Despite its title, Passion is a typical Stephen Sondheim product: a musical play in which intelligence dominates emotional involvement. In many of his musicals—Company, Pacific Overtures, Sunday in the Park with George, for instance—the characters seem aloof from the audience and from one another. (I did not see
Assassins, but the title certainly indicates a lack of warm affective interchange.) The words and music may stir the intellect and serve the story, but theatergoers do not whistle the tunes or sing the lyrics as they leave. Any appeal to the heart here is through the brain.
Passion is intended to arouse emotions, and it does, but, as in those earlier works, through the mediation of the mind. The story will thus engage psychoanalysts as they try to understand the many forms that passion may take.
The play opens with a handsome man and a beautiful woman, breasts bared, in bed, in love, engaged in lovemaking as they sing of their attachment. Their ardor cools when the man, an Italian soldier, announces that he has been transferred and will soon depart for a small town far from Milan, where the woman lives. The latter seems irritated, but not furious, at this turn of events.
She seems to agree with her lover's avowal that they will make the most of the few days left them. After his departure they write passionate letters to each other, but as he writes of his involvement with an hysterical depressed woman, his mistress warns him to avoid entanglement. The involvement is coolly therapeutic; the post physician has prescribed the soldiers acting as if he loves the woman in order to prevent her dying of her affliction. Being kind and wanting to help, he agrees. But he soon realizes that the woman's passion for him includes a binding, grasping need to control. Though he tries to leave her, her tentacles gradually entwine him as she pursues him mercilessly. Her passion seems driven by a sadomasochistic need to prevent loss and attain revenge for a previous jilting.
Sondheim succeeds somehow in involving the audience, but never entirely. At times giggling at some piece of unintended silliness, the audience by play's end appeared hooked, if a bit repelled by the turn of events. As I tried, somewhat dejected in my identification with the unfortunate hero, to formulate the dynamics of the characters, I wondered whether the rest of the audience was similarly involved.
I have omitted the names of the principals in order to communicate the distant quality that pervades Sondheim's work. Of the three leads, Donna Murphy as Fosca, the hysterical woman, was clearly the best. She maintained a somber mood as the clinging, vampirelike antiheroine. Marin Mazzie was beautiful, appealing, yet distant as Clara, the hero's mistress. The evening I saw Passion, the male lead was ill with the flu. His understudy, Matthew Porretta, who played Giorgio, did very well indeed, as he made the masochistic altruist a feasible tragic figure. At the Plymouth, 236 West 45th Street.
This new production opened to rave reviews both in England in 1993 and in New York earlier this year. Critics declared the play, which was first staged in 1945, a smash as newly interpreted by director Nicholas Hytner.
The current version is good. It is enjoyable and is ultimately a moving and powerful tearjerker. Much of the music is robust and invigorating. But the viewer who expects a nearly perfect, revolutionary production may well be disappointed. Be sure to get tickets, but keep your expectations reasonable.
The story, based on Ferenc Molnar's Liliom, is solemn and sentimental. Billy Bigelow, a seductive and unsavory carnival barker, marries Julie Jordan, a naive but rebellious young thing who loves Billy without reservation. Masochistic, an analyst would say, she excuses his beating her and his failure to hold a job. Because he desperately needs money, Billy allows himself to be talked into robbing the town's wealthy mill owner. When the burglary is botched and Billy dies, the audience sobs as Billy is allowed to return to earth to see his daughter, now a teenager, and to redeem himself by some good deed before being consigned to heaven or hell.
How can anyone criticize such a tale when the acting and singing are fine, at times even excellent; when Shirley Verrett, the Metropolitan Opera star, leads the chorus in a rousing rendition of “June Is Bustin' Out All Over”; when the newly discovered Audra Ann McDonald, who plays Julie's friend Carrie, wins everyone over with her warmth and her rich voice?
Nevertheless, I have several reservations. The cheerfulness of the first two-thirds of the play belies the essential seriousness and melancholy quality of the relationship between the principals. Further, Julie and Billy, as portrayed by Sally Murphy and Michael Hayden, seem unsuited to each other; there just isn't much chemistry between them. And perhaps because wife beating is considered more serious today than when Carousel first appeared, the play's apparent sympathy for an abuser seems inappropriate.
However, the play does work. Toward the end, as I wondered why I was not moved, tears began to flow. Despite my reservations, I was grabbed emotionally. At the Vivian Beaumont, Lincoln Center.
The playbill and the newspaper ads that sell An Inspector Calls as a thriller are misleading. It is more than that. A surrealistic morality play by the esteemed British playwright, novelist, journalist, and autobiographer, it appeared originally in 1945 (as did Carousel) and confronted its audience with such philosophical questions as the nature of reality and whether we are responsible for our fellow human beings.
A mysterious inspector appears out of the blue to interrogate the members of a wealthy, possibly illustrious family. He accuses each of having contributed to the suicide of Eva Smith, a young woman who, he says, poisoned herself. Mr. Birling (Phillip Bosco), the head of the household, had dismissed her from a job in his factory because she had engaged in a strike for moderately higher wages. His daughter Sheila, encountering her on her next job, as a saleswoman, had complained about her and insisted that she be fired. Sheilas fiancé, Gerald, had jilted her after an affair, and Sheila's brother Eric had also been involved with her. Mrs. Birling (Rosemarie Harris) had rejected the young woman's pleas for help.
Eventually, the family all succumb to the inspector's acid attacks on their moral values. The father, for instance, who had felt quite justified in sacrificing Miss Smith in order to increase his profits, becomes distraught, but only because a scandal might cost him the knighthood he dearly covets. He finds temporary relief in reasoning, from the inspector's remark that Eva Smith had used various pseudonyms, that she might not have existed as a single person. In a Pirandellian moment, one realizes that the inspector himself might not exist as a real police officer.
In many ways An Inspector Calls is an old-fashioned play; it demands adherence to an absolute and liberal morality many might dismiss as naive these days. Although the play's characters threaten at times to become stereotypes, the members of the family are sufficiently individuated, and the excellent acting saves the day. So too does the imaginative staging, which reflects the Birlings' inner turmoil. The walls of the house they inhabit open and close, and the house itself burns, crumbles, and then repairs itself, creating a mysterious aura.
Kenneth Cranham as the inspector and Phillip Bosco, Rosmarie Harris, Jane Adams, and Aden Gillet as the family engage the audience in moral dialogue as they confront one another. Marcus D'Amico did not perform the evening I attended. Mr. Priestley, who was one hundred this year, must be pleased with this excellent production. At the Royale, 245 West 45th Street.
Jules Glenn