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ON STAGE 38 WHAT'S UP! JANUARY 9-15, 2022 Kennedy Center Celebrates Tony royalty will turn out in February for D.C. event PETER MARKS The Washington Post W hile the barricades won't rise again next month at the Kennedy Center, the voice of Frances Ruffelle — one of the original stars of "Les Miserables" — will. The Tony- winning British actress, who created the role of lovelorn gamine Éponine, will join a battery of acclaimed Broadway actors for a celebration of the musicals that have helped to make history at the arts center on the Potomac River. "50 Years of Broadway at the Kennedy Center" is the occasion: two nights of in-person-only concerts in the Opera House on Feb. 11 and 12, commemorating the center's 50th anniversary season. Serving as host will be another Tony winner, James Monroe Iglehart ("Aladdin"); joining Ruffelle and Iglehart will be an elite corps of musical-theater notables. The roster includes Stephanie J. Block, Christopher Jackson, Beth Leavel, Andrew Rannells, Vanessa Williams, LaChanze, Sierra Boggess, Norm Lewis, Alfie Boe, Gavin Creel and Tony Yazbeck. "It gave me so much in my life," Ruffelle said by phone, from Oxfordshire, England, of "On My Own," the heart-achy "Les Miz" number she plans to perform again. "It will be quite emotional, singing at the Kennedy Center." The evenings are all about looking back, particularly at the shows and the artists that put the center on the theatrical map. Jeffrey Finn, the organization's vice president and executive producer of theater, said the music of three shows that had pre-Broadway starts at the Kennedy Center — "Pippin," "Annie" and "Les Miz" — will form the thematic core of the 90-minute production, directed by Marc Bruni ("Beautiful: The Carole King Musical"). The evenings will also include a tribute to composer- lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who died in November. The center's 2002 Sondheim Celebration, for which six of his musicals were revived and performed in a festival- style repertory, was one of the institution's musical-theater standout events. "When we were talking about how were we going celebrate 50 years at the Kennedy Center, we thought, 'we've got to celebrate 50 years of Broadway,' because that has been such an anchor for the institution," Finn said. "Every song that we will be featuring will have been on a Kennedy Center stage." That gave Finn, Bruni and music director Rob Berman a lot of potential material. According to the center, some 234 musicals have been mounted on those stages, going back to the inaugural year of America's national cultural center, 1971. The 2,360-seat Opera House and 1,164-seat Eisenhower Theater have long been key venues for the national tours of Broadway hits, tryouts of productions on their way to Broadway and, on some rarer occasions, the birthplace of center-produced musicals. In recent years, that last category has not been in evidence. Sondheim and John Weidman's "Bounce" — later retitled "Road Show" — was produced by the Kennedy Center in 2003, and Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens' "Little Dancer" originated there in 2014. "It's a goal of mine," Finn said, of creating a musical under the center's auspices. In times not burdened by the uncertainties of a pandemic, the center's extremely tight scheduling militates against the requirements of a new musical, he explained. The extra weeks necessary to perfect a new Broadway show technically, Finn added, are not made readily available in an arts center in which dance, opera, classical music and theater continually vie for space. On Feb. 11 and 12, though, the Opera House will be show tune central, with memory- triggering numbers and video tributes. (Tickets are already on sale.) The performers, Finn said, were also canvassed for their choices of songs. "We'll likely open the show with some great moments from 'Pippin,'" the musical with a score by Stephen Schwartz and book by Roger O. Hirson that opened on Broadway in 1972 after a Kennedy Center tryout. Iglehart, who has been announced as the next Billy Flynn in the long- running Broadway revival of "Chicago," said a recent stint in Lin-Manuel Miranda's improvisational "Freestyle Love Supreme" was good preparation for being master of ceremonies. "The great thing about improv is that if something goes wrong, you can get your way out of it," he observed. "It also helps you read the room." He expects a room filled with warm recollections in Washington. "I love being in front of an audience and taking them on a journey," he said, "letting me be that voice, to take you down memory lane." In late 1986, "Les Miserables" played an engagement at the Kennedy Center before its 16-year, 6,680-performance Broadway run. (Joan Marcus for The Kennedy Center)