Sting, Trudi to read love aloud

PASSIONATE love, parental opposition, eventual madness -- who can resist the love story of composer Robert Schumann and his student and later wife, Clara Wieck Schumann?

Hollywood legends Paul Henreid and Katharine Hepburn played the couple in the 1947 movie “Song of Love” (and reprised their roles in 1950’s “The Schumann Story”). Now, rock star Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, are set to read excerpts from the Schumanns’ love letters in John Caird’s “Twin Spirits,” March 27 at New York’s New Victory Theater, in a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

“We’re hoping to raise $200,000, which I think we’re going to do,” says Tom Viola, the nonprofit organization’s executive director. Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS supports the Actors’ Fund of America, an actors’ assistance program, and about 500 AIDS and family service organizations across the country, including “easily a hundred in California,” Viola says.

Interspersed with the Schumanns’ letters will be musical interludes by six classical musicians, including violinist Joshua Bell and soprano Barbara Bonney. Sting and Styler, for their parts, will be reprising the “Twin Spirits” performances they gave at a fundraiser for the renovation of Britain’s Royal Opera House in 1999.

There’s no direct connection between “Twin Spirits” and AIDS, Viola says. “But if medical and social services had been such as they are now, Robert Schumann probably would have been diagnosed as bipolar, perhaps, or manic depressive, very likely, and might have had the social services to be treated. So he would not have ended up -- as people did -- with this undiagnosed insanity, instead of having a chemical imbalance, which could be corrected with medication.”

Chris Pasles