Passion

April 28-May 8, 2022
Theatre Uncorked at
Boston Center for the Arts

This emotional chamber opera tells of the passionate affair between a handsome soldier and an old spinster in nineteenth-century, war-torn Italy.

Discover the power of love in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Tony Award-winning musical, Passion. No less than the wondrously complex landscape of the human heart is the subject of this haunting, intensely emotional one-act chamber opera that many consider to be Sondheim's deepest and most powerful evening of musical theatre.

A remote military outpost in 1863 Italy, a handsome army captain, separated from his beautiful – but married – mistress, is forced to re-evaluate his beliefs about love when he becomes the object of the obsessive, unrelenting passions of Fosca, his Colonel's plain, sickly cousin.

Bold, unexpected and thrilling, Passion is one of Stephen Sondheim's most emotional works. Intimate, raw, erotic and dark, it explores universal, yet often unspoken, truths. The sweeping, romantic score (Sondheim describes it as one long rhapsody) accompanies an intelligent, thought-provoking book that bears James Lapine's trademark lyricism and a host of well-drawn characters.