Passion

I’m watching Stephen Sondheim’s Passion this morning. (It’s a musical. Sondheim is a major musical theatre composer/lyricist…just in case you didn’t know. And the book, i.e., dialogue and such, is by James Lapine.) One of the cast of the show I’m doing now mentioned it, so I thought I’d look for it online. I found the entire show on youtube.

I was already familiar with it. In fact, I just leant the original cast recording CD I have to that cast member. I’ve listened to it several times and watched some of the video, but not all of it. I’ve also played a few songs from the show before.

Anyway, I like the show. It’s not a big flashy presentation sort of musical. It’s dark, and not really happy sort of show.

It’s about this soldier and the two very different women who love him.

He starts out with one, and they declare how happy and in love they are.

Then he leaves on assignment where he meets the other.

There’s a lot of struggling to deal with this other woman who loves him desperately and trying to maintain the relationship with the first woman.

I rather like the score. I think a lot of it is based on a small number of musical themes. That’s something Sondheim does—not just repeating material, as some other music theatre composers do, but developing it, as a classical composer might. You’ll see it more in Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with Georgethan in some of his earlier shows. And it seems that Passion is his most “condensed” score in that way.

I haven’t done an analysis of the score, though I did propose such an analysis as a project for a music theory class, but the teacher rejected the idea, saying that it was “popular music” and we didn’t deal with popular music in the class. Actually, we had done some work with popular music already in the class, AND I would suggest that this show is not really “popular music”. It’s much more a work of artistic merit.

Anyway…it’s a great show. I’d love to do it sometime. It’s not really a big show, in terms of cast size and sets and props and such. But you’d need good singers—not just good voices, but people who are capable of learning some very difficult music. After all, it is Sondheim. You need musically advanced singers for a lot of Sondheim, but they must also be good actors to do the material justice. That’s what I like about really good musical theatre—it’s not just actors who can learn some notes or singers who can learn some blocking. 

Oh yeah, some shows also require strong dancing. This one doesn’t. Sondheim doesn’t write much for dance.