Our top pick, previewed yesterday, is a reading of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart on Saturday. We also have some great jazz music for you (both traditional vocals and a very contemporary performance), a London production of Chekhov that earned rave reviews, a tribute to two of Broadway’s best songwriters, chamber music and a contortionist. After all, it’s Mother’s Day weekend. Don’t all mothers just love contortionists?

Here are the Top 10 Best Bets: May 7th – May 10th

*TOP PICK* PLAY READING: The Normal Heart – ONE Archives Foundation – May 8th – 8:00 PM ET/5:00 PM PT

We previewed this event yesterday as out Top Pick, but here are the pertinent details:

Director Paris Barclay has assembled Sterling K. Brown, Laverne Cox, Jeremy Pope, Vincent Rodriguez III, Guillermo Díaz, Jake Borelli, Ryan O’Connell, Daniel Newman, Jay Hayden and Danielle Savre for a virtual reading of Larry Kramer’s play.

The reading will be introduced by Martin Sheen.

There will be just this one live performance of The Normal Heart. It will not be available for viewing afterwards. There will be a Q&A with the cast and Barclay following the reading. Tickets begin at $10 for students, $20 for general admission.

PLAY READING: Rachel – Roundabout Theatre Company’s Refocus Project – Now – May 7th

Angelina Weld Grimké’s 1916 play Rachel, is the second play in the Refocus Project from Roundabout Theatre Company. Their project puts emphasis on plays by Black playwrights from the 20th century that didn’t get enough attention or faded into footnotes of history in an effort to bring greater awareness to these works.

Rachel tells the story of a Black woman who, upon learning some long-ago buried secrets about her family, has to rethink being a Black parent and bringing children into the world.

Miranda Haymon directs Sekai Abení, Alexander Bello, E. Faye Butler, Stephanie Everett, Paige Gilbert, Brandon Gill, Toney Goins, Abigail Jean-Baptiste and Zani Jones Mbayise.

The reading is free, but registration is required.

JAZZ: Joel Ross & Immanuel Wilkins – Village Vanguard – May 7th – May 9th

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more compelling pairing of jazz musicians than vibraphonist Joel Ross and alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins.

The two have been collaborating for quite some time. Wilkins is a member of Ross’ Good Vibes quintet.

Nate Chinen, in a report for NPR, described a 2018 concert in which Ross performed with drummer Makaya McCraven this way. “Ross took one solo that provoked the sort of raucous hollers you’d sooner expect in a basketball arena. Again, this was a vibraphone solo.“

Wilkins album, Omega, was declared the Best Jazz Album of 2020 by Giovanni Russonello of the New York Times.

I spoke to Wilkins last year about the album and his music. You can read that interview here. And if you’re a fan, Jason Moran, who produced the album, told me that this music was “just the tip of the iceberg.”

Tickets for this concert are $10.

PLAY: Uncle Vanya – PBS Great Performances – May 7th check local listings

Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is performed by a cast headed by Richard Armitrage and Toby Jones. Conor McPherson adapted the play for this production which played at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London and was directed by Ian Rickson.

Arifa Akbar, writing in her five-star review for The Guardian, said of the production:

“Ian Rickson’s exquisite production is full of energy despite the play’s prevailing ennui. It does not radically reinvent or revolutionise Chekov’s 19th-century story. It returns us to the great, mournful spirit of Chekhov’s tale about unrequited love, ageing and disappointment in middle-age, while giving it a sleeker, modern beat.

“McPherson’s script has a stripped, vivid simplicity which quickens the pace of the drama, and despite its contemporary language – Vanya swears and uses such terms as “wanging on” – it does not grate or take away from the melancholic poetry.”

CHAMBER MUSIC: Beyond the Horizon – LA Chamber Orchestra – Premieres May 7th – 9:30 PM ET/6:30 PM PT

This is the 12th episode in LACO’s Close Quarters series and definitely one of its most intriguing. Jessie Montgomery, the composer who curated the previous episode, curates this episode as well. She is joined by her fellow alums from Juilliard, mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard (who directs) and music producer Nadia Sirota.

The program features Alvin Singleton’s Be Natural (a pun any music major will understand); Mazz Swift’s The End of All That Is Holy, The Beginning of All That is Good and Montgomery’s Break Away.

The performance portion of Beyond the Horizon is conducted by Christopher Rountree of Wild Up! Visual artist Yee Eun Nam contributes to the film as does art director James Darrah.

There is no charge to watch Beyond the Horizon.

