in Washington.
This yr’s recipients of the lifetime achievement award for creative accomplishment are director Francis Ford Coppola,the Grateful Dead, jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, and singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt. In addition, the venerable Harlem theater The Apollo, which has launched generations of Black artists, is being acknowledged.
There can be personalised tributes with performances and testimonials from fellow artists throughout the gala on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Medallions had been introduced throughout the conventional Saturday night time ceremony on the State Department.
The tribute performances are sometimes saved secret from the recipients themselves, most notably in 2018 when Cyndi Lauper flat out lied to her longtime good friend Cher about being unable to attend. Lauper appeared on stage to carry out Cher’s hit, “If I Could Turn Back Time.”
Several of the most recent honorees have themselves participated in previous tributes to buddies and colleagues on the Kennedy Center.
Coppola spoke throughout fellow director Martin Scorsese’s induction in 2007. Sandoval carried out within the tribute to his mentor, jazz trumpet legend Dizzy Gillespie. Raitt has taken half in tributes to Buddy Guy and Mavis Staples. Raitt even attended the Kennedy Center Honors within the Nineteen Seventies when her father, Broadway performer John Raitt, was participating in a tribute to composer Richard Rogers.
The tribute to the Grateful Dead is anticipated to double as a memorial to the band’s founding bass participant Phil Lesh, who died in October at age 84.
This is also the final Kennedy Center Honors ceremony with out political intrigue for some time.
During Republican Donald Trump’s first 4 years in workplace, Kennedy Center officers had been pressured to stroll a public tightrope between the custom of the president attending the ceremony and the open antipathy towards Trump from a number of honorees. In 2017, recipient Norman Lear threatened to boycott his personal ceremony if Trump attended. Trump, who takes workplace in January, skipped the ceremony for everything of his first time period.
Democratic President Joe Biden is scheduled to host a reception for the honorees on the White House and plans to attend the Kennedy Center ceremony afterward.
The present will air on CBS on Dec. 22.
