book review and the band played on

Book Review: And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts

by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 16, 2020 | LEARN: Chronic Illness | 0 comments

Randy Shilts creates a tour de force history of the early years of the AIDS epidemic in And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic . It’s 600 pages of intense details, drawn from thousands of interviews with 900+ people. Despite being published in 1987, it remains one of the most definitive books on the history of AIDS and the gay community.

After college, Shilts moved to San Francisco, working as a journalist for The Advocate and The San Francisco Chronicle. This background gave him a unique seat at the side of history, as it was being made. And the Band is a compilation of various angles on the story, from personal to scientific to political.

Shilts examines what it felt like to be a gay man as the diagnosis of AIDS shifted from “gay cancer” to ARC to AIDS and HIV. He compares the attitudes of the New York gay community with that in San Francisco. And every description is full of so much heart and pain. It’s scope is vast, even as most chapters include poignant personal details.

My conclusions

I’m mad I waited so many decades to read this book. On the other hand, reading about an epidemic in the midst of a pandemic is a perfect moment. They’re different enough that it feels less stressful. And yes, there were times when the parallels were just too close.

As the story started, I loved learning exactly how the actual process of public health, epidemiology, and contact tracing work. The relevance! And then the book starts describing political wrangling in federal and multiple city governments. Shilts also lays bare the competition between the various scientific entities. All that felt pretty relevant to today, as my county government currently opposes our state government‘s pandemic response plan.

Because we have spent so long now with mostly effective treatment for HIV, it’s easy to forget how much of a death sentence AIDS was in the 1980s. If you lived with AIDS (or all of its other earlier names), you had opportunistic infection after infection. Life was not easy. There was no treatment, no AZT, no drug cocktails. And we can’t forget that even now, almost 40 years later, there is still no vaccine for AIDS. If that doesn’t give you pause as you contemplate COVID-19, I don’t know what will.

AIDS and the gay experience are themes I’m moved by, perhaps because of friends and family in that community. Or perhaps because I live with incurable chronic illness too. If you like medical drama, political wrangling, and a solid dose of history this is a great book. I’m giving it five stars.

This was a perfect pair to read with Tell the Wolves I’m Home . Other pairs would include The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 by M.K. Czerwiec. An alternate memoir is Standing Strong: An Unlikely Sisterhood and the Court Case that Made History by Diane Reeve. This one tells the story of a man infected with HIV who purposely has sex with as many women as he can, and how the women joined together to stop him.

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Review: And the Band Played On

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The story of these first five years of AIDS in America is a drama of national failure, played out against a backdrop of needless death.

Though this book has been on my list for years, it took a pandemic to get me to finally pick it up. I am glad I did. And the Band Played On is both a close look at one medical crisis and an examination of how humans react when faced with something that does not fit into any of our mental boxes—not our ideas of civil liberty, not our categories of people, and not our notions of government responsibility. As such, this book has a lot to teach us, especially these days. Randy Shilts was working as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. This position allowed him to track the spread of this disease from nearly the very beginning. Putting this story together was a work of exemplary journalism, involving a lot of snooping and a lot more interviewing. What emerges is a blow-by-blow history of the crisis as it unfolded in its first five years, from 1980-85. And Shilts’s lens is broad: he examines the gay community, the epidemiologists, the press, the blood banks, the medical field, the research scientists, and the politicians. After all, a pandemic is not just caused by a virus; it is the sum of a virus and a society that allows it to spread. The overarching theme of this book is individual heroism in the face of institutional failure. There are many admirable people in these pages: epidemiologists trying to raise the alert, doctors struggling to treat a mysterious ailment, gay activists trying to educate their communities, and a few politicians who take the disease seriously. But the list of failures is far longer: from the scientists squabbling over claims of priority, to the academic bureaucracies squashing funding requests, to the blood bankers refusing to test their blood, to the government—on every level—failing to take action or set aside sufficient funding. A lot of these failures were due simply to the sorts people who normally caught AIDS: gay men and intravenous drug users. Because both of these groups were (and to some extent still are) social pariahs, major newspapers simply did not cover the epidemic. This was crucial in many respects, since it gave the impression that it simply was not worth worrying about (the news sets the worry agenda, after all), giving politicians an excuse to do nothing and giving people at risk an excuse not to take any precautions. The struggle in the gay community over how to proceed was particularly vexing, since it was their very efforts to preserve their sexual revolution which cost time and lives. As we are seeing nowadays, balancing civil liberties and disease control is not an easy thing. But what made these failure depressing, rather than simply frustrating, was the constant drumbeat of death. So many young men lost their lives to this disease, dying slow and agonizing deaths while baffled doctors tried to treat them. When these deaths were occurring among gay men and drug users, the silence of the country was deafening. It was only when the disease showed the potential to infect heterosexuals and movie stars—people who matter—that society suddenly spurred itself into action. This seems to be a common theme to pandemics: society only responds when “normal” people are at risk. Another common theme to pandemic is the search for a panacea. At the beginning of the AIDS crisis, there were many claims of “breakthroughs” and promises of vaccines. But we still have neither a cure nor a vaccine. Fortunately, treatment for HIV/AIDS has improved dramatically since this book was written, when a diagnosis meant death. Pills are now available (Pre-Exposure Prophylactic, or PrEP) which, if taken daily, can reduce the chance of contracting HIV through sex by almost 99% percent. And effective anti-viral therapies exist for anyone who has been infected, greatly extending lifespans. Unfortunately, these resources are mostly available in the “developed” world. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where resources are scarce, the disease is still growing, taking many lives in the process. Once again, a disease is allowed to ravage in communities that the world can comfortably ignore.

