Starring: - Donna Murphy
- Jere Shea
- Marin Mazzie
Description:
Based on the Italian movie Passione d'amore, Stephen Sondheim's Passion is a story of obsessive love. Giorgio (Jere Shea), a soldier, and Clara (Marin Mazzie), a woman with a husband and child, are deeply in love, but their idyllic happiness is disrupted when Giorgio is transferred to another post. Here, he meets Signora Fosca (Donna Murphy), a homely and ill woman who is the cousin of the regiment's commanding officer. Fosca soon falls in love with Giorgio and pursues him relentlessly, saying "Loving you is not a choice / It's who I am." He is repulsed and resists her advances, but eventually, he succumbs to the power of her love.
Rather than a succession of individual songs strung together by dialogue, Sondheim's score is a constant flow of gorgeous music. (The original theater program listed no individual songs.) The plot is conveyed by song, some dialogue, letters between the characters, and a group of soldiers that serves as a Greek chorus. The result is more of a chamber opera than a conventional musical. Passion won Tonys for Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Book of 1994, and Murphy also won a Tony for her powerful performance as Fosca. Mazzie is in glorious voice as Clara, and Shea brings a pretty voice and a wooden personality to Giorgio.
1. Happiness
2. First Letter
3. Second Letter
4. Third Letter
5. Fourth Letter
6. I Read
7. Transition
8. Garden Sequence
9. Transition
10. Trio
11. Transition
12. I Wish I Could Forget You
13. Soldiers' Gossip
14. Flashback
15. Sunrise Letter
16. Is This What You Call Love?
17. Soldiers' Gossip
18. Transition
19. Forty Days
20. Loving You
21. Transition
22. Soldiers' Gossip
23. Farewell Letter
24. No One Has Ever Loved Me
25. Finale
Passion