CHAMBER MUSIC: MusiKaravan: A Classical Road Trip with Delerium Musicum – The Wallis Sorting Room Sessions – May 7th – May 9th

Music by Johannes Brahms, Charlie Chaplin, Frederic Chopin, Vittorio Monti, Sergei Prokofiev, Giacomo Puccini and Dmitri Shostakovich will be performed by Delerium Musicum founding violinists Étienne Gara and YuEun Kim. They will be joined for two pieces by bassist Ryan Baird.

The full ensemble of musicians that make up Delerium Musicum will join for one of these pieces? Which one will it be? There is only one way to find out.

This concert is part of The Sorting Room Sessions at The Wallis.

Tickets are $20 and will allow for streaming for 48 hours

MOTHER’S DAY OFFERINGS: MOMentum Place and A Catalina Tribute to Mothers – May 8th

Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum is celebrating Mother’s Day with MOMentum Place, a show featuring aerial artists, circus performers, dancers and musicians. The line-up includes circus artist Elena Brocade; contortionist and acrobat Georgia Bryan, aerialist and stilt dancer Jena Carpenter of Dream World Cirque, ventriloquist Karl Herlinger, hand balancer Tyler Jacobson, stilt walker and acrobat Aaron Lyon, aerialist Kate Minwegen, cyr wheeler Sarah Moser and Cirque du Soleil alum Eric Newton, plus Dance Dimensions Kids and Focus Fish Kids. The show was curated by aerlist/dancer Lexi Pearl. Tickets are $35.

Catalina Jazz Club is holding A Catalina Tribute to Mothers at 9:00 PM ET/6:00 PM PT. Headlining the concert are singers Jack Jones, Freda Payne and Tierney Sutton. Vocalist Barbara Morrison is a special guest. Also performing are  Kristina Aglinz, Suren Arustamyan, Lynne Fiddmont, Andy Langham, Annie Reiner, Dayren Santamaria, Tyrone Mr. Superfantastic and more. Dave Damiani is the host. The show is free, however donations to help keep the doors open at Catalina Jazz Club are welcomed and encouraged.

JAZZ: Love in Exile – The Phillips Collection – May 9th – 4:00 PM ET/1:00 PM PT

There is no set program for this performance by pianist/composer Vijay Iyer, vocalist Arooj Aftab and bassist Shazad Ismaily. The website says Love in Exile performs as one continuous hour-long set.

Having long been a fan of Iyer, spending an hour wherever he and his fellow musicians wants to go sounds like pure heaven to me.

Iyer’s most recent album, Uneasy, was released in April on ECM Records and finds him performing with double bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. It’s a great album. You should definitely check it out.

There is no charge to watch this concert, but registration is required. Once Love in Exile debuts, you’ll have 7 days to watch the performance as often as you’d like.

DANCE: Past, Present, Future – ALL ARTS – May 9th – May 11th

ALL ARTS, part of New York’s PBS stations, is holding an three-night on-line dance festival beginning on Sunday.

If We Were a Love Song is first up at 8:00 PM ET on Sunday. Nina Simone’s music accompanies this work conceived by choreographer Kyle Abraham who is collaborating with filmmaker Dehanza Rogers.

Dancers (Slightly Out of Shape) airs on Monday at 8:00 PM ET. This is part documentary/part dance featuring choreographer Pam Tanowitz as she and her company resume rehearsals last year during the Covid crisis. It leads to excerpts from Every Moment Alters which is set to the music of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw.

One + One Make Three closes out the festival on Tuesday at 8:00 PM ET. This film showcases the work of Kinetic Light, an ensemble featuring disabled performers. This is also part documentary/part dance made by director Katherine Helen Fisher.

All three films will be accompanied by ASL and Open Captions for the hearing impaired.

BROADWAY: Broadway Close Up: Kander and Ebb – Kaufman Music Center – May 10th – 7:00 PM ET/4:00 PM PT

You know the work of John Kander and Fred Ebb: Cabaret, Chicago, Flora the Red Menace, Kiss of the Spider Woman, New York New York, The Scottsboro Boys and Woman of the Year.

Their work will be explored, discussed and performed with host Sean Hartley.

He’s joined by Tony Award-winner Karen Ziemba (Contact) who appeared in two musicals by the duo: Curtains and Steel Pier. The latter was written specifically for her.