One day, a hardworking journalist will write a similar book about the current coronavirus crisis and our institutions’ response to it. And I am sure there will be just as much failure to account for. But there will also be just as much heroism. View all my reviews

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And the band played on Book review

Politics, people & the AIDS epidemic

This blockbuster of a book tells how, figuratively speaking, the band played on while the AIDS crisis got worse and worse. Lengthy and detailed though it is, it sustains the reader’s interest through its narrative method. It is divided into short segments, which switch rapidly from one scene to another- San Francisco, New York, the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta, the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, dramatis personae. They bring in a large cast of dramatis personae. The stories of these people are not fiction, the author insists; for purposes of narrative flow, he reconstructs scenes and conversations, but he bases his book on ten years’ experience as a reporter in San Francisco, hundreds of interviews, and extensive consultation of government documents.

The tale is one of “denial and delay, sophistry and self interest.” It contains many heroes, especially some dedicated retro virologists and epidemiologists, and some prominent homosexuals who try to maximize the effects of the disease (and are often labeled homophobes and fascists for their efforts). There are many villains – Washington bureaucrats, who argue that throwing away money at AIDS will not stop it; bathhouse operators, who want their rights – and their profits; blood bank operators, similarly motivated, who keep denying that AIDS can be transmitted through transfusions even when a hundred Americans have died because of contaminated blood; and many of the homosexuals themselves, refusing to admit that they are spreading a horrible disease.

11,000 Americans

The Statistics, which Shilts intersperses throughout his work, chart and inexorable progress. In the week of August 13, 1982, the number of cases in the U.S. passed 500. By October of the next year, Bill Kraus was the 728 th person to be diagnosed in San Francisco alone. In June 1985, the American tally was over 11,000 of whom 5,441 had died. Three quotations dramatize the spread and impact of the disease: “Listening to this frightening tale of this new virus, Cleve Jones thought about gay sexual mores – hell, his own sexual exploits. His face turned white. “We’re all dead,’ he said.” (January 1982)

“Bill Darrow established sexual links between 40 patients in 10 cities. At the center of the cluster was Patient Zero. His role truly was remarkable. At least 40 of the first gay men with AIDS either had sex with Patient Zero or had sex with someone who did.” (April 1982)

“Don Francis knew enough to draw some depressing conclusions. Gay men were going to die by the tens of thousands. Hemophiliacs faced decimation. Intravenous drug users would be wiped out in astounding numbers.

Equatorial Africa faced death on the scale of the Holocaust.” 1984)

Patient Zero, sad to say, was a Canadian – Gaetan Dugas, and airline steward from Montreal. Even when he had AIDS for months, he kept going to bathhouses. He was a legend in San Francisco – the formerly handsome man, now was purple spots on his skin, who had sex with other men and then calmly told them that he had gay cancer. Even when Dr. Selma Dritz of the San Francisco Health Department told him he had to stop, he reacted by angrily saying that it was none of her business – and went on spreading the disease. When he was finally forced out of San Francisco, he transferred his activities to Vancouver.

Horror and pathos

The book describes a succession of deaths, which are full of horror and pathos, especially when false hopes arise and inevitably disappear.  One of the most dramatic moments occurs when Dr. Dale Lawrence of the Centers for Disease Control has a statistician plot the incubation curve and finds the mean for AIDS is not two years, as had been thought, but 5.5. If the disease sleeps for so long, he realizes, this means that thousands and thousands of people have it and do not know it. Another high point occurs when U.S. Secretary of Health Margaret Heckler tells a press conference, “Today we add another miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science.” But this occasion is full of irony, for she is claiming that American researcher Dr. Robert Gallo has isolated the virus which causes the disease, when scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have discovered it some months before.

As one would expect, there are many stories of compassion and its lack. On the one hand there are those who say, “It’s only a gay disease. They’ll all be dead soon- and good riddance to them.” One the other hand, there are examples of extraordinary charitable behavior, as when a woman in a white linen gown moves among young men in a Washington hospital and asks them about their illness: “Mother Teresa, came to visit the AIDS patients directly from the White House, where President Regan, who had yet to acknowledge the disease, had awarded her the Medal of Freedom.”

Shilts shows how exaggerated were the fears that AIDS could spread through casual contact that it would move like wildfire through the heterosexual population in North American. His is a very good book with some disturbing things in it – aside from the disgusting practices it describes and the number of tragic deaths. Its main action is set between two Gay Freedom Day Parades in San Francisco, one in 1980 and one in 1985. The first, in the time Before, celebrates the glory days for homosexuals. The second, in the time After, after “the years of denial and anger, the bargaining and incapacitating sadness,” is hardly less a celebration: “Hopefully, Americans could learn from the gay community’s mistakes and not waste valuable time floundering in denial: perhaps Americans could learn from the gay community’s new strengths, as well.”

