[In the following negative review of Passion, Lahr condemns Sondheim's lack of distinction between psychotic obsession and true passionate love, his conversational tone, his lack of melody, his use of a predictable gothic Romantic formula, and the musical’s failure to be convincing.]

There are animals in the jungle that survive by playing dead and Fosca, the heroine of Stephen Sondheim's Passion, is one of them. Ugly, hysterical, unrelenting, joyless, she's an amalgam of alienations, and personifies both romantic agony and the dead end to which Sondheim, in his perverse brilliance, has brought the American musical. In Passion, the charm of angst replaces the charm of action, and the American musical, once a noisy, vulgar, bumptious exhibition of our appetite for life, is deconstructed into an elegant flirtation with death. Sondheim's “revolution” is not really one of form (most of his shows are lyric-heavy and not well integrated) but one of intellectual ambition: his shows substitute the prestige of pain for the prestige of enjoyment. Here, for instance, the audience is encouraged not to applaud but to listen. The songs are treated as narrative, and are not even listed in the program. Sondheim, whose musical ideas are rarely as bold as his lyric ones, is in rebellion against “tunes” (which is why he doesn't provide many) and the notion of himself as a “tunesmith.” We are coaxed to see Sondheim as a thinker and the musical as a statement. But the formal qualities of verse—rhyme's combination of rigor and delight—make it a blunt analytic instrument, “unsuitable for controversy,” as W. H. Auden has pointed out. Nevertheless, the public, ever mindful of Sondheim's greatness (“Is Stephen Sondheim God?” a New York headline asked recently), sits reverently, without intermission, to receive the pieties and the pontificating of Passion, which, typically, has no passion, only ratiocination. What we get in this listless epistolary musical, where the main characters spend much of their time singing love letters to and from each other, is the results of Sondheim's recent experiments with the play's director and librettist, James Lapine: not the big heart but the dead heart; not the joy of the pleasure dome but the hush of the lecture hall; not dancing but reading.

Sondheim's eye for excellent material far exceeds his ability to plumb it. Assassins (1991), for instance, offered him the extraordinary panorama of American psychopathy and infamy, but from it he drew merely a dark cartoon. Passion, which is set in Italy in the eighteen-sixties and was adapted from the Ettore Scola film Passione d'Amore, poses a mesmerizing psychological conundrum in the story of Fosca's erratic behavior and her eventual seduction of the handsome, promising captain, Giorgio (superbly sung by Jere Shea), but Sondheim can't musically come to grips with its issues of love and emotional tyranny. The production prefers to stay on the surface of the Romantic formula of suffering without reward. The startling first image—the naked body of Giorgio's lover, Clara (the voluptuous and fine-voiced Marin Mazzie), astride her hairy-chested package of military testosterone—has the look of passion but not the hunger. They are talking their pleasure, not taking it, and this mutual meditation on ecstasy is cut short at the end of the first song by Giorgio's announcement that he's being posted to a backwater. The lovers’ words speak of perfection with a lyric conviction that the music can't match:

Some say happiness
Comes and goes.
Then this happiness
Is a kind of happiness
No one really knows.

Giorgio's happiness and his heroic reputation (he has rescued a wounded soldier in a skirmish with the Russian infantry) are tested by Fosca, an orphan, whose only kin is a cousin, the colonel of the regiment to which Giorgio is posted. She interrupts the banality of military dinner-table badinage with an offstage scream. It's the first we hear of her, and the noise is sensationally appropriate. Fosca (in a stunning performance by Donna Murphy) is intrusive. She knows no boundaries, and the scream broadcasts her inability to contain herself. “She is a kind of medical phenomenon,” a doctor tells Giorgio. “A collection of many ills.” As staged, she is also a collection of iconic trappings from gothic romance: the shadowy figure descending the long, gloomy staircase; the black-shrouded silhouette; the doomed, spectral presence. Fosca buttonholes Giorgio with her sharp intelligence while Clara, in a gorgeous pink gown, simultaneously materializes before us to sing her letter to him. Clara conjures a world of joy: the “sultry afternoon” and their sumptuous sex. Fosca, on the other hand, is a gourmand of griefs. She clutches a book; and when Giorgio, out of politeness, offers to lend her material from his library his decency gives Fosca an opening and an audience. She has taken death as her dominion, and she loses no time in selling herself as an aristocrat of anguish. “Sickness is normal to me, as health is to you,” she tells Giorgio, startling his soldier's imagination. Sondheim's characterization of military life is wholly unconvincing—drum rolls, marching soldiers, and some trite lyrics:

Group: This military madness
This military
All: Uniforms, uniforms
Giorgio: Military madness.

But when Fosca sings to Giorgio about why she reads, at once disguising and admitting her defensiveness, Sondheim is in his element, and he delivers a brilliantly insightful soliloquy about resignation. “I do not dwell on dreams,” she sings to Giorgio in the show's finest song. “I know how soon a dream becomes an expectation.” She goes on, exalted:

I do not hope for what I cannot have!
I do not cling to things I cannot keep!
The more you cling to things,
The more you love them,
The more the pain you suffer
When they're taken from you …
Ah, but if you have no expectations,
  Captain,
You can never have a disappointment.

