and in florida and in the bronx sable sedan you know the bullied gay teen who fought back with a knife fourteen years in prison for manslaughter and assault i was there and will have a report  prevention funds when he was the governor of florida as a child of the infection rates were skyrocketing those were federal funds he didn't want i'm going to review betrayal just play with tom  broadway and are very special guest is bruce sussman who's going to tell us about his new musical harmony coming to new york in collaboration with his longtime coworker barry manilow and it's coming in at the beginning of next year and he's going to tell us all about it ok so you know to trump has made this the centerpiece of his presentations these days he even tweeted about of the sweet how many federal judges he has appointed you can see the tweet there it is a phenomenal number but when he was talking about it to the press this week i have to thank obama for this gift of all these openings on the court will thank mitch mcconnell for that because he wouldn't so what else did he do this week he's got this new regulation to throw three million six hundred thousand dollars of you off of food stamps many of them in trump company country he's looking to cut refugee admissions by half over the  now and of course he's diverting no funds to building the wall which is taking money from districts in republican districts all over the country but he has merit at the endorsement of homophobic former chris is that of the star isaiah washington who came out for his reelection you know as a washington is now our guy and he says well i've seen a little change of the democrats for i'm up for my people who out you know i always worried that we've been too hard on isaiah d washington i happens because it was a long time ago i have to feel that this is the scene here on his part there repealing a ban on be killing pesticides in wildlife refuges how we going to eat you know well they're killing all the auto emission standards that california worked out with a car company that is bringing an end to trust suit against auto companies that want to be environmentally conscious by complying with florida because they're doing it together that's place in north carolina yes the democrats lost in a heavily republican district but it swung more than ten points to the democrat and if all the districts swing ten points to the democrat donald trump loses the state of north carolina all right hold my breath on that one there is no there is fight back here and there and i want to thank representative jennifer waxed in a democrat of virginia who has introduced a bill that roadblocks in front of every investigation and everything but the democrats have got to get more aggressive well i see little signs of that i want more of course but i'm happy to see our congressman jerry nat'l are on t v more and more talking about  work they're doing they don't have trouble standing up to them in iceland so mike pence makes a visit to iceland the president of that country greeted him wearing wearing a rainbow bracelet as he had also done in greeting putin while ago because of putin's you know anti homophobia anti home of homosexuality law and the other picture there are a couple of local businesses that were on the parade route not the parade route but the route for mike pence put up multiple rainbow flags but you know mike just sees this as due to his strong christian faith well you remember that last week that the white house was claiming that just because i've met with pence's not changing just because he's met with the streets were barricaded in our law and in county clare but nobody turned out to greet pence there but speaking in front of the irish prime minister publicly criticized trip pence they were greatly troubled by his remark these are the people who kept us out of the st patrick's day parade for twenty five years st do this on purpose tents and trump and all those people they are just trying to get under our skin well it is upsetting what are we supposed to do just ignore it well st of all we're i have these democratic debates and we're taping now on wednesday and i should note that we're taping non september  wednesday and as we do that we of course remember gay heroes like mark bingham on united flight ninety three who helped bring that flight down before it could crash into something huge in d c and kill even reason and they will be sequential interviews with candidates which will take a long time the st one is on september th next week yes and that one is it will not be televised but it will be broadcast on line it's being held at koch college in cedar rapids iowa there are ten candidates who've already to do it glad if that's eastern or central in iowa on september th and the other one is sponsored by the human rights campaign on october the th the eve of national coming out day they're going to let c n n reporters ask the questions and audience members this is out in california at the novo away accepting so for biden to judge castro harris war and club char and it's an audience of invited guests yeah you can send in questions but they are restricting the audience and people are a little upset about that this echoes the forum held in two thousand and eight where melissa etheridge asked the questions that was somewhat controversial remember remember and some of the answers from the candidates are a little controversial too but these there and so september th october ten forums individually questioned candidates on l g b t two issues i don't expect anything to you never go unpredictable remember no well the question is what should the questions be you know think about that you can send them in to go to the website for that one on october th no all this stuff about trump