August 8, 2002

Emotions Beneath the Sondheim Chill

By BEN BRANTLEY

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 — The soldier has the shucked, wondering look of a man who is just realizing that he has shed his old skin. Something has happened to Giorgio, the kind of thing that means he will never again see life in the same terms. When his mistress tells him solemnly, "You've changed," the simple words crack like thunder.

Theatergoers who saw the original Broadway production of "Passion," the Tony-winning musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine from 1994, may not recall this moment. Or if they do, they probably don't remember it as anything special. But in the transfixingly clear revival of the show at the Kennedy Center here, the jewel of its summer-long Sondheim festival, the scene clicks like a key in a long-locked door.

Giorgio, a young lieutenant in 19th-century Italy and the center of the strangest and most intense romantic triangle in Broadway musical history, is played by Michael Cerveris. It's the sort of performance that makes you ask where he's been all our lives, though he has already originated roles in high-profile shows like "Tommy" and "Titanic."

In Eric Schaeffer's splendidly confident restaging of "Passion," Mr. Cerveris gives a performance of such emotional transparency that it hurts. And you start to regard the brooding "Passion" not as an anomaly in the Sondheim canon but as its Rosetta stone.

A declaration from Fosca (the excellent Judy Kuhn), the show's terminally ill heroine, takes on new relevance: "I know I feel too much. I often don't know what to do with my feelings." As the invaluable Sondheim Celebration enters its last month — with "Passion" in repertory with his "Merrily We Roll Along" and "A Little Night Music" — Fosca's words start to seem like an epigraph for the extraordinary strengths and difficulties of Mr. Sondheim's body of work.

Most critics have by now mothballed the objections to Mr. Sondheim as too clever, chilly and cerebral to create musicals with heart. But after seeing all six of the main offerings in the festival (the earlier ones were "Sweeney Todd," "Company" and "Sunday in the Park With George"), I began to think that Mr. Sondheim may be the most emotional composer in the history of musicals.

Not that Mr. Sondheim creates songs with the sentimental wallop of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It's impossible, for example, to imagine the melancholy Fosca suddenly bursting out with "I'm in love with a wonderful guy!" Or Sweeney Todd regarding the streets of London and proclaiming, "Oh, what a beautiful mornin'!"

Mr. Sondheim's lyrics don't lend themselves to exclamation points. His has always been an acutely self-conscious sensibility, that of a man in love with the traditions of musicals but aware that those traditions can't always accommodate a modern world in which cherished institutions seem false or at best unreliable.

His much misunderstood "Follies" (1971) is a dialogue between a musical past and characters who feel betrayed by its promises. His "Into the Woods" (1987), currently in revival on Broadway, examines the fallacy of fairy-tale happy endings. But there is more pain than cynicism in such considerations.

"I often don't know what to do with my feelings," indeed. Mr. Sondheim's extraordinary gift lies in his finding ways to express that uncertainty in song while guiding his music into illumination.

For a Sondheim show to work, everyone — onstage and off — has to experience a sense of change and in the process feel "too much."

As the Kennedy Center festival vividly illustrates, this makes casting and performing a Sondheim musical a very tough proposition. It's rare that a production reflects the shadows in the score as satisfyingly as the festival's "Passion" does and "Company" did.

The current incarnations of "Merrily" (1981) directed by Christopher Ashley, and "Night Music" (1973), directed by Mark Brokaw, aren't disastrous. Like Mr. Schaeffer's staging of "Sunday in the Park" they mostly seem just dutiful. They are blueprint productions in which all the elements are in place but never come together into three vibrant dimensions.

"Merrily" has always been the beloved problem child of Mr. Sondheim's works. Adapted by Mr. Sondheim and George Furth from a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the show famously moves backward in time, charting its characters' path from middle-aged disillusionment to youthful idealism. The original Broadway production, directed by the mighty Harold Prince, used a cast of largely untried young performers who couldn't begin to do justice to their characters' devolutions.

In contrast, Mr. Ashley's "Merrily" has seasoned and magnetic stars, including Michael Hayden (Nicholas Hytner's "Carousel"), Raul Esparza ("Tick, Tick . . . Boom") and Miriam Shor ("Hedwig and the Angry Inch"). Yet they too seem frustratingly one-note as they act out the long, thorny friendship of a composer (Mr. Hayden), a playwright (Mr. Esparza) and a novelist (Ms. Shor).

