More info on the new Sondheim and David Ives musical (UPDATE, 2018)- Page 3

[Fantod]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 12:05am

Blech. I don't hate Passion (I don't like it either. I find the whole affair meh) and I don't understand how anyone could like Fosca. She shows absolutely no love, only uncaring obsession, placing herself above everyone else. She has no redeemable features, and while her past is tragic, she still is a terrible and manipulative character. Everyone in that show is awful, though. However, I don't find sympathetic or likable characters necessary for a good show. It would be difficult to call Billy Bigow likable.

[JBroadway]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 12:13am

"I don't understand why everyone finds the ending of Passion so unbelievable.  He learns to love Fosca because her love is so powerful that he realizes that love is more than just beauty.  The moral of Passion is that true love isn't physical,  it's emotional.

 

I'm sorry to continue the derailing of this thread, but that is not at all what Passion is about. Giorgio "falls in love" with Fosca in the end because he is unstable and emotionally dependent, and, as we might say in modern day "on the rebound." He goes to her right after he breaks up with Clara, and thinks that he loves her because she is the only emotional support for him. Also, Fosca is not just ugly, she is pretty psychologically twisted and really not a very good person. The good things she does in the play are only because she is obsessed with Giorgio. Passion is absolutely not a "Beauty and the Beast" story, about the value of inner beauty. It's about the twisted nature of obsession, jealousy and emotional and physical dependance, as well as the effects of physical and mental illness on people's behavior.

[JBroadway]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 12:13am

double post

Updated On: 4/21/15 at 12:13 AM

[Fantod]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 12:15am

^ Accurate. 

 

More evidence that icecreambenjamin is an idiot, as if we needed any more.

[JBroadway]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 12:26am

Let me be clear: I actually do like Passion. I think it's beautiful in its dark exploration of all the themes I mentioned in my last post. For a long time after the show was introduced to me, I thought that it was trying to express what icecreambenjamin was saying, and I didn't like the show because I didn't think it was believable that Giorgio would fall in love with someone who had behaved so grossly throughout the narrative. Once I accepted that Giorgio is off his rocker and in need of validation, I started to appreciate the show for what it is. 

[Sally Durant Plummer]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 3:00am

"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...

Fulfilled by James's theatrically inventive staging, the piece worked for me, but certainly not for everyone. As the hostility during previews indicated, the story struck some audiences as ridiculous. They refused to believe that anyone, much less the handsome Giorgio, could come to love someone so manipulative and relentless, not to mention physically repellent, as Fosca. As the perennial banality would have it, they couldn't "identify" with the main characters. The violence of their reaction, however, strikes me as an example of "The lady doth protest too much." I think they may have identified with Giorgio and Fosca all too readily and uncomfortably. The idea of a love that's pure, that burns with D. H. Lawrence's gemlike flame, emanating from a source so gnarled and selfish, is hard to accept. Perhaps they were reacting to the realization that we are all Fosca, we are all Giorgio, we are all Clara. Which, as far as I'm concerned, is what gives Tarchetti's stodgy novel and Scola's elegant movie such profound power."

- Stephen Sondheim, "Look, I Made A Hat"

[broadwaybabywannabe2]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 7:54am

...and i truly love "HAPPINESS"...so much happiness in such a sad show...

[icecreambenjamin]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 7:56am

While I understand that Giorgio is unstable and Fosca is, in a way, his rebound girl, he's let his whole life fall apart due to her.  He could've ignored Fosca all together, but instead, there's something about her that is eating away at him.  Fosca is obsessive and crazy, but she still loves him more than Clara did and I believe that Giorgio realizes that at the end.

Did the fact that Giorgio was sad and heartbroken, help to get him into Fosca's bed?  Yeah, probably,  but Fosca is not a bad person.  She had a final wish and that was for someone to love her.  Giorgio truly falls in love with her because she's the nearest source of love after losing Clara.  I wouldn't say that he loves *Fosca*, but rather the love she provides.

Fantod, when we discuss things, please refrain from being unpleasant.  I did not insult you, so please don't insult me.  We have different opinions,  that does not make me an "idiot."

[broadwayboy223]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 1:41pm

I hope this show is good! I love Sondheim so much. Most of his shows have touched me in one way or another and I just love his music. 

[Charley Kringas Inc]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 3:28pm

I'm really curious about what tone they'll be taking on this, and if Ives's past work is any indication we'll be seeing a return to Sondheim's Brecht mode. 

[After Eight]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 11:11pm

"I've never been in a theater before or since where the audience so actively detested both the show and the leading character. Justifiably so, I will add. "

I'll add, too.

 

 

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/21/15 at 11:30pm

You need a a square root, baby. 

[gypsy101]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 12:04am

Has a title been announced yet?

[Fan123]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 5:51am

Not to re-derail the thread or anything, but can any of the knowledgeable posters here advise whereabouts it was that Sondheim was quoted as saying that Fosca's song 'Loving You' in 'Passion' is meant to be the moment we start to sympathise with her as a character? I swear I read or heard him say that somewhere but haven't been able to find it since. I was amazed at his comment because that song of self-justfying stalkerism was the moment that turned me definitively against the character.

