National Theatre

Despite serving only a single term as President, Jimmy Carter holds the record among sitting presidents for attending shows at the Kennedy Center — 28 in his four years in the District. But that's only the beginning of his love of the theater!

There are two things that all D.C. residents love: the first lady and the performing arts. It’s no surprise then that in the capital, “First Lady of American Theatre” Helen Hayes is an icon. Born in 1900 in Washington D.C., Hayes’s career spanned nearly eighty years. She was the first EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) recipient to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan in 1986. But out of all her accomplishments, perhaps one of the most overlooked is Helen Hayes’s involvement in the desegregation of the National Theatre.   

On a sweltering August night in 1957, Washington’s National Theatre hosted a glittering crowd of senators, ambassadors, and VIPs for the pre-Broadway premiere of West Side Story. It was enough to make any composer nervous, but behind the velvet curtain, composer Leonard Bernstein was strangely calm.