“It had been a star-crossed organization for years, beset by strikes, warehouse fires, financial woes and the devastation of the early years of AIDS. Beverly Sills–the company’s biggest star, its long-time general manager and most effective fundraiser–estimated that the troupe lost more than 100 people to AIDS in the space of a decade: directors, conductors, singers, and others at the peak of their youth and sexual urgency, cut down by a mysterious new malady.”