Madonna strode onstage, and 15,000 fans went bats. "It feels great to be in a house full of people who care," she told the Madison Square Garden crowd. "AIDS is a strange and powerful disease. But we're more powerful." Then Madonna, who lost her "best friend," Painter Martin Burgoyne, 24, to AIDS, rocked the Garden with old songs given pertinent twists. As she sang Papa Don't Preach, the screens flashed Ronald Reagan's image; at song's end, they bore the message SAFE SEX. Everyone got the message from the concert, which raised $400,000 for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR), and from a comic book about AIDS. "Read this booklet," a handwritten note urged, "then give it to your best friend. It just might save his or her life. It just might save your own. Love, Madonna."
That same night last week, another Manhattan audience gathered for a more poignant celebration. Charles Ludlam, the wondrous star-playwright-designer- director of Greenwich Village's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, had succumbed to AIDS in May, at 44. Now 1,000 of his admirers crammed into the Second Avenue Theater to watch excerpts from his ebullient farces and to pay tribute to the artist whom Playwright William M. Hoffman called "the funniest man in America." Madeline Kahn recalled her college days with Ludlam. Joseph Papp and Geraldine Fitzgerald spoke of his prodigious energy. Finally, Everett Quinton -- Ludlam's colleague and for years his lover -- walked onstage to a standing ovation. Throughout the evening he had manfully cavorted through such roles as Flosshilde in Der Ring Gott Farblonjet, Alice in Conquest of the Universe or When Queens Collide and Lamia the Leopard Woman in Bluebeard. He waited for the cheers to subside and said, "I never felt so alone in my life."
Hope, pugnacity, desperation. And the entertainer's belief that, against fatal odds, the show must go on. These may be the only emotional weapons an artist can marshal against a disease that has sapped America's artistic community. Star-studded evenings like the Madonna concert and the Ludlam memorial have become depressingly frequent occasions for New York's beau monde. In October, 13 prominent dance companies will appear in Dancing for Life, which should raise $1.5 million for four AIDS groups. In November, Leonard Bernstein, Luciano Pavarotti, Leontyne Price and other luminaries will stage a Carnegie Hall concert to cadge $2 million for the Gay Men's Health Crisis.
When artists are not rallying the well-heeled troops, they are struggling to transform their feelings about AIDS and its sufferers into art. Theater has already produced a shelf of contentious dramatic literature: Hoffman's As Is, Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, Harvey Fierstein's Safe Sex, Robert Chesley's Jerker, or the Helping Hand, Alan Bowne's Beirut. The D.C. Cabaret Troupe is performing its new musical, A Dance Against Darkness: Living with AIDS, in Washington. NBC broadcast the first AIDS TV movie, An Early Frost, in 1985, and this week CBS airs An Enemy Among Us, in which a teenager gets AIDS from a transfusion.