Theatre / Passion

"No one has ever loved me
As deeply as you.
No one has truly shown me
What love could be like until now:
Not pretty or safe or easy
But more than I ever knew.
Love within reason -
That isn't love
And I've learned that from you."

— Captain Giorgio Bachetti, "No One Has Ever Loved Me"

Passion is a 1994 musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. Set in 19th century Italy, it concerns a young soldier named Giorgio and the changes in him brought about by the obsessive love of Fosca, his colonel's homely, ailing cousin. It's noticeably even more serious than other Sondheim musicals — the only humor comes in the Soldier's Gossip songs, and even those are fairly dark.

---

This musical provides examples of:

• All Musicals Are Adaptations: It's based on the 1869 novel Fosca by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, and the 1981 Ettore Scola film Passione d'Amore, the latter of which inspired Sondheim to write the show.
• Betty and Veronica: Played with, with Giorgio as Archie. When we first meet Fosca, she's the Veronica to Giorgio's lover Clara. But as the show progresses, Fosca becomes less "dangerous" and Clara becomes less reliable and sweet, and they eventually swap roles. Their attire reflects this change, Fosca's starting out dark and becoming light, while Clara's does the opposite.
• Bookworm: Giorgio is one, and it puts him at odds with the gung-ho masculine soldiers. He's surprised to learn that Fosca is also a book lover, and their first interaction together comes after she's read one of the books he lent her.
• Dark Reprise: Parts of "I Wish I Could Forget You", in which Fosca forces Giorgio to write a falsely loving letter to her, are repeated in the finale when Giorgio is alone and Fosca is dead after their night together.
• Epistolary Novel: Or musical, rather. Much of the show is people reading (well, singing) letters to each other. There's the first letter, the second letter, the third letter, the fourth letter, the sunrise letter...you get the point. It was, in fact, the only epistolary musical ever written until the debut of the Daddy-Long-Legs musical in 2009.
• Gold Digger: Fosca's Dark and Troubled Past features one. She comes from a wealthy family, and at seventeen, her cousin the Colonel introduced her to an Austrian count who immediately started wooing her. It wasn't until after they were married—and he'd stolen all of her fortune—that she discovered that the count had a wife and child already.
• I Am Not Pretty: Fosca, although it is revealed by the Colonel that she grew up thinking she was beautiful, until the death of her parents and abuse by her former husband, an Austrian count who was already married with a child when he wooed Fosca for her money.
• Ill Girl: Fosca fits this trope perfectly. Interestingly, no one is really sure what illness Fosca has—her doctor describes it as a "nervous disorder," since it causes her have seizures and screaming fits, and it's at least partially the result of a Dark and Troubled Past. In essence, her trauma and desperation for love are manifesting physically. The best guess is some kind of conversion disorder, but she is debilitated by it to the point of dying from exhaustion after finally making love with Giorgio.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Fosca is still a young woman, but she grew up believing she was beautiful before her mistreatment at the hands of her husband made her a sickly, unstable wreck. It's unclear if she actually was beautiful, but her illness and resulting dourness about being ill (and habit of dressing like she's already mourning her own death) can't have helped how she presently looks.
• Love Makes You Crazy: Upon winning the duel with the Colonel, Giorgio lets out a scream much like Fosca's — hers are due to her "nervous disposition".
  • This is also, interestingly, almost the moral of the show, and not presented as a negative. Giorgio comes to realize he would rather be loved heedlessly and fully by Fosca, no matter how crazy it makes them both, than at Clara's convenience.
• Mrs. Robinson: Clara is much older than Giorgio, with a husband and a young son. Later in the show she writes to Giorgio in dismay over finding her First Grey Hair.
• Ms. Fanservice: Clara is nude in bed at the beginning, and while the professionally shot version kept Marin Mazzie covered up, in all other performances she let everything show.
• My Sister Is Off-Limits: Cousin in this case. The Colonel and Fosca are cousins, and when the former finds the love letter Giorgio wrote to Fosca (which he only did at her own insistence and didn't actually mean), he accuses Giorgio of leading her on and challenges him to a duel. Giorgio wins, but the Colonel makes a full recovery.
• Nightmare Sequence: In a fever dream towards the beginning of the second act, Giorgio dreams that Fosca is pulling him down into the grave with her, with "cold tentacles" embracing him.
• Younger Than They Look: Fosca is in her late twenties but is usually played by older actresses to suggest her illness has prematurely aged her.