In an Epilogue, Shilts enters the mind of Cleve Jones as he leads a crowd of angry homosexuals towards the White House, chanting, “History will recall, Reagan did the least of all”; “The numbers of AIDS cases measured the shame of the nation, he believed. The United States, the one nation with the knowledge, the resources, and the institutions to respond to the epidemic, had failed, and it had failed because of ignorance and fear, prejudice and rejection. The story of the AIDS epidemic was that simple, Cleve felt: it was a story of bigotry and what it could do to a nation.”

The story was not that simple at all; it is never easy to hate the sin and still love the sinner, and Americans could hardly be blamed for thinking that the homosexuals had brought the plague upon themselves. Excellent as this book is, in the long run it defends and even recommends an unnatural vice – sodomy.

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And The Band Played On

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Summary and Study Guide

And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is a work of investigative reporting by Randy Shilts, a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle . Shilts covered the AIDS epidemic from 1982 for the only newspaper willing to give its full attention to the epidemic.

Shilts examines the roots of AIDS beginning in 1976 to two events and focuses on the mysterious illness of a Danish physician working in Africa, Dr. Grethe Rask. Before the virus even has a name, it leaps across continents and destroys communities, while many stand idly by.

Shilts is critical of the Reagan Administration, whose budget cuts affected the programs that needed funding for AIDS research; the scientists, whose dismissal and later rivalry causes the delay of necessary answers; the businesses, whose choice to keep blood banks unaccountable and bathhouses liberated helps to spread the disease; the mainstream media, which is reluctance to cover the disease; and numerous political officials, public health authorities, and community leaders, whose irresponsible and/or blasé attitude sped the deaths and stole the dignity of those affected with AIDS.

However, Shilts also shows that throughout the AIDS crisis, there are faces of humanity who come together for the singular cause of solving the crisis: doctors and scientists devoted to seeking the truth behind the chaos of the epidemic, and political leaders and activists dedicated to finding solutions to the failures of their government.

It is the idea that the AIDS epidemic was a gay disease, a problem of homosexuality, and deemed an insignificant misfortune that causes a nation’s conscience to stumble and push itself deeper into its own blunders. The death of Rock Hudson, in 1985, (a man famous enough where AIDS could no longer be ignored) places everyone’s focus beyond their respective divisions and into committed cooperation.

In this book, Shilts writes not only of the history and the hubris behind a human crisis, but creates a tribute by honoring the heroes who fought in the way each knew best, to try and make sure that everyone gets a chance at life. 

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PLENTY OF BLAME TO GO AROUND

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By H. Jack Geiger

• Nov. 8, 1987

AND THE BAND PLAYED ON Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. By Randy Shilts. 630 pp. New York: St. Martin's Press. $24.95.

WE are now in the seventh year of the AIDS pandemic, the worldwide epidemic nightmarishly linking sex and death and drugs and blood. There is, I believe, much more and much worse to come. But great and lethal epidemics are never merely biological events, and never elicit merely biological or scientific responses. They become social forces in their own right, carving deep new fissures in the political and cultural landscape, thrusting up buried fears and hatreds. ''Objective'' medicine and science may be as vulnerable to these pressures as, say, Congressmen, evangelists or budget directors.

And so acquired immune deficiency syndrome is not only an epidemic; it is a mirror, revealing us to ourselves. How did we respond? What does that say about us, and about the future? In ''And the Band Played On,'' Randy Shilts, a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle who has covered AIDS full time since 1983, takes us almost day by day through the first five years of the unfolding epidemic and the responses - confusion and fear, denial and indifference, courage and determination. It is at once a history and a passionate indictment that is the book's central and often repeated thesis:

''The bitter truth was that AIDS did not just happen to America - it was allowed to happen. . . . From 1980, when the first isolated gay men began falling ill from strange and exotic ailments, nearly five years passed before all these institutions - medicine, public health, the federal and private scientific research establishments, the mass media, and the gay community's leadership - mobilized the way they should in a time of threat. The story of these first five years of AIDS in America is a drama of national failure, played out against a backdrop of needless death.''

In the beginning, Mr. Shilts writes, physicians and scientists (with the exception of a heroic and dedicated handful) did not devote appropriate attention to the epidemic ''because they perceived little prestige to be gained in studying a homosexual affliction.'' Desperately underfinanced and shorthanded, epidemiologists were delayed for months and years in linking all the cases of a little-known skin cancer and bizarre infections with obscure microbes, tracking down the chains of transmission from person to person, understanding that the root cause was a new sexually transmitted virus - spread via semen and blood - that destroyed the immune response, the body's ability to fight off all infection.