Any fan of Kander and Ebb will want to purchase a ticket for this show. Tickets are $15

Those are our Top Ten Best Bets: May 7th – May 10th (even if we cheated a little bit by having two options listed together). But there are a few reminders:

The Metropolitan Opera has their own view of mothers with their theme of Happy Mother’s Day featuring Berg’s Wozzeck on Friday; Puccini’s Madama Butterfly on Saturday and Handel’s Agrippina on Sunday.

Puccini returns for the start of National Council Auditions Alumni Week with a 1981-1982 season production of La Bohème. We’ll have all the details for you on Monday.

LA Opera’s Signature Recital Series continues with the addition of a recital by the brilliant soprano Christine Goerke.

One rumor to pass along to you: word has it Alan Cumming will be Jim Caruso’s guest on Monday’s Pajama Cast Party.

That completes all our selections of Best Bets: May 7th – May 10th. I hope all of you who are mothers have a terrific weekend. For those of you celebrating with your moms, I hope we’ve given you plenty of options to consider.

Have a great weekend! Enjoy the culture!

Photo: Larry Kramer (Photo by David Shankbone/Courtesy David Shankbone)

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The Normal Heart, essentially an autobiographical play, looks at the early days of the AIDS crisis in New York and the efforts of one writer to motivate a city and a country to take the crisis seriously. At risk of alienating his friends and his community, he also tries to rally those in the gay community to fight back and make radical changes in their lifestyle.

Kramer’s play is being given a one-time only reading on Saturday, May 8th at 8:00 PM ET/5:00 PM PT by ONE Archives Foundation.

Starring in the reading are Sterling K. Brown (Father Comes Home From the Wars; This Is Us); Laverne Cox (Orange Is the New Black); Jeremy Pope (Choir Boy, Hollywood); Vince Rodriguez III (Here Lies Love; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend); Guillermo Díaz (Scandal); Jake Borelli (Grey’s Anatomy); Ryan O’Connell (Will & Grace); Daniel Newman (Eastsiders; The Walking Dead); Jay Hayden (Station 19; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) and Danielle Savre (T@gged; Too Close to Home).

Martin Sheen will introduce the live reading of The Normal Heart.

The evening is directed by Paris Barclay (recent recipient of the Directors Guild of America Honorary Lifetime Member Award). There will be a Q&A with Barclay and the cast after the reading.

When I walked out of the Broadway production of The Normal Heart I was astonished (and frankly pleased) with how quiet the audience was leaving the theater. There was none of the chit-chat that inevitably follows a performance. In this case the audience was too moved, too challenged, too stunned, to engage in conversation.

This is emotionally profound material. I strongly recommend The Normal Heart which is why it is Cultural Attaché’s Top Pick Best Bets: May 7th – May 10th.

Tickets begin at $10 for students and $20 for general admission.

Photo Courtesy ONE Archives Foundation

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It wasn’t just a play. It was Kramer firing warning shots across the bow of apathy by wrapping it in an entertainment. With this play AIDS become tangible for those who had previously relied on what little news coverage there was on a regular basis, or worse, thought it was just the disease that infected gay men. Through his writing, the failings of the Reagan Administration became more than politics, they became a catastrophe that was measured death by death.

I first saw The Normal Heart when I was in my mid-20s. In late 1985 there was a production in Los Angeles that starred Richard Dreyfuss, Bruce Davison and Kathy Bates. Lacking any personal experience with AIDS, I was profoundly moved and fiercely angered.

The play also presented a dilemma for me. Do I come out as a gay man when the identity of gay men was tied to an incurable disease? Do I spend more time in the closet because my own shame wouldn’t allow me to join in anything more than quiet solidarity? Could not acting on my sexuality save my life? I’m not proud of the decision I made.

In 2011 I went to see the first Broadway production of The Normal Heart. The emotion that the entire audience experienced was more heartbreaking than I had remembered from 1985. We had navigated our way out of the crisis but never fully solved it. When the names of those who died from HIV/AIDS were projected on the walls of the stage at the plays’ conclusion, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Never had I seen an audience move so quietly from the theater onto the streets of the city. Their silence was deafening, but it was finally the right silence.

At the Tony Awards that season, Kramer was finally acknowledged for his work as a playwright when the production won for Best Revival of a Play.

Six years ago I interviewed Dreyfuss about his experiences in the play just as the HBO movie of The Normal Heart was about to premiere. Here’s what he had to say about the experience of introducing audiences in Los Angeles to Larry Kramer and his work.