upsets you as much as that of the sets us i was  and of course family members profit from the businesses that they generate but insiders are now leaking compromising documents and e mails and  story reports of how for well brags about his penis size and shared photos of his wife in a french maid costume law lots of you know they political put up pictures of him at a nightclub in florida in miami and he said that's photo shopped so they came up with four more photos from their ad to photographer this is at a club called wall where his son trey was a wasn't there well liberty university students are forbidden to go to places like that or drink alcohol and yes all that stuff so this guy well i hoping this this is the this is secretary of health and human services or something and there's a fascinating piece of video online put out posted by the well known drag performer in west hollywood lonnie reinhardt he was performing at a club in west hollywood and he noticed that aaron schock the former congressman and closet case and republican and anti l but then somebody was with their in shock what over and said something and he ended up going over to talk to him and so his posting on line describes all this and describes the conversation he had with aaron schock which included aaron schock saying you know i was outed and it was very painful and my family rejected me and they were very upset and i am writing a statement all of which is very interesting so lonnie doesn't know what to think of this quite and he says you know i just want to put this up to say you can have conversations with people but it would be nice if he did some if he did write a confessional statement and did some good forgive him i think he's getting into character as bella and you know very tough very tough very very tough we love her and i'm looking forward to the show but you know i mean look do i hope it comes around some of these people never give up the conservative politics yes what's well i mean well it's hard for us to imagine anyone having conservative politics but you have to take it on faith that they actually believe this stuff there was news also about aaron schock you know about the investigation into him over the criminal charges his misuse of those campaign funds and after completing a probe should marry period and paying sixty eight thousand dollars that he used for personal expenses and pay back taxes he gets a sweetheart deal when he gets as it gets is record cleared and he gets to run for office again well a lot of new york city former council drag star is running for the city council over but yes with thirty two years old on the nightlife advisory board and on the community board now the election is not until tw one we have a picture we're calling for it a little out of order i don't know whether the control room can get it up but if you can we do we are losing all five out council members  see what happens there let's maybe go back to some of the bad news that we have here about what the trans women who have been murdered this week yes of the st one we have for you and again this is almost a weekly occurrence although they say this is the th and th in baltimore seventeen year old bailey reduce an african american trans woman a murdered was gunned down leaving a party last sunday night she was also the th person shot in baltimore that night so but let's not gloss over the fact she was seventeen years old right seventeen various sitting there in the hundreds hard out of school and was told to go back and told him could not transfer to another three times even though his mother and he asked for a transfer and get me out of this crazy place now you've got to finish school here when i read the story here's what disturbs me most about it is that when he when the mother or he complained about the bullying or if something happened in the class you faggot you girl you know all this stuff  never said anything or did anything they never even engage the students in it it's like oh that's too much you know we're going to talk about all that talk about soccer games later terror but terror of the kids so he dropped out of school for a year you know look you know again a big mistake carrying around a knife in school although he's trying to do it for protection and it's horrible that these kids were killed one was killed and the other one was slashed but fourteen years he was sentenced to he was denied the context in fact he said you know that your you're being bullied i have no doubt that you were bullied but it doesn't justify a murderous rage well let me tell you what happens to a lot of kids when they get into a murderous rage they get an a r fifteen they go to school and they shoot everybody and i don't think murderous rage is the appropriate description of this i think this was fear right i don't think he was enraged i think he was afraid and he knew they were throwing things out all they were coming to atlanta and when he confronted the class which he did they just jumped over their seats and started wailing on the last oh he uses the knife again not knowing how to use a knife so that he might just defend himself but he just goes like this and it happens to pierce the other kids heart in many states he would be considered justified yeah but not in new york and the judge said you may have been bullied but not by these guys well he was bullied by the day and he knew who they were that they were gang members which they deny or just make about the civil suit anyway i feel for abel we're going to try to see have now that he's being sent to prison because he was doing ok and rikers and getting an education in the city jail but in the state prison system you know it's very rough and we have to protect people in prison especially gay people will say