And even when that understanding was dawning and the massive epidemic threat was clear, as Mr. Shilts documents exhaustively, the Reagan Administration ignored pleas from many scientists and physicians, cut funding mercilessly and sent its agency heads to mislead Congressional committees by saying that the researchers had everything they needed. For example, Margaret Heckler, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, testified in May 1983 that ''I don't think there is another dollar that would make a difference because the attempt is all out to find an answer.'' Even when funding increased, the scientists carried on interagency wars. The National Institutes of Health, the Communicable Disease Center and others competed rather than collaborated, engaged in domestic and international wars for prestige and thus delayed progress. Medical journals delayed or rejected publications. Public health agencies vacillated.

Meanwhile, he notes, gay community leaders (like everyone else!) ''played politics with the disease, putting political dogma ahead of the preservation of human life.'' With few exceptions, they denied that the epidemic existed except as a homophobic fantasy, fiercely labeled attempts to modify behavior as ''sexual facism'' and an infringement on civil liberties and failed to mobilize effectively for more funding for research and treatment.

The mass media, meanwhile, yawned in indifference and shunned the story - until the movie star Rock Hudson died of AIDS in the summer of 1985.

There are some troubles with this thesis, both in substance and in presentation. In his appropriate rage over indifference and lives lost, Mr. Shilts overstates the effect earlier intervention would have had. There would have been a major epidemic in any case because AIDS patients - unknowingly infected and capable of transmitting the virus for years before symptoms appeared - were steadily infecting others. Even an all-out early effort, given the state of knowledge, could not have stopped it.

But this is only one of the five major stories Mr. Shilts is covering. There is the epidemiological story -the medical stumbling over clues, the exhausting tracking down and charting of cases. There is the human story: the anguish, terror, rage, denial, painful suffering and miserable deaths of specific human beings. There is the pain of their friends and lovers, the growth of fear in whole communities.

There is also the clinical story of physicians struggling both to treat and care for AIDS patients - desperately comparing notes, searching the medical journals, fighting for hospital beds and resources. There is the story of the scientific research that led at last to a basic understanding of the disease, the identification of the virus, the test for antibodies. And, finally, there is the larger political and cultural story, the response of the society, and its profound impact on all the other aspects of the AIDS epidemic.

Mr. Shilts tells them all - but he tells them all at once, in five simultaneous but disjointed chronologies, making them all less coherent. In the account of a given month or year, we may just be grasping the nature of the research problem - and then be forced to pause to read of the clinical deterioration of a patient met 20 or 40 or 60 pages earlier, and then digress to a Congressional hearing, and then listen to the anxious speculations of a public health official and finally review the headlines of that month. The threads are impossible to follow.

The reader drowns in detail. The book jacket says that Mr. Shilts - in addition to his years of daily coverage of the epidemic - conducted more than 900 interviews in 12 nations and dug out thousands of pages of Government documents. He seems to have used every one of them. Reading ''And the Band Played On'' sometimes feels like studying a gigantic mosaic, one square at a time.

Finally, and most disturbingly, there are people missing from the book: the intravenous drug users and their sexual partners - a population that is mostly poor and black or Hispanic - who now constitute the great second wave of the AIDS epidemic, and a great share of its future. Mr. Shilts gives them a few paragraphs, no case reports, no personal or human accounts.

Not long ago, Dr. Stephen Joseph - New York City Health Commissioner, and one of the most skilled and humane of public health officials - sketched the future of the AIDS epidemic. In 1991 alone, he told a small medical meeting, there will be more new AIDS cases than there have been in all the years from 1980 to the present. The city will need 2,000 to 4,000 hospital beds just for AIDS patients - with comparable and overwhelming needs for chronic-care facilities, social services, welfare assistance, nursing services and counselling. A majority of the anticipated tens of thousands of 1991 New York City AIDS patients will be black and Hispanic intravenous drug users, their sexual partners and their babies.

How, someone asked, will two more oppressed minorities move the nation, the rest of us, to provide the needed resources? There was a long pause. ''Well,'' Dr. Joseph at last said softly, ''we'll find out what kind of people we are, and what kind of people we want to be.'' ''And the Band Played On'' is about the kind of people we have been for the past seven years. That is its terror, and its strength. NO JOKING MATTER

''Any good reporter could have done this story,'' said Randy Shilts, explaining how a political reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle was drawn to covering AIDS full time. ''But I think the reason I did it, and no one else did, is because I am gay. It was happening to people I cared about and loved.''

In a telephone interview from a New York hotel where he was staying during a book tour, Mr. Shilts said his coverage of the AIDS story for the paper has been unusual, but not that extraordinary. He has essentially devoted the last five years of his life to writing about the AIDS epidemic. He took only a six-month leave from The Chronicle to work on his book, ''And the Band Played On.''

''If I were going to write a news story about my experiences covering AIDS for the past five years,'' Mr. Shilts said, ''the lead would be: In November of 1983, when I was at the San Francisco Press Club getting my first award for AIDS coverage, Bill Kurtis, who was then an anchor for the 'CBS Morning News,' delivered the keynote speech. . . .