 

As you might have guessed, I do not like 'Passion', but if I believed the show was intended to be about 'none-too-bright narcissist succumbs to manipulative stalker' (rather than just unintentionally being about it) then the show might actually become more palatable. But Sondheim's comment made me think that he believes the show is about a somewhat-laudable love.

[Someone in a Tree2]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 6:04am

^ In SONDHEIM BY SONDHEIM, the 2010 Broadway review, he expounds on that idea. It's all there on the Cast Recording.

[binau]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 7:20am

It MIGHT be on the DVD commentary, if I recall correctly too. 

I also don't know if I agree with the interpretation that the point of the story is that Giorgio is on 'the rebound' (cf. "No One Has Ever Loved Me"). I really think that we are meant to believe he genuinely falls in love with her, and I don't buy it for a second. Some great songs in the show though, but I don't think it 'works'.

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 8:25am

Sorry to continue the derailing, but:

So Giorgio loves Fosca because Fosca, unlike Clara, loves him completely?  

So do we meet Giorgio as a kind, loving man and come to learn that he is more genuinely defined by his own narcissism, his need to be completely worshipped and adored by a woman?  Any woman?

My question isn't completely rhetorical.  I really would like to know if that is the dubious takeaway (for those who love Passion) or if it's something else that I'm just not getting (and have never gotten).

If Giorgio were a woman who, having been ultimately rejected by her married male lover, came to love the unattractive, manipulative dying man who was consumed with her and stalked her, because no one had ever loved her like that incorrigible man had, how would we describe her?

Because I can't buy this as a story about a man who simply learns to love with his heart instead of his libido (and, as has been said, if that were the case, Giorgio's heart is simply open to whomever loves him).  Clearly, there's something deeper than that intended here (at least one would hope); though, what it might be, I haven't a clue.   

Updated On: 4/22/15 at 08:25 AM

[binau]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 8:43am

I think that is the fatal flaw with the show. Trying to explain that he loves her because of his 'narcissism' is, in my opinion, overanalysing the show and trying to make it work when it just doesn't.

Sondheim: "The audience would not buy the idea that this good looking guy would fall in love with this obsessive, grasping, difficult, unpleasant woman. So I wrote a song called Loving You". 

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 8:51am

Golbinau, believe me, I wasn't offering Giorgio's possible narcissism as a way of trying to make the show work. To the contrary I was suggesting that were Giorgio's narcissism the explanation, the story clearly doesn't work.   If it's a show about that kind of need, then it really isn't a show about love.  And if it were a show about that kind of self-centered need, it might have been a fascinating story, but it doesn't even begin to convince as that kind of story.

For me, the show doesn't work.  At all.  But I am open (though skeptical) to trying to understand why it does work for so many people.

Perhaps it's simply a story about the immense seductiveness of being utterly loved, lived and died for like Fosca claims to love Giorgio.... but in what sense is that kind of consuming obsession really love for either Fosca or for Giorgio?

If these questions are overly analytical, they are excactly the kinds of probing questions Sondheim and his collaborators have been asking about love and other drives since the late 60s.  

Sometimes compellingly.  Other times, not.

Updated On: 4/22/15 at 08:51 AM

[g.d.e.l.g.i.]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 9:16am

"Perhaps it's simply a story about the immense seductiveness of being utterly loved, lived and died for like Fosca claims to love Giorgio.... but in what sense is that kind of consuming obsession really love for either Fosca or for Giorgio?"

It's not. That's why the show is called Passion and not Love.

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 10:41am

But then why does Sondheim write "[t]he idea of a LOVE that's pure, that burns with D.H. Lawrence's gemlike flame, emanating from a source so gnarled and selfish, is hard to accept. Perhaps they were reacting to the realization that we are all Fosca, we are all Giorgio, we are all Clara."?  [EMPHASIS ADDED]

Doesn't sound like he thinks he wrote a show about passion without real love.

Updated On: 4/22/15 at 10:41 AM

[g.d.e.l.g.i.]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 12:22pm

He wrote it at the same time as he was falling in love with Peter Jones. Of course he's going to associate the piece with love, much as he claims that little of himself is present in his work. It's about passion and obsession, not real love.

[Sally Durant Plummer]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 12:39pm

I don't think Giorgio is intended to be a narcissist, he simply refuses to believe that Fosca's feelings were love. "Loving You" was added to give a turning point to their relationship, rather than having Giorgio randomly loving her. It is that song that makes him realize that she truly loves him. When he discovers his lovers feelings are less than true, he comes to terms with the purity of Fosca's love.

 

However, if you're a cynic, you can believe he simply loves the love he has inspired in Fosca.

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 12:48pm

Interesting that the movie's title is Passione d'amore, Passion of Love, equating the two.

But in your opinion, g.d.e.l.g.i.,  does it work as a show about passion and obsession without real love?  

Can an audience's interest be sustained by a "love triangle" without real love?  More to the point, why are some people's interest sustained by this one?   Unless they actually do find real love in it?  

And if they do find real love in it, how?

[g.d.e.l.g.i.]

Posted: 4/22/15 at 1:05pm

My attitude is somewhat more pragmatic than the average fan. Does it work, can an audience's interest be sustained, what do they find it? That doesn't matter to me. What matters is he wanted to write it, he wrote it, and he got it produced. He thought it was worth musicalizing, so my opinion doesn't matter. That's my opinion.