“It’s a pretty exciting thing to provoke an audience into demanding that they listen and watch and they did. The whole play is a scream of empathy and love and it doesn’t matter that he’s an irritant. Look at what he’s fighting. Anyone with a brain knows that this is a man who is grieving over the loss of his own. Larry himself is more willing to go toe-to-toe with people. He may have a posture, he can misinterpret a phrase and take it as something to ignite, but for the most part he’s a sweet gentleman.”

The lion who was also “a sweet gentleman” passed away yesterday. Just as the world is confronting another pandemic that, in many governments around the world, is being met once again with apathy and indifference.

Though I never met Kramer, I imagine if I asked him about the state of the world today he would say, “We just never learn.” Through his own battles with HIV and liver disease Kramer never stopped fighting. He never stopped advocating. He never stopped pissing people off. Just as we need better leaders, the world could use more people like Larry Kramer.

Photo of Larry Kramer by David Shankbone/Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

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Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart is finally a movie—and it only took 29 years. Directed by Glee and American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy (he also did Eat, Pray, Love) the film began airing on HBO this past weekend. But before it was a TV movie, it was a landmark play penned by writer and AIDS activist Larry Kramer. It debuted in the spring of 1985 at New York’s Public Theatre. In December of that same year a production opened at the Las Palmas Theatre in Hollywood. The cast included Kathy Bates, Bruce Davison, and, in the lead role of Ned Weeks, a young Richard Dreyfuss, who at that point was probably best known for starring in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Set in the early 1980s The Normal Heart depicts the first years of the AIDS crisis. Ned (played by Mark Ruffalo in the film) and several colleagues form the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in an effort to help men who are dying from the “gay cancer.” Weeks’s activism inflames government officials and alienates his friends, but desperate times demand desperate solutions. The Normal Heart essentially depicts Kramer’s experiences during that era.

“Every night Bruce and I kissed,” Dreyfuss recalls, “some guy in the audience would slam his program down and say ‘Goddamnit, I’m getting out of here.’ That’s when we knew we were doing it right. It’s a great role and it was timely. It’s like the theatrical parallel of [The Apprenticeship of] Duddy Kravitz. The whole play is a scream of empathy and love. It doesn’t matter that he’s an irritant; look at what he’s fighting.”

The Normal Heart finally reached Broadway in 2011. At certain performances Kramer could be found outside the John Golden Theatre handing out flyers to remind the audience that HIV/AIDS hasn’t gone away and that there is more that needs to be done. Clearly the fire still burns. “Larry himself is more willing to go toe-to-toe with people because he’s been going toe-to-toe, like the scene with the mayor,” says Dreyfuss. “Anyone with a brain knows this is a man who is grieving over the loss of his own. He may have a posture, he can misinterpret a phrase and take it as something to ignite, but for the most part he’s a sweet gentleman. As a matter of fact, I’m kind of grieving that we haven’t talked in a bunch of years.”

“The most important moment was two years after The Normal Heart came out,” Dreyfuss says. “I spoke to [Larry] and he said, ‘I went to the island and they acted as if the play had never been written. They are behaving like they did before.’ And his heart broke. He realized, and I’m making this up, that his opponent was no longer the straight world, it was the gay world. It was like these kids had never experienced or cared about what he had been writing about and they were behaving as they had in 1969. It killed him.”

With actors today still being encouraged not to “play gay,” did Dreyfuss or his agents have any concern about appearing in this play? “No one ever said that or ever would who knew me. Not even in the slightest.” It was the challenge of the role that inspired him. “The challenges were the speeches. There were problems in the staging of the actors at certain moments. There’s that blasting confession when Bruce dies that was never really fulfilled as it should have been. But it’s a pretty exciting thing to provoke an audience into demanding that they listen and watch—and they did.”

Does Dreyfuss believe we’ve made progress since 1985? “There were markers along the way like when Magic [Johnson] got sick and talked about it and when Doris Day came out for Rock Hudson. Slowly we began to lose our hostility and fear. However, it would also help to remind different sectors of society—doctors, pharmaceutical companies, gay people, right wingers, Vice Presidents of the United States whose children are gay—there’s more connection than disconnection.”

Dreyfuss, who has always spoken his mind, does not have any plans to return to the stage at the moment. “In a certain way I stepped away from acting. Now when I act, I do it to make a living and feed my family. It’s not the love affair it had been for 50 years; it’s a friendship. We have this strange inability to ask the most talented industry in the world to get involved in theater in their own town. And we don’t know how to offer them anything to make this work. I say offer them something they don’t have: complete artistic freedom. And that way you get Steven Spielberg, Warren Beatty, and Francis Ford Coppola to do theater.”

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