GAY PEOPLE'S Chronicht

SECTION B

OCTOBER 1, 1994

Evenings Out

The nature of human love

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Jere Shea as Giorgio and Donna Murphy as Fosca in a scene from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's new musical Passion.

Passion

by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine

Reviewed by Barry Daniels

Stephen Sondheim's latest work, Passion, opened on Broadway in May and has won numerous awards including the Tony for Best Musical of the 1993-1994 season. Although hardly a musical, but not quite an opera, Passion is a daring work, intimate in scale, subtly scored, and exquisitely staged. Its subject is nothing less than the nature of human love.

Passion is set in Italy in 1863—it is based on an obscure novel, Fosca, by I. U. Tarchetti and on Ettore Scola's film version of it, Passione d'Amore-and works a variation on the traditional and popular 19th century version of the love triangle. Giorgio, a handsome young officer in the newly-unified Italy's national army, is passionately in love with Clara, a married, upper class woman from Milan. When Giorgio is transferred to the small provincial town of Parma, he becomes the object of the obsessive passion of the mortally ill and painfully ugly Fosca, cousin of his commanding officer. The action follows the gradual transformation of Giogio from the conventional hero of sentimental fiction to a man who is brought to the brink of madness by the intensity of Fosca's love.

This action is essentially internal; the originality of the work lies in the creation by Sondheim (music and lyrics) and James Lapine (book and direction) of a form that makes this internal action dramatically visible and compelling. They use the device of letters as a structural motif that gives the musical its distinctive quality. Letters are read, or sung, often with writer and reader present, voices intertwining. Physical distance and concrete milieu dissolve in the flow the passions.

James Lapine's staging of Passion is a marvel of craft and intelligence. With his designers, Adrianne Lobel (sets), Jane Greenwood (costumes), and Beverly Emmons (lights), he creates a series of stage pictures that are based in the romantic desire to transcend physical reality. The production is set against a series of luminous backdrops that recall the sublime nature of Turner and Martin. Scrims, set pieces and an intricate series of panels are used to create an infinite number of visual compositions. Everything shimmers and flows like the music. These moving pictures are often breathtaking: they make it possible to bring together in the same image past and present, Milan and Parma, the external and the internal.

Passion is carefully structured in sets of opposites that are true to the spirit of 19th century Romanticism. It begins with a nude love scene: in a bed surrounded by red velvet drapes, Giorgio and Clara sing the joys of physical rapture. It concludes in a hospital as Giorgio recovers from his madness, a white curtain gently blowing in the wind. The red

of the first scene is present in Fosca's gown, when she appears as he reads her deathbed letter to him. The military drums of the overture are repeated in the climactic duel scene which precipitates Giorgio's madness. Giogio's scream at the end of the duel recalls Fosca's screams that have punctuated the action.

Passion is small in scale for a Broadway musical. Sondheim uses only 14 singer-actors to create all the roles and his emphasis is on the three principal characters. Most developed of the minor characters are Fosca's cousin and protector, Colonel Ricci (Gregg Edelman) and the meddling Doctor Tambourri (Tom Aldredge). In a flashback sequence, Christophe Peccaro has a fine cameo role as Ludovic, the false count and bigamist, who seduced and married Fosca for her money. In the two principal female roles Maria Mazzie as Clara and Donna Murphy as Fosca perfectly embody Sondheim's dialectics. The sensuous, beautiful worldly Clara has just the right touch of heartlessness and vulgarity in Mazzie's performance. Murphy's Fosca earned a well-deserved Tony award. She makes Fosca's obsessive passion both human and fascinating. The audience, like Giorgio, ends up enthralled and consumed by her incandescence. Jere Shea's Giorgio is of necessity a less showy performance than either of the female characters. He is handsome, virile, sweetvoiced and utterly convincing in representing the subtle changes Giorgio experiences. Passion's central opposition is an eternal one: physical love based in the external stands against transcendent love that is all internal. Although the lovers represented are heterosexual, there is a clear homosexual subtext to the work. Giorgio is the classic pretty boy who rejects the transcendent passions of his older or uglier pursuer for the simpler pleasures of the flesh. He is very much an object of desire, or more precisely two different kinds of desire.

I would argue that this somewhat passive positioning of a male at the center of a play of passions reflects a clear homosexual position on the part of the creator and is experienced this way by gay men in the audience, and, perhaps unconsciously by straight men as well. (Fosca's lyric, "Loving you is not a choice/It's who I am," makes it clear her marginality can be read as a metaphor for homosexuality as well.)

Ironically, for all Sondheim's musical virtuosity, it is the music that is Passion weakest element. Despite its shimmering textures and unconventional structure with song flowing in and out of underscoring, and a subtle repetition of motifs and textures, the music lacks what it most wants to portray: passion. Perhaps on repeated hearing the recording was released in the summeror in a more fully orchestrated version, I will be proven wrong. I hope so, because Passion is clearly an important work that will mark the history of musical theatre as much of Sondheim's work has. The intensity and luminosity of the staging and acting make this difficult and sometimes mysterious work profoundly moving.