Mr. Prince has said that "Merrily" was originally conceived as a sort of latter-day "Babes in Arms," a bubbly frolic to display young talent. But Mr. Sondheim's bubbles tend to sting, and Mr. Prince's approach belly-flopped. This is nonetheless essentially the approach adopted by Mr. Ashley, with numbers (choreographed by Karma Camp) that bring to mind awkward answers to the peppier sequences from "Singin' in the Rain."

A trio like "Old Friends" can't just be sunny; you have to sense the clouds ahead and within. Mr. Hayden, Mr. Esparza and Ms. Shor sing the glorious score appealingly, but they cling steadfastly to the surface of things. (You never, for example, believe that Ms. Shor's character is hopelessly in love with Mr. Hayden's.)

It is not a good sign when Gussie (the wonderful Emily Skinner), the voluptuous movie star who corrupts Mr. Hayden's Frank, and her downtrodden husband, Joe (Adam Heller), emerge as the show's most compelling figures.

"A Little Night Music," one of Mr. Sondheim's few bona fide hits on Broadway, suffers from a similar imbalance. Mr. Brokaw, an agile and imaginative director from Off Broadway, may have been intimidated by the arch stateliness of this tale (adapted from an Ingmar Bergman movie) of muddled sexual liaisons in early 20th-century Sweden.

In any case Mr. Brokaw's response has been to scale up the comedy and scale down the rueful awareness of mortality. Given the copious sexual innuendos in Hugh Wheeler's book, this often has the effect of making "Music" feel like a Scandinavian answer to "Love American Style." Randy Graff, playing the disenchanted, deeply bored wife of a fatuous count (Douglas Sills), runs away with the show with her dry, exaggerated line readings. It is petty larceny.

Blair Brown brings her usual warmth and centeredness to the pivotal role of the actress Desiree Armfeldt, and she lends a beguiling sincerity to the well-worn "Send in the Clowns." But this commanding actress fails to project Desiree's dithery, disorganized side. John Dosset gives a sweetly understated performance as her hapless lover.

It's the enchanting young soprano Sarah Uriarte Berry, however, who seems most happily wedded to her role, that of an insistently virginal bride. Her fluttery interpretation may not be subtle, but it has a heartfelt charm. Like Ms. Skinner, Ms. Berry becomes the misplaced focus of her show.

Mercifully, it is hard to conceive of a more impeccably balanced "Passion" than the one offered here. Mr. Schaeffer has staged the show before for the Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., and he clearly has an instinctive grasp on this knotty, fascinating work. As he demonstrated in his worthy Signature production, he understands that the center of "Passion" has to be Giorgio, the sensitive young army lieutenant, instead of Fosca, the sickly, homely and obsessive woman who pursues him to the point of death.

The central problem with the Broadway "Passion" was that Donna Murphy's Fosca was so dazzlingly conceived that you felt it was her story. It's not. "Passion," which features Mr. Lapine's most accomplished book for a musical, must trace Giorgio's change in his perception of what love is as he shifts his affections from Clara (Rebecca Luker in this version), his ravishing mistress, to the unlikely and unprepossessing Fosca.

Whether this shift is a move toward salvation or destruction is, and should be, unclear. With the designers Derek McLane (set) and Howell Binkley (lighting) doing their most refined work for the festival, this production brings out the show's affinities to Romantic Age classics like "Wuthering Heights," dark paeans to unconditional love.

Ms. Luker and Ms. Kuhn turn in thrillingly sung, intelligently realized performances that refrain from making Clara too shallow or Fosca too grotesque. And with Mr. Cerveris tracing Giorgio's vacillation between them with such acutely graded emotions, the lieutenant's final choice seems inevitable.

The use of Giorgio's fellow soldiers as a Greek chorus and the sustained counterpoint of Clara's and Fosca's musical motifs make sense in ways they didn't on Broadway. "Passion" now seems to be taking place inside Giorgio's head, and Mr. Cerveris makes sure that we are caught in there with him.

It is fitting that the standouts of the Sondheim festival should have turned out to be "Company" (1970) and "Passion," works created nearly a quarter of a century apart and the oldest and newest of the musicals performed here. Like Mr. Cerveris, John Barrowman, as the perpetual bachelor Bobby in "Company," provided an interpretation that brought new light and equilibrium to a show that never seemed entirely in kilter before.