i'm trying to share of the murder boy's mother wri upset with us in bakersfield california some kids with maggette hat from acolytes invaded a meeting of the gay straight alliance or what do we call it and what is driver loses it i'm a christian get out she says and a christian get out and so the lesbians take out a phone and start filming this again you can find this on line to go ahead fill me i'm standing up for christ story and i thought she's picking up something from a year and a half ago we heard this story before but i looked it up and now it happened again well it's going to keep happening and then follow up on that situation in boston where they were there was the straight pride march again and this n she was the attorney of the year of the national lawyers guild and they've got to get this guy off the bench is out of control these are the anti straight pride protesters our side both the prosecution and the defense had asked that the charges against them be dismissed but the judge five refused so the cops are very happy now because they feel they've been vindicated for all their rough treatment of the protestors ionic pressley  represent time congressional representative from massachusetts and alexandria casa cortez are supporting the bail fund that has been put together for those protesters by the way speaking about a candidate's in crazy like the whole skyline of san francisco on hats and he came out of that tradition and really wild stuff but it is also march is contributions included a towering martha stewart themed head piece complete with a pai a lobster a pot of sunflowers and a copy of martha stewart living but on project runway and beyond he did much more controlled work put the picture up again if you can including fan you know i didn't know him but he appeared to be a fantastic guy on project runway and really a fantastic designer fell on his head in two thousand and seventeen he was put into a minute medically induced coma he came out of it he was just partly died of a heart attack at age fifty six a real tragedy to lose chris march and then sally floyd someone i hadn't heard of but who was affected your life she's a computer scientist sixty nine years old goldwater cancer she invented something called our edi random early detection which is the logarithm but basically lets the internet work and let's information flows smoothly before that there is apparently a lot of congestion who were putting on the show their down syndrome people who who were due in drag yeah the show went on it was very successful but had to add an extra show that in fact sold out and the a c l u is suing the guy who canceled them for discrimination because he said you know you know you said you were solicitous of people with down syndrome being what discriminated against or used marriage has come out about how much it really opposes legalizing same sex marriage as the senate there is moving ahead on legalizing it although they did delay it a little but they're going to have a vote in october that may move us forward a marriage there very encouraging story in brazil and rio the mayor there as an evangelical preacher and at the he said police into the international book for your fare to see these copies of a comic book with men kissing the police came up empty and the judge barred him from further raids or from withdrawing the permit for the comic book was a tw avengers the children's crusade well so the newspaper put it on the front page and you draw a lot of it that's how it's hoping and wicked who are boyfriends kissing it sold out before the raid but a nd judge said gay and lesbian content for children should not be publicly displayed too late the comedian felipe noto said he would distribute thousands of books with gay and lesbian characters with a label reading it appropriate for a back or director of worried and prejudice gibraltar the government will delete the and the option for registrars to opt out of performing same sex marriages meanwhile it hasn't been used in three years so they figure well we don't really need it in toronto was a big protest at the opening of the chick fil a by both on a bill of rights groups and u b t groups to get their big lines also for the chicken we remind you that popeye's also has a chicken sandwich now here a big fan of popeye's i haven't tried the chicken sandwich they ran out yes they certainly did in cosmic stan the great to see isn't from the supreme court there which overturned a lower court ruling they ruled for the privacy rights of a lesbian couple who were kissing in a movie theater yeah and some jerk pulled out a phone camera and started filming them and then posted it on facebook they have since been attacked and harassed and had death threats and so they went to court against this guy and the court said you do have privacy rights it may be too late on this but this is not appropriate behavior the under secretary of state in northern ireland an election but i'm to say i was somewhat discouraged to read there was this one young guy seventeen years old who had registered is going to be eighteen now he's twenty i'm sorry but he said oh vote for either the green party or the conservative a proposed law to outlaw discrimination on sexual orientation or gender identity as urgent why don't i believe him now we told you about in france the soccer game getting stopped because of homophobic chanting but the head of the soccer federation there said stop the games if it's racist chanting but not homophobic chance if it's homophobic signs take him down so there are a lot of calls for him to resign and in her go i the government will recognize foreigners for same sex marriages i couldn't read the whole story it's in spanish i don't read right the st united methodist church is also the