''He started with a little joke. . . . In Nebraska the day before, he said he was going to San Francisco. Everybody started making AIDS jokes and he said, 'Well, what's the hardest part about having AIDS?' The punch line was, 'Trying to convince your wife that you're Haitian.' '' The episode, Mr. Shilts remarked, ''says everything about how the media had dealt with AIDS. Bill Kurtis felt that he could go in front of a journalists' group in San Francisco and make AIDS jokes. First of all, he could assume that nobody there would be gay and, if they were gay, they wouldn't talk about it and that nobody would take offense at that. To me, that summed up the whole problem of dealing with AIDS in the media. Obviously, the reason I covered AIDS from the start was that, to me, it was never something that happened to those other people.''

Mr. Shilts said that people he meets and interviews frequently ask him what, if anything, they can or should do about the AIDS epidemic. ''I'm always left at a complete loss for words,'' he said, ''because, as a reporter, it just never crosses my mind to tell people what to do.'' GINA KOLATA

H. Jack Geiger is the Arthur C. Logan Professor of Community Medicine at the City University of New York Medical School.

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And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic MP3 CD – Unabridged, Nov. 18 2014

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By the time Rock Hudson's death in 1985 alerted all America to the danger of the AIDS epidemic, the disease had spread across the nation, killing thousands of people and emerging as the greatest health crisis of the 20th century. America faced a troubling question: What happened? How was this epidemic allowed to spread so far before it was taken seriously?

In answering these questions, Shilts weaves the disparate threads into a coherent story, pinning down every evasion and contradiction at the highest levels of the medical, political, and media establishments. Shilts shows that the epidemic spread wildly because the federal government put budget ahead of the nation's welfare; health authorities placed political expediency before the public health; and scientists were often more concerned with international prestige than saving lives.

Against this backdrop, Shilts tells the heroic stories of individuals in science and politics, public health and the gay community, who struggled to alert the nation to the enormity of the danger it faced. And the Band Played On is both a tribute to these heroic people and a stinging indictment of the institutions that failed the nation so badly.

• Language English
• Publisher Brilliance Audio
• Publication date Nov. 18 2014
• Dimensions 13.34 x 1.52 x 17.15 cm
• ISBN-10 1491581476
• ISBN-13 978-1491581476
• See all details

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About the author.

Randy Shilts was an American journalist and author. He worked as a reporter for both The Advocate and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as for San Francisco Bay Area television stations. He wrote the critically acclaimed book And the Band Played On, which chronicled the history of the AIDS epidemic.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brilliance Audio; Unabridged edition (Nov. 18 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1491581476
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1491581476
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 113 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.34 x 1.52 x 17.15 cm

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And the Band Played on

Randy Shilts' monumental book about AIDS has been impressively assembled by scripter Arnold Schulman, who's based his dramatization on facts and "elements" from the book and from historical records, as well as creating fictionalized characters and situations. Unfolding like a sad detective story, the $ 8 million-plus production, directed to varying degrees of effect by Roger Spottiswoode, points up the politics as well as the horror of AIDS. As a TV movie about a highly sensitive subject, overall it's a moving experience. Film premieres Sept. 2 at the Montreal Film Festival, then begins airing on HBO Sept. 11.

By Tony Scott

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Randy Shilts’ monumental book about AIDS has been impressively assembled by scripter Arnold Schulman, who’s based his dramatization on facts and “elements” from the book and from historical records, as well as creating fictionalized characters and situations. Unfolding like a sad detective story, the $ 8 million-plus production, directed to varying degrees of effect by Roger Spottiswoode, points up the politics as well as the horror of AIDS. As a TV movie about a highly sensitive subject, overall it’s a moving experience. Film premieres Sept. 2 at the Montreal Film Festival, then begins airing on HBO Sept. 11.

Skipping over intricate details of medical research, the telefilm takes measure of the battles against red tape, egos, lack of funding and countless self-interests. The telefilm mirrors the struggles, recounted in Shilts’ book, as researchers in France and the U.S. fought to isolate and identify the virus despite public resistance and governmental neglect.

Popular on Variety

As a narrative thread to tie up Shilts’ sprawling story, Schulman uses real-life researcher Don Francis (Matthew Modine), an impassioned hero who joins Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control team in 1980. The plot dramatizes the medical frustrations and small victories of Francis’ CDC associates, including Dr. Mary Guinan (a standout Glenne Headly).

Doctors and health officials in N.Y., L.A. and S.F. encounter patients with the unknown disease and begin the long hunt to nail it down. Francis spots a clue on a Pac Man machine; other points add up, and the “gay cancer” finally gets a name.

The vidpic underscores the appalling lack of coin for research. Hospitals turn away the sick, blood banks won’t spend the money to screen blood. Self-promoting individuals and interest groups are shown ruthlessly defending their positions; federal government indifference is noted with selective shots of President Reagan.

If Modine isn’t always persuasive as the scrappy doctor, he does have the idealist look and determined combativeness. Played with assurance, Sir Ian McKellen’s Bill Kraus, liaison between San Francisco gays and their congressman, becomes a near-symbolic figure in the telepic as his health begins to fail.

Aspects of gay life depicted in “Band” include Kraus’ low-key homelife with his partner (B.D. Wong); a dying, flamboyant transvestite (“Angels in America’s” Stephen Spinella, who, like most of the patients, looks too robust under the AIDS makeup); and an unconvincingly staged rally against the closing of S.F. bathhouses.