And while Bobby is last seen pleading to be taught how to love, Giorgio is allowed to learn that lesson fully in "Passion." This answered prayer does not come without a penalty. But then nothing does in Mr. Sondheim's world of conflicted, overwhelming feelings.

The Washington Times
www.washtimes.com

An eerie 'Passion'

Jayne M. Blanchard
Published 7/27/2002

     We think of the musical "The Phantom of the Opera" as romantic and passionate, but when you get right down to it, it is a story of an ugly, disfigured man who stalks and kidnaps a beautiful young woman.
     Stephen Sondheim takes the beauty and the beast concept to a deeper and creepier level in his gorgeous, grotesque 1994 musical, "Passion," which director Eric Schaeffer has revived with searing forthrightness and emotion.
     The musical, based on the novel "Fosca" by Amino Tarchetti and the movie "Passion D'amore" by Ettore Scola, takes place in 1863, in the Romantic era and in one of the world's most romantic countries — Italy. It explores the more disturbing aspects of love, but not the kind of love promoted in the movies and on TV — with beautiful people rolling around in perfect rhythm to the music, their bodies lightly and artistically beaded with sweat, the lighting just so. This is a dangerous, annihilating, Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton in their heyday kind of union — of a sort that sucks the air out the room, destroys everything in its path.
     And like comedy, it isn't pretty. Obsession and stalking rarely brings out the best in a person, yet in the case of "Passion" you could make the case that the young soldier Giorgio (Michael Cerveris) was never more alive than when forced to love the wretched Fosca (Judy Kuhn). The power of Fosca's shameless love has changed him irrevocably.
     At the close of the musical, Giorgio is a changed man.
     Is he better for loving Fosca? What a question. He now has a knowledge, a terrible knowledge. Fosca's love is almost superhuman, almost divine — overpowering for mere mortals. This kind of divine love can induce madness.
     There is much madness in "Passion," but much beauty as well. Just so audiences don't go tearing up the aisles to call their psychiatrists, Mr. Sondheim imbues the musical with a gorgeous, soaring score that is operatic in its heightened emotions. Songs like "Happiness," "I Read" (which should be the theme song of everyone's personal Lonely Heart's Club), "Loving You" and "No One Has Ever Loved Me" are so saturated with coloration and mood changes that they make many other standard love songs seem like ditties.
     As a contrast, Mr. Sondheim also shows the more socially acceptable form of passion in the delicious love affair between Giorgio and Clara (Rebecca Luker), a young married woman. As the musical opens, the pair loll in bed, extolling how good things are between them ("Happiness") and praising each other's beauty.
     This is what we like to see in our love scenes —attractive people enjoying themselves.
     Then, Giorgio is posted to a remote, provincial town in Italy. The two pledge to express their ardor through letters (which are sung as romantic interludes) and the occasional conjugal visit. All is well, and Giorgio starts to fit in with the amiable group of officers that make up a kind of Greek chorus.
      That is, until Giorgio meets Fosca, the sickly cousin of Colonel Ricci (John Leslie Wolfe). Fosca is the antithesis of Clara — pale, painfully thin, seemingly at death's door. Isolation and loneliness have twisted her — Fosca is free of restraint — and chronic pain has made her almost feral. As portrayed by Miss Kuhn, she is like a drawing by Edward Gorey set in the middle of a robust Romantic landscape.
     Giorgio gallantly offers to lend Fosca some books, not knowing that this small gesture has tipped the scales.
     While Giorgio thinks of little else than Clara and her wonderful letters, Fosca falls horrendously in love — and I am not saying that because Giorgio is handsome and Fosca is plain. It is because she loves so undecorously, so pitifully and without shame.
     Audiences not used to see such gut feelings laughed nervously whenever Miss Kuhn's powerful Fosca went way beyond throwing herself at Giorgio.
     That passion has a destructive side shouldn't be startling, but it is a jolt to see something this twisted on the musical stage. With so much roiling emotion, it would make sense to keep things simple and set designer Derek McLane has created an elegant space framed by soaring white shuttered panels. The shutters create either a haven or a prison, depending on the situation. Beds float up from the floor — spartan in Fosca's case, a tumble of rich bedclothes for Clara.
     Mr. Schaeffer has assembled an outstanding cast for "Passion," a group of singers and actors who appear to deeply understand the show. The soldiers — John Leslie Wolfe, Philip Goodwin, Daniel Felton, Bob McDonald, Lawrence Redmond, Michael L. Forrest and Will Gartshore (who doubles as Fosca's scam artist first husband) — are in superb voice and supply an earthy element to the nightmarish trajectory of Fosca and Giorgio's love story.
     The three leads similarly throw themselves into their roles. Mr. Cerveris makes Giorgio less a handsome dupe and more a sensitive man faced with emotions he didn't know he had. His nimble voice smoothly handles the chaotic mood changes, from liltingly romantic to angry, cruel and confused. Miss Luker, lovely of voice and person, gives Clara a touching vulnerability and practicality. She is one of the musical's few sympathetic characters, and she is a married woman having an affair. But Miss Luker makes Clara very much a product of her times — a woman meant to be loved and adored, but not to the point where she loses control of her life and social standing.
     And then there is Miss Kuhn's brilliant turn as Fosca.
     She gives Fosca an initial coldness and stiffness that is entirely unsympathetic. She is a monster, a needy, greedy monster. Miss Kuhn portrays the outsized emotions of Fosca with unnerving intensity — the fact she sings so gloriously keeps you riveted rather than repulsed.
     It is disturbing to see passion and love portrayed without guile. We prefer love to be tied up with a bright red bow. We want it to be like the movies — no warts, no cellulite, no unseemly emotion. What Mr. Sondheim has done with "Passion" is given us an aspect of love that challenges us and scares us.
     It is interesting to wonder why Fosca and the love between her and Giorgio is so disturbing. Is it because she is ugly? Perhaps. In a society valuing beauty and youth over practically everything else, it seems crazy for Giorgio to love Fosca when he can get the luscious Clara.
     Is it because Fosca is a woman? Traditionally, stalkers and obsessive lovers are men. And even though it is aberrant behavior, there is something romantic about a man so in love that he would do anything for the object of his affection.
     In "Passion," the obsessed lover is a woman. Fosca doesn't take no for an answer, which seems deeply unfeminine. She does not flirt, play games or use cunning to get Giorgio — she tells him she loves him, demands love in return, and that's that. Fosca goes around the bend, practically insane, to get her man.
     What is viewed as kind of romantic in a man is psychotic in a woman. Women are supposed to be pursued and won, the hunted and not the hunter. The Kennedy Center audience laughing at Fosca reminded me of how everyone cheered when Glenn Close got her due in "Fatal Attraction." Miss Close's character didn't follow the rules, and she pays for it with her life.
     So does Fosca, in a way. She is doomed from the start, but in Giorgio she sees an opportunity for a glimpse of life and passion before she dies. Fosca goes for it. Is she selfish? Yes. Does she ruin lives? Absolutely.