st african congregation to identify is what's called reconciling accepting of gay people and this started because they had a church member who had an intersection child in one thousand nine hundred and eight who was thrown out by her husband and said we need to learn about sexual hiv genetics to target individual transmitters they have a lot of complaints against the c d c under trump so then they got redfield to sit down with them and they had a meeting h well no details on it we'll see how it develops but at least they did have the meeting well very reminiscent of the old days there was a big expos where was this on governor rick scott when he when he 's a senator now in florida but it showed that he was he was forced to return fifty four million dollars in federal funds to combat h i v due to winnow the deliberate failure by the stay health department to secure legislative permission to spend the money and hiv rates have gone way up there they also blocked c d c grants applications in towns i mean it's really are just to apply for medicaid expansion they have the highest number of hiv cases in the country coming to broadway in the spring at the middle and theater previews for march th stars openly gay simon russell beale h b o has got a four part series on catherine the great with helen mirren but it seems to focus on or affair with a guy nineteen but but you're here today to talk about a musical called harmony which has been kicking around for a few years and it's coming to new york and that's what we're excited about and it's about a group of jewish and gentile singers who got together in the gathering storm in germany when the nazis were right before the nazis came on and were an internationally famous singing group they were not welcome thank you  mean let's talk about the shows you won't forget about i'm sure harmony yes harmony tells a story as you mentioned of the comedian harman a school who are they because most of us have never heard of them through i know when i discovered who the story about them photo in the new york times it was a review of a documentary about them that was running down at the public theater you may remember they used to be a screening room down the yes and they didn't want films and documentaries and the new york times did a review of this documentary and epic documentary the comedian harm innocent the public there were a lot of words in there i didn't recognize a hard fact who is he comedian harmonises what an odd pairing of words yeah read the review and it sounded very compelling so i schlepped down to the public the it all never forget it was a rainy cold april night went down alone tuesday night and i watched four and a half hours of german documentary making in german with subtitles not my usual way to spend a tuesday night but this wasn't four and a half hours of them was that it was one hour and a half hour or hour and a half hours of their story really with little excerpts of them and a lot of the recordings dubbed over it and their wives and their and i called barry in california and i said i think i found it i said i think i found the story we're looking for to write a musical we've been wanting to write a musical from the day we met and this pop music thing was this amazing diversion and he said i don't know what you're talking about but go get it and this was more than twenty years ago it was and i started doing the research and we started to write and and then we had our very st production  one you can hit and what people don't understand is that when a broadway producer options your show they get to renewed the option three times as long as they pay the option fee you have no say in the matter so if they get it and if they don't do anything with it you're just sitting there twiddling your thumbs oh has kept the front runner off the screen for decades right so this just happened repeatedly the interesting thing is every time one of these options expired there was someone else waiting to pick it up so the interest in the piece never flagged it was just we couldn't find people who could deliver and now we appear to send it out really well reviewed in early production until hoyer yes and subsequently in atlanta whatever but why as they kept commercial on broadway there was the air of the twinkie musicals it was the era of mamma mia and these shows that were wonderfully entertaining but didn't have a serious bone in their bodies well we weren't that we were we were something else that we have the comfort that we have come from a themselves they negotiated a deal amongst themselves for two years and then it collapse before we got to all the production stuff let's let's st hear a little bit from them back then and we're going to show more of your production and then when i want to hear more about better clip one of them harry comes forth and begins to do his comic routine one of their legendary trademarks was mimicking the sounds of musical instruments and  one of the things they would do is at intermission coming back from intermission the lights would be down and you would hear what you thought was a chamber orchestra playing the overture to the barber of seville and slowly the lights would come up and just the six of them replicating the sounds of musical instrument and so they're a great group and they're very successful right who was was there any consciousness we're going to have half jews and have gentiles on the screen well the house who are the jews and who are the gentile is actually a plot point in the piece that i'm not going to spoil here and how many of the each there were is another plot point to complicate things one of the jewish members married a gentile woman and one of the gentile members married a jewish woman but wasn't a conscious effort to like have