Fosca haunts the outpost with both her grief and her envy. She is inconsolable. She will not eat. She will not laugh. She humiliates herself. She can take pleasure only in things that reflect her sense of collapse, like the ruined castle to which she offers to take Giorgio. “I find it lovely,” she says. “Probably because it's ruined, I suppose.” She uses her sense of blighted life to extract pity from Giorgio, whose mind is full of Clara, and whose mouth is full of romantic, symbiotic mush about “love that fuses two into one.” Giorgio is a victim of his own decency. He struggles to fend off Fosca's panic-stricken emotional demands. “This woman has no friends. No one to talk to. I know the power I have over her,” he explains to Clara, who has cautioned him to keep his distance. “I didn't ask for this power—she bestowed it upon me, but somehow it carries responsibilities that I can't seem to shed.” Fosca plays on Giorgio's youthful omnipotence. “Understand me, be my friend,” she sings to Giorgio—a plea whose pathos and empowerment he finds impossible to refuse. “They hear drums / We hear music. / Be my friend.”

No barrier that Giorgio can put between them keeps Fosca away. She will not be denied. She is beyond hope or shame. This is not passion but obsession—a distinction that Sondheim's show doesn't make clear. Fosca follows Giorgio up a mountain, onto a train. She is even prepared to kill herself to get his attention, taking to her bed after she receives his Dear Fosca letter. “You rejected her love—which doesn't surprise me,” the doctor tells Giorgio. “This woman is letting herself die because of you.” The doctor prevails on Giorgio's chivalrous nature to help save a life, but in agreeing to be a savior Giorgio loses control of his own life. Fosca is so emotionally impoverished that she doesn't trust the world to give her pleasure, and the musical's best scene is a chilly display of her overweening narcissism. Giorgio, thinking Fosca is dying, allows her to dictate words of love, and he dutifully writes them down and signs them as his own. The letter will later be misconstrued by Fosca's cousin and lead to a near-fatal duel, but the writing itself is a death-dealing moment. The eerie act of ventriloquism, an un-love song, demonstrates the insidiousness of Fosca's control and shows Sondheim at his dramatically most astute. It's powerful moment of psychological wretchedness, couched in the language of the romantic sublime:

For now I'm seeing love
Like none I've ever known,
A love as pure as breath,
As permanent as death,
Implacable as stone.

Sondheim and Lapine fudge the issue of Fosca's infantile behavior by giving her a history (doting parents; a feckless first husband, who absconded with her money) that in no way adequately explains the trauma of abandonment that her hysteria acts out. They opt for glib sociological shorthand: shame at her husband's rejection, and humiliation, as an unmarried woman in a patriarchal society, at forever being a “daughter.” Similarly, Giorgio's emotional volte-face after Clara refuses to run away with him (she's married, and would lose custody of her child) is dramatically confusing. On the rebound from Clara, he sees Fosca with new eyes, and transfers his romantic hyperbole to her almost instantaneously—as if losing the ideal of love were worse than losing the object of it. The moment is meant, I hope, to be ironic, but it is not played or received that way. Giorgio is betrayed by his romantic imagination. Fosca's possessiveness is refashioned by him into a delirium of unrequited love:

Love without reason, love without mercy
Love without pride or shame.
Love unconcerned
With being returned …

“Unconcerned with being returned”? Fosca's tyrannical behavior has been entirely devoted to forcing a response from Giorgio. He doesn't hear his own befuddlement; and although the lyrics address the confusion, the words have no proper purchase on the audience's imagination, since we don't hear lyrics in the same way we hear prose. Fosca and Giorgio's embrace is the creepiest I've ever seen onstage—a kind of vampire clinch, in which Giorgio's health is exchanged for Fosca's sickness. The production cops out on this ambiguity, which the stage directions emphasize in the penultimate scene, when Giorgio thinks he has killed Fosca's cousin and lets out a high-pitched scream—“a cry that could only be reminiscent of Fosca's.” But Passion won't explore, or even acknowledge, this irony. It is just as commercially compromised as the musicals it pretends to be in rebellion against—it's forced, presumably for box-office reasons, to claim a triumph for love at the finale (“Your love will live in me!” Fosca and Giorgio sing to each other), while never dramatically proving it. In fact, everything we've been shown in the musical belies the purity of the finale's romantic ardor. The author can't quite admit his ambivalence toward the predatory Fosca, but it makes itself felt anyway, in the curious absence of pulse in his workman-like score.

Sondheim's music has a surface sophistication, a fussy accompaniment that allows no strong melodic arc but serves the conversational tone of the lyrics. Lapine's book also promises more than it delivers. Only Giorgio and Fosca are vividly drawn; the others are given a wash of personality, and an occasional line that gets a titter. The military scenes—and there are a lot of them—are uniformly lacklustre, and some are actually repetitious, reminding the audience of what it already knows: Fosca's unhappy, Giorgio's got a future, and soldiers are boorish. Lapine's organization of plot points is clunky; and the dialogue is too often of “The pheasants will be ready shortly” variety. His staging is more elegant. A former set designer as well as a filmmaker, Lapine conjures up strong, if sedate, stage pictures, using bold vertical lines made by panels that slide in from the wings and also work, in a cinematic way, to create dissolves. But, in a play where so much is verbalized and so little said, the grandness of the design trivializes rather than enhances the play's statement. In between the romantic wafflings, you find yourself studying Adrianne Lobel's beautifully painted backdrops, which suggest the hazy Italian countryside, or admiring the well-lit stippling on the movable panels.

On the night I saw Passion, the audience was both unmoved and unconvinced. They were right to be. Passion feels like a rushed and unfinished portrait, in which the head and the hands are complete but the rest remains an unexplored outline. Yet again, Sondheim and Lapine have loaded a musical with fascinating intellectual freight—a burden that, finally, it can't carry.