The vidpic catches various phases of gay life openly and objectively, yet one of the most touching moments involving ignorance about homosexuality is voiced by a woman whose hemophiliac husband has contracted AIDS.

The use of celebs in cameos to draw audiences might have been a distracting gimmick, but most of the actors melt into the drama: Swoosie Kurtz, in one of the more poignant segs, plays a woman who learns she’s contracted AIDS from a transfusion; an expressive Richard Gere is a composite character who sees his grim future in two of the vidpic’s most eloquent moments; Lily Tomlin limns a courageous S.F. public health official; Steve Martin is awkward in his bit, and Anjelica Huston’s appearance is absurdly brief. Alan Alda as Dr. Robert Gallo, laying claim to discovery of the AIDS virus, gives a solid study of a driven man.

Though a number of scenes are expertly directed, Spottiswoode surprisingly runs into difficulties with some straightforward moments: the CDC’s first meeting with Francis, a choreographer (Gere) in a hotel-lobby encounter, Tomlin’s style of talking her way into a bathhouse inspection, etc.

“Band” has been in the offing since 1989, being optioned and eventually dropped by both ABC and NBC. Spelling, linked to the ABC deal, conferred with Robert Cooper, HBO Pictures senior VP, and the project was on the way.

But not without its problems. Director Spottiswoode succeeded Joel Schumacher and Richard Pearce, who left for various reasons. Recently, HBO denied Spottiswoode’s claim he was fired from post-production, with Modine joining in the public fray over concern about the content and handling of the issues, but all sides have since expressed amicability and satisfaction with the end result.

The vidpic’s shrewd use of film clips and of L.A. locales is excellent. Numbers flashed occasionally across the screen denoting increasing AIDS cases and deaths again define the telefilm’s theme.

Paul Elliott’s camerawork is well composed, and Carter Burwell’s low-key score is on target. Victoria Paul’s design is imaginative, Lois Freeman-Fox’s editing is terrif.

If there are lapses, director Spottiswoode’s engrossing, powerful work still accomplishes its mission: Shilts’ book, with all its shock, sorrow and anger, has been transferred decisively to the screen.

(Sat. (11), 8-10:21 p.m., HBO)

• Production: Filmed in and around L.A. and San Francisco by HBO Pictures. Exec producers, Aaron Spelling, E. Duke Vincent; producers, Midge Sanford, Sarah Pillsbury; co-producers, Arnold Schulman, Edward Teets; director, Roger Spottiswoode; writer, Schulman; based on the book by Randy Shilts.
• Crew: Camera, Paul Elliott; editor, Lois Freeman-Fox; production designer, Victoria Paul; art director, Lee Mayman; sound, Walt Martin; music, Carter Burwell.
• Cast: Cast: Matthew Modine, Alan Alda, Patrick Bachau, Nathalie Baye, Christian Clemenson, David Clennon, Phil Collins, Alex Courtney, David Dukes, Richard Gere , David Marshall Grant, Ronald Guttman, Glenne Headly, Anjelica Huston, Ken Jenkins, Richard Jenkins, Tcheky Karyo, Swoosie Kurtz, Jack Laufer, Donal Logue, Steve Martin, Richard Masur, Dakin Matthews, Sir Ian McKellen, Peter McRobbie, Lawrence Monoson, Jeffrey Nordling, Saul Rubinek, Charles Martin Smith, Stephen Spinella, Lily Tomlin, B.D. Wong, Walter Addison, Jill Andre, Alan Barry, Neal Ben-Ari, David Bottrell, Rico Bueno, Bill Carmichael, Christopher Carroll, Reg E. Cathey, John Del Regno, John Durbin, Mogens Ecklert, Carey Eidel, Robert Briscoe Evans, Richard Fancy, Keythe Farley, Christopher John Fields, Dave Florek, Niki Gilbert, Yasmine Golchan, Patrick Gorman, James Greene, Jeffrey Hayenga, Daniel Henning, Ike Ikesiashi, Laura Innes, Laura James, Michael Kearns , Erasor Kemie, Jack Kenny, Thomas Kopache, Clyde Kusatsu, Frank Li'Bay, Rob LaBelle, Neal Lerner, Rene Levant, Geoffrey Lower, Anthony Lucero, James Mastrantonio, Jon Matthews, Rosemary Murphy, Edafe Okurume, Susanne Olsen, Angela Paton, Sierra Pecheur, Miguel Perez, Martin Raymond, Jeremy Regan, Robert Martin Robinson, Valeri Ross, Hildur Ruriks, Tom Schanley, Sean Whitesell, Michael Winters, William Wintersole, Lenny Wolpe.

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And The Band Played On... Kindle Edition

• Print length 140 pages
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• Publication date December 31, 2019
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B083CWRTSV
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Theater Review: 'Stereophonic' is a brilliant 'Behind the Music' play on Broadway

A five-piece rock band enters a recording studio in 1976 at the beginning of “Stereophonic” on Broadway

It's July 1976 in a Northern California recording studio and the rock ‘n’ roll band cutting their latest album is exhausted and wary. The coffee machine is broken. Never mind, there's always cocaine — and heaps of it.