been rather than what germany became they were they were incredibly diverse it was a polish rabbi a book gear i mean singing waiter a german doctor an italian opera singer a whorehouse pianists i mean they were just six diverse guys of every stripe who doesn't sound like the marx brothers yes ok and together and created this phenomenon and what is unique idea it was to saying the repertoire they sang the way they sang it do the nazis come and then what happens there their rise to fame from street not from impoverished street musicians to successful cabaret performers to international recording artist they made  they even then because there had been so many governments and so many months they decided and believe this one was going to last but it but right at that point they began to realize there was there there was going to be some trouble and then the axe fell they got an aide they got a letter from the ranks minister of music or culture i forget which department saying they could not perform with the current personnel they couldn't perform songs composed by jews with lyrics by jews or published by jocks left they had one song in their repertoire that was left when i was that one so everything else had to go and because harry who was the perhaps the greatest comedian among them because harry was the arranger and he was jewish all the arrangements had to go and this used to be a line in our show and we had to cut it because they got an unwanted laugh the letter also said you can't use the name comedian harmison the more we suggest the master sextet it was so ridiculously ironic that we used to get a laugh and we we just we had to remove it but that's that's what happened in fact when the jewish members fled the the non jewish members put together another found three more members and put together another group and but it was over they just couldn't recapture the glory of the hand there i don't know if you deal with it in the show but what became know within the show and i want to go into this too much but it was well i think only one of them really found a fully integrated life after this this happened when they were very young and it  success and to this day if you go to germany if you go to the equivalent of tower records in germany there will be a whole wall full of communion hominis albums and they were imitator groups like beatlemania yeah to the communion harmonies repertoire all around germany yes some people may know that there's a spectacular revival of fiddler on the roof around the city is just splendid i love it i don't know how you felt about it but i was crazy about it and that was done by the nationally a dish the into downtown and actually started down there and then they moved uptown and they approached us and asked us if they could get involved with harmony at the time we had just met a new commercial producer who was interested c to get this production here into new york really because of those options and the producer is there any other and that's pretty much it i mean along the way it's been a journey for us to for every reincarnation revisit the show and see what can we we know what can we just is it and also every new director that comes on has an idea about how he or she might like to do it so we make adjustments along the way and do you think the timing now  ironically appropriate our director just said that to us you know he said he said i know the agony of what it's been like to know the frustration of not being able to get the show to new york he said but now that you have he said the timing may be the best timing you could era before jukebox musicals and it's funny how many people say oh you're not doing the comedian home minister repertoire well no we're not but nor did they in funny girl or gypsy or the sound of music that was put into the bunch trapp family repertoire and we didn't do the fanny brice repertoire in the in the stage play anyway so it was original music only decided since there was no over the rainbow there was no song that was so phenomenally well known by people outside of germany that this was a but because they're all speaking german there's no accent so it's so that you know when they speak english and or when they're when they're in new york and they say hello new york we have the committee then they have an accent and i say yeah it's very mean it was such a surprise yeah it down was all about crazy costumes and funny song yes and you know i just kind of went out up obligation because it was cross dressing and all this other kind of stuff and it was just it was having my fun we were we were invited just made a couple of songs for it and it was it was great fun we really had a good time with that one and then you know i got to work with the late wendy wasserstein yes as we did her st musical was her only musical until recently to work for she died but that was a that was an amazing journey as dowler i think this is all very exciting and then you have gotten great audience reaction to our money and the advance you know i can't believe it's five and a half six months away and tickets are selling and already so it's just it's amazing i'm very gratified it's got twenty years of word of mouth so you know there is that yes there is that and i think some people are coming out of curiosity and and and there are also some people who actually know the story and it always amazes me when i run into anybody who does i just met a producer at c b s and he came up to me and said you doing the camino arma story and i said yes he said they're my favorite harmony the group is called caribbean heart us harmony right and the website is harmony a new musical d dot com for more information about this and how you can see it that's going to be downtown at the museum of jewish heritage thirty