Passion (musical)

Passion
Original Broadway poster art
Music	Stephen Sondheim
Lyrics	Stephen Sondheim
Book	James Lapine
Basis	Ettore Scola film Passione d'Amore Iginio Ugo Tarchetti novel Fosca
Productions	1994 Broadway 1996 West End 1996 St. Louis, MO 2007 Chicago 2010 London 2013 Off-Broadway 2016 Sweden
Awards	Tony Award for Best Musical Tony Award Best Book of a Musical Tony Award Best Original Score

Passion is a one-act musical, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine. The story was adapted from Ettore Scola's film Passione d'Amore, itself adapted from the novel Fosca by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti. Central themes include love, sex, obsession, illness, passion, beauty, power and manipulation. Passion is notable for being one of the few projects that Stephen Sondheim himself conceived, along with Sweeney Todd and Road Show.

Set in Risorgimento-era Italy, the plot concerns a young soldier and the changes in him brought about by the obsessive love of Fosca, his Colonel's homely, ailing cousin.

The story originally came from a 19th-century novel by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, an experimental Italian writer who was prominently associated with the Scapigliatura movement. His book Fosca was a fictionalized recounting of an affair he'd once had with an epileptic woman when he was a soldier.

Sondheim first came up with the idea of writing a musical when he saw the Italian film in 1983:

As Fosca started to speak and the camera cut back to her, I had my epiphany. I realized that the story was not about how she is going to fall in love with him, but about how he is going to fall in love with her . . . at the same time thinking, "They're never going to convince me of that, they're never going to pull that off," all the while knowing they would, that Scola wouldn't have taken on such a ripely melodramatic story unless he was convinced that he could make it plausible. By the end of the movie, the unwritten songs in my head were brimming and I was certain of two things. First, I wanted to make it into a musical, the problem being that it couldn't be a musical, not even in my nontraditional style, because the characters were so outsized. Second, I wanted James Lapine to write it; he was a romantic, he had a feel for different centuries and different cultures, and he was enthusiastically attracted to weirdness.