     ***1/2
     WHAT: "Passion" by Stephen Sondheim
     WHEN: Running in repertory with "Merrily We Roll Along" and "A Little Night Music" through Aug. 23 WHERE: Eisenhower Theatre, Kennedy Center
     TICKETS:$20-$79
     PHONE: (202) 467-4600
     MAXIMUM RATING; FOUR STARS

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washingtonpost.com

A Darker 'Passion'
Sondheim's Solid Music of Obsession

By Nelson Pressley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 23, 2002; Page C01

Obsessive characters are abundant in the Stephen Sondheim gallery. Mama Rose, Sweeney Todd, Georges Seurat, the assassins of "Assassins" -- these are relentless, sometimes destructive figures whose manias wreak social or emotional havoc.

Another word for the emotion that drives such characters is, of course, passion. It's all in how you look at it, and in "Passion" -- the admirably performed, fluidly staged fifth production in the Kennedy Center's Sondheim Celebration -- Sondheim and librettist James Lapine try hard to get the audience to see the positive qualities in a frail, gothically obsessive woman named Fosca.

Dramatically, this has nearly always been a tough sell. Yet some of Sondheim's music in "Passion," which is very much like a little opera, is heart-stoppingly rapturous. So it's entirely possible to resist the show's unlikely story (based on the 1981 Italian movie "Passione d'Amore," which came from a 19th-century Italian novel) while being shattered by some of the score's trembling romantic statements. And that's likely how you'll come out of director Eric Schaeffer's confident, smartly performed production.

