Passion needs to be, like its namesake, overwhelming. In its Boston premiere at SpeakEasy Stage Company, the Tony-winning 1994 musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine is often touching but hardly mesmeric, and that makes it resistible. Which is what it cannot be if this heightened tale of an obsessive love that becomes a sort of emotional deliverance is to triumph.
Based on Passione d’amore, a 1981 film by Ettore Scola that was in turn inspired by Igor Tarchetti’s 1869 novel Fosca, Passion is, as Robert Brustein points out in his eloquent defense of the work (which has its detractors), more an opera than a conventional musical — not just because the soaring, contrapuntal score carries the piece but in view of the plot. Tarchetti’s tale of a handsome army officer in love with a beautiful actress but won over by the dogged passion of an ill and ugly stalker is in itself melodramatic stuff turned by Sondheim into a musically ravishing meditation on the power of abrasive, industrial-strength love. The operatic sweep, as well as truly gorgeous voices, is what the competent, even admirable SpeakEasy staging lacks.
It’s Washington that’s getting a six-show Stephen Sondheim Celebration, courtesy of the Kennedy Center, this year. But Boston has hardly been stinted, with area premieres first of the Pulitzer-winning Sunday in the Park with George and now Passion, which, despite its four Tony Awards, had a disappointing Broadway run. I for one am grateful for the opportunity to see, as well as hear, it.
It’s hardly a surprise that the SpeakEasy production is no musical match for the original-cast album featuring Donna Murphy, Marin Mazzie, and Jere Shea. But no matter, they’re not here. More detrimental to the production is leading man David Foley’s failure, despite a strong singing voice, to make believable soldier Giorgio’s journey from kindly revulsion to acquiescence in the face of the unhappy Fosca’s ruthless love. Foley, a Cambridge architect by day, is wooden if sincere — though he is forceful when attacking Fosca, with an almost agonized frustration, on " Is This What You Call Love? " Then again, you wouldn’t want Mandy Patinkin to design your house.
Sondheim has said, " Passion is about how the force of somebody’s feelings for you can crack you open, and how it is the life force in a deadened world. " Indeed, the piece is emotionally courageous, utterly lacking the irony characteristic of Sondheim, whose characters are more often singed by cynicism or regret than purified in a crucible of feeling. There are no " Ladies Who Lunch " in Passion, just one brandishing the female currency of the day, her physical beauty and sexual adoration (the stuff of " Happiness, " the opening number sung by Giorgio and the married Clara naked in bed), and one plain, pinched by disease, and offering love like a contagion.
At SpeakEasy, actor-singers Julie Jirousek and Leigh Barrett, the only Equity performers in the show, convey, respectively, the gossamer passion of Clara, who loves Giorgio within reason, and the deep, grim love of Fosca, which burrows into his mind and heart by sheer force of will. Barrett may be too sturdy to be dying from some mysterious 19th-century malady that makes sex fatal (at least Puccini’s Mimi has something medically documentable). But she doesn’t shrink from the grasping relentlessness of Fosca, who with her " Love without reason/Love without mercy/Love without pride or shame " is in Giorgio’s face like a five o’clock shadow.
The names of Clara and Fosca connote light and dark; initially, the former’s songs are lilting, written in a major key, whereas the latter’s are blunt and soaked in minor-key melancholia. When Giorgio is posted to the remote army outpost where distance and Fosca come between him and Clara, her music turns gradually sadder until, at the end, it is Fosca who reprises the opening lovers’ paean to " all this happiness. "
Still, the Milan world of Clara is meant to be light and filmy, and designers Susan Zeeman Rogers and Naomi Wolff do their best, with limited resources, to accommodate. Easier to approximate at the BCA is the drum-roll lockstep and barrenness of the army outpost where a mostly strong male chorus barks sly gossip and Fosca’s unsightly flower of a love blooms and endures. Operating without Broadway bucks or truly splendid voices, but with a fair degree of musical sophistication and sensitivity, director Paul Daigneault and musical director Paul S. Katz do a respectable job with Passion. But in the end there’s not enough of the title ingredient to bat this production into the sublime.