“That’s not the same thing,” one of the musicians says.

"It’s the exact same thing," she is told.

So begins “Stereophonic,” one of the most thrilling pieces of theater in years, a play with better songs than most musicals on Broadway and an ensemble that rocks, literally. You won't need any of their coke to last the three-hour-plus run time.

Playwright David Adjmi tells the story of a Fleetwood Mac-like band with five members — some married, some dating — working on music with two sound engineers over a life-changing year, with personal rifts opening and closing and then reopening. The riffs also change, as songs endure dozens of takes and changes in tempo.

The play, which opened Friday at the Golden Theatre, is a hypernaturalistic meditation on the thrill, and also the danger, of collaborating on art — the compromises, the egos and the joys. It's an ode not just to the music business but perhaps to the theater world, too.

“Stereophonic” is a very human play, featuring deep moments about love and the pursuit of art interspliced with digressions about dry cleaners and Marlon Brando. We learn to care about each of the five characters and even anticipate their reactions. Will they survive this album intact?

David Zinn's marvelous set, with the engineers manipulating dials and faders in the office-hangout spot, in front of a glassed-off recording space, allows for multiple conversations at once, including one intense argument completely offstage that the engineers overhear.

The effect is almost to turn the actors into instruments themselves, alternating silence for one or two moments in one scene and in another with their volumes raised high. There is cross-talk, mufflers and even the clunk of machines whirring when a recording is started. It's the most interesting soundscape since “The Humans.” Kudos to director Daniel Aukin and the nimble cast for making it all so seamless.

Will Butler, formerly of Arcade Fire, provides the original, layered blues- and folk-based songs — perfect for progressive rockers in the late ‘70s. The songs are instantly funky, head-bobbing bangers and audience members will care about them, too. (What happens to them at the play's end is a twist.)

An existential angst hangs over this recording studio in Sausalito, California. Long hours in the studio mean the inhabitants lose track of time. They work into the wee hours, forgetting what day they're in. “What month is this?” one asks.

Outside the studio, we learn this unnamed band is getting famous, but inside there is no escape from microaggressions, breakups and perfectionist demands, all amplified by substance abuse.

The two women in the band — keyboardists and singers played by Sarah Pidgeon and Juliana Canfield — learn to stick up for themselves over the course of the play, while the men — the bassist played by Will Brill and a drummer by Chris Stack — rebel against the dictatorial singer-guitarist, played by Tom Pecinka. Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler play the hapless engineers with increasing self-confidence.

Adjmi writes the awful, push-pull fights of couples brilliantly: “Just because I don’t unravel the thread doesn’t mean I don’t know where it is,” one women says to her partner. He also captures with accuracy and wit a scene in which three guys have a random, pot-fueled discussion about houseboats.

Pidgeon's character, Diana, a budding and gifted singer-songwriter, reveals a profound insecurity, one not helped by her coolly demanding band leader and lover. “I can’t be a rock star and be this stupid,” she says. Unhelpful is her partner: “You can’t ask me to help you and not help you. I can’t do both."

One of the best moments is when this dysfunctional couple are asked to harmonize together in the studio, sharing the same mic but separated by Canfield's character. The two on-again-off-again lovers are at each other's throats — “My skin is crawling. I can’t stand being near you,” Diana hisses at him — until the signal to record begins. Then all three voices beautifully merge into one for the recording. Go figure.

Toward the end, one of the engineers asks Diana why she'd ever consider staying in this noxious band, calling it kind of a nightmare. “This was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Diana replies.

Those in the audience know the feeling.

Follow Mark Kennedy online.

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Don’t Think Too Hard About The Heart of Rock and Roll

The core ethos of The Heart of Rock and Roll might be best expressed in an early scene by the musical’s exasperated head of HR, played by Tamika Lawrence, who accedes to its peppy hero’s scheming by shrugging and saying, “Fine! What the hell. It’s the ’80s.” There’s a lot to unpack in that exchange alone. The Heart of Rock and Roll is about a cardboard-box company where the head of HR is a crucial character. And it’s set in the ’80s — like really set in the 1980s , in the same way that the French portion of EPCOT resembles actual Paris: There are tons of prop Walkmen, a profusion of crimped hair, and more shoulder pads than a Margaret Thatcher impersonator convention. The songs are all Huey Lewis and the News. The plot is a baroque fantasia of ’80s movie tropes. And fine! What the hell. I had fun.