"Passion," set in 1863 Italy, is a Beauty and the Beast tale. A good-looking soldier named Giorgio gradually gives in to the aggressive, pitiful pleadings of the wretched Fosca. This flies in the face of the usual laws of attraction, which are established in the opening duet between Giorgio (Michael Cerveris, his muscled torso exposed) and his beautiful lover, Clara (Rebecca Luker, blond and strapping in a long sheer nightgown). Together they sing "Happiness," a blissful ode in which they gush about their romance. It's a terribly pretty song, but it leaves room for Fosca to show Giorgio something deeper -- and for Sondheim to find more resonant, burnished musical expression for the profound passions to come.

As the ailing Fosca, the diminutive Judy Kuhn is dressed as a Victorian ghoul. Her black dress comes up to her throat, and her chalky face and raccoon eyes can seem a little disembodied. Still, Kuhn is as intriguing a Fosca as you're likely to find. Sondheim piques your interest in this bizarre figure with a deeply absorbing song, "I Read," and Kuhn skillfully negotiates the difficult number's prickly melody and grand gloom with a strong, slightly quavering voice. In trying to downplay the horror-show aspects of Fosca, Kuhn acts with more mournful sadness than clawing desperation, and her downcast eyes and firm sense of the character's crisp intelligence take her pretty far.

But Fosca's intensity can't help but be overwhelming as she plagues Giorgio with the tenacity of a virus. When she lurks behind Giorgio late in the show, you think, fleetingly, that this is the kind of tale where someone ends up with a knife in the back.

That is why audiences have tittered uncomfortably at portions of "Passion" ever since it first appeared in New York eight years ago. (There has not been a new Sondheim musical since then, by the way.) Actually, snickers weren't heard when Schaeffer directed the show at the 136-seat Signature Theatre a few seasons back, which suggests that in a small room it's possible to cast an impenetrable spell with Sondheim's seamless, quietly surging score.

Schaeffer isn't able to do away entirely with unwanted bits of laughter this time around, but it's hard to imagine how his production at the Eisenhower Theater could be any better. His leading actors are first-rate; Luker is lovely and sensible as Clara, while Cerveris, his head shaved and his expression pointed, brings a spiky handsomeness and quizzical air to Giorgio. They sound fine together, with Luker's clear, warm soprano blending nicely with Cerveris's steely singing.

The supporting roles are largely filled by the festival's chorus of local actors, many from Signature, who have been solid throughout this summer's repertory. And Philip Goodwin, a regular at the Shakespeare Theatre, makes easy work of the meddling military doctor who helps thrust Giorgio and Fosca together.

The show is smartly designed, too, from the desiccated set of sliding louvered panels by Derek McLane to Anne Kennedy's crisp period costumes. Lighting designer Howell Binkley adds some stormy effects near the end, and helps fashion a gorgeous closing silhouette that seems borrowed from "Gone With the Wind."

There is a glaring misstep late in the show, an ill-conceived song that was added for the 1996 London production. It doesn't have a title of its own -- you won't find a song list in your program -- but you can't miss it. It comes when Giorgio steps forward and bellows, "I love Fosca," and, "I was wrong," in a bludgeoning moment that seems more in keeping with the ponderous mock-operas that have lumbered across Broadway for the last two decades.

But most of the rest of the score has magic in it. Sondheim subtly weaves the lyricism of "Happiness" with Fosca's duskier motifs, and the emotional turbulence can be wonderfully disquieting. This is in sharp contrast with Sondheim's tactics in "Merrily We Roll Along," also playing at the Kennedy Center. The crisp songs of "Merrily" come strutting at you with Broadway confidence: bright melodies, big choruses, sad ballads, the works. In "Passion," the songs are part of a nearly unbroken fabric of more meditative sound that's utterly different, yet perfectly suited to the story at hand.

The waltzes of "A Little Night Music," which will offer another sound altogether, are yet to come, and it's staggering to think of the different hues that would have been on display if "Follies" and "Assassins" had been included in this festival. By placing six disparate shows cheek by jowl, the Sondheim Celebration is making a good case that despite his acclaim as a lyricist and brave storyteller, Sondheim's most lasting legacy will be for the unrivaled variety and penetrating depth of his music.

Passion, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine. Directed by Eric Schaeffer. Through Aug. 23 at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. Call 202-467-4600.