It helps that The Heart of Rock and Roll is the funniest new musical of the season — not a high bar to clear, considering the generally dour and/or self-serious competition, but an achievement nonetheless. The book (by Jonathan A. Abrams, who shares a credit on the story with Tyler Mitchell) is just spritely and shameless enough to charm, in the vein of Shucked before it. The gist of it is this: Our hero, Bobby (Corey Cott), used to be an aspiring rock star but has given it up to work at a cardboard-box factory; I’m pretty sure the choice of product is to justify an assembly-line take on “It’s Hip to Be Square.” Bobby’s boss, Mr. Stone (John Dossett), runs the place with his uptight daughter, Cassandra (McKenzie Kurtz), but the finances are iffy, so they (Lawrence’s HR woman, Roz, included) all end up going to the 1987 Midwest Packaging Convention in Chicago, where they court business from the magnate of IDEA Home Furnishings named Fjord (Orville Mendoza, whose dialogue may as well be “bork bork” ) and where Cassandra also runs into her peroxide Wasp ex-boyfriend Tucker (Billy Harrigan Tighe). The proto- Lean In lessons of Working Girl , shenanigans of Risky Business , hedonism of Cocktail , and even the greed of Wall Street have all been jammed into a blender (though all those films’ seediness has been strained out). Tucker pursues Cassandra with the ominous single-mindedness of someone who used to be in an a cappella group. He happens to have recently left a job in Tokyo, because “I finally figured out what’s truly important in life: private equity.” That’s one of many groaners you just have to respect for their audacity.

If it’s as obvious as a neon sign where all this is going, well, there is something to be said for clear illumination and bright primary colors. Director Gordon Greenberg applies a light touch and a bit of wit to the proceedings, inserting sight gags whenever possible. When Bobby declares his love late in the show, Cott asks an audience member to hold a boom box over their head in imitation of Say Anything … When Fjord insists on taking a meeting in the hotel’s sauna, the scene change is effected by having a member of the ensemble with a cheese grater of a six-pack walk across the stage in a towel. (Jen Caprio’s costumes also tend to keep Cott shirtless or, at minimum, sleeveless whenever possible.) Lorin Latarro’s choreography enacts a similar kind of humor. Tucker’s attempts to win back his ex are set to “Give Me the Keys (And I’ll Drive You Crazy),” performed with the backing of his fellow Princeton Undertones, who Transformer themselves into the shape of a car. One dancer acts as the door that Cassandra slams when she gets fed up with Tucker. As Tucker rolls down his window to shout after her, the dancer pliés down toward the ground like he is the glass itself. By Act 2, we get a full-on dream ballet set to “Stuck With You,” in which Cassandra imagines a future with Tucker where they settle down into a quiet suburban life. That leads to alcoholism and, somehow, trying to stab him with her stiletto heel. You can close American Psycho , but you can’t mute the sociopathy lurking inside those Huey Lewis and the News synths.

In the spirit of Reaganomics excess that “Hip to Be Square” embodies, for better or worse, Greenberg seems to have told his actors that, in all cases, more is more. Though Cott and Kurtz are the show’s relative straight men, he’s veered into gleeful himboism, while she, a recent veteran of Wicked , has made her character all prim type-A Galinda. They’re mugging, but compared to the rest of the cast, they’re relatively tame. Lawrence’s Roz has many sassy retorts and too little actual character to play, but she lays into what she’s given with full commitment. Raymond J. Lee, as one of Bobby’s former bandmates, proves once again he’s got a killer deadpan, each line delivered at least 45 degrees askew. But Tighe as that Princetonian ex may be going biggest of all and delivers one of the most maniacally strange performances on Broadway right now (Eddie Redmayne wishes his Emcee were this bonkers). There’s a moment where he twirls down to pick up a ukelele before mincing offstage when Cassandra rejects one of his advances that I can only compare to the actions of a possessed Victorian marionette.

The consequence of all that ’80s excess is that there ends up being little room left in The Heart of Rock and Roll for any emotional weight. Dossett provides the show with what little grounding it has emotionally — there’s a convoluted backstory to his floundering family business that he flecks with human-scale pathos — but there’s little message to latch onto, aside from the ever-generic admonition to follow your heart and, of course, believe in the “Power of Love” (a song also being performed a few blocks over in Back to the Future , where there are more special effects but fewer good jokes). I know drinks and concessions must be sold, but an intermission kills the momentum here, as do the attempts to turn Huey Lewis and the News numbers into heartfelt 11 o’clock ballads. In the moment, it’s easy to laugh along with The Heart of Rock and Roll ’s relentless charm offensive. As soon as you have a little distance from it, as with many an ’80s fad like crimped hair or the War on Drugs, the thing looks a lot more questionable. Sure, the show pays lip service to undermining some of the rampant casual racism and sexism of those ’80s movies, but it’s still all about rooting for our squeaky-clean straight white heroes. As much as the jokes about capitalist excess are satire, it’s hard to find anything too subversive in a jukebox enterprise that’s a de facto boomer-bait brand extension.

To its credit, The Heart of Rock and Roll tries to get out before the buzz wears off. The second act lags and then accelerates around the point where Bobby’s choice between rock and cardboard gets obvious. While Abrams delights in adding new complications to the book, he seems to get bored of its circumstances about three quarters of the way through, and the show slams into its denouement at 90 miles per hour. There are a few lines of tossed-off explanation, right before the big finale, about why various threats to our heroes’ well-being are no longer an issue. You can pursue your dreams and also settle down! You can avoid the risk of a hostile takeover if you are … pure of heart and have some investment money from a Swede! The heart of rock and roll is still beating … as long as you don’t think too hard about it.

The Heart of Rock and Roll is at the James Earl Jones Theatre .

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