Michael Cerveris & Patti Lupone.

Photo by Robert Lightfoot for Ravinia Festival 2003.

For a gala climax to its season at the Rose Theater, Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series presented an extraordinary staged concert revival of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim and book author James Lapine’s odd and operatic musical Passion, with a stellar trio of principals, Patti Lupone, Michael Cerveris and Audra McDonald, offering powerful performances of almost disturbing intensity. Under the guidance of director Lonny Price and music director Paul Gemignani, Passion opened on March 30. Its second night, March 31, was a Live from Lincoln Center telecast. The third and last hearing, on April 1, is considered here.

Illusion and delusion, obsession and the titular emotion are the concerns of Passion, which tells the tale of two contrasting, life-changing loves of a handsome soldier, Giorgio (Cerveris), in mid-19^th century Italy—the beautiful, but ultimately superficial one he shares with the lovely, married Clara (McDonald) and the scorching, manipulative and burdensome, but far deeper one thrust upon him by the sickly, needy Fosca (Lupone).

Letters play an important part in Passion. The love letters that Giorgio and Clara exchange form the bases of their love duets, following their first amorous words (“Happiness”), given, half-naked in bed in their love nest. The fateful romantic missive that Fosca, from her sickbed, dictates to Giorgio and obliges him to sign (“I Wish I Could Forget”), supposedly to convince herself the impossibility of a relationship between them, is one he thinks harmless enough until, its meaning twisted, it results in a duel with her cousin, Colonel Ricci (Allen Fitzpatrick), who claims Giorgio led her on.

Passion, which had a short but award-winning Broadway run in 1994 and has been played in various places since, is not the easiest musical to love at first hearing, but the haunting work grows on the listener with repeated hearing. When you progress from finding Fosca an embarrassing thorn in the side, a charity or mercy encounter gone horribly awry, who continually humiliates herself, to rooting for her and her unconditional love, then you know that Passion has reached you and Fosca successfully cast her spell.

Lupone, pallid and plain and, garbed all in black, in perpetual mourning, screamed and raged hysterically, laid her guilt trips, wallowed in self-pity, fancied Clara her “rival,” and threw herself shamelessly at her reluctant love, all with abandon, a virtuosa tackling a succession of bel canto mad scenes. But it was the subtler moments—her quiet declaration, “ Loving You (is not a choice, it’s who I am),” delivered with disarming simplicity, and the moving love duet she, posthumously, finally had with Giorgio—that made her searing Fosca a towering achievement.

In a more understated tour-de-force, Cerveris’ all-too-human Giorgio reveled, at first, in the “matinees” of his pretty but shallow affair with Clara, while his anger at the relentless, “insatiable” Fosca flowed freely (“Is This What You Call Love?”). Later, with growing awareness that their trysts would lead nowhere, he cast Clara as the recipient of his ire and, haltingly, in a voice choked with tears, confessed to Fosca his awareness of the depth of her feeling (“No One Has Ever Loved Me”). Cerveris’ hero all but turned into Fosca when he suffered a nervous breakdown, mistakenly thinking he had killed her cousin in their duel and, now an invalid himself, vowed to keep the memory of their all-consuming love alive (“Finale”).

Michael Cerveris & Audra McDonald.

Photo by Robert Lightfoot for Ravinia Festival 2003.

McDonald glowed as Clara, bubbling in the early duets with Cerveris, but clear-eyed as she informed that her duties as wife and mother had to be her priority and dismissed him (“Farewell Letter”) when he demanded more of her.

Passion boasted a notable supporting cast. George Dvorsky put in a striking cameo appearance as an oily Ludovic, a handsome cad that married homely Fosca for her dowry and, after squandering it, jilted her. Kate Baldwin played the mistress he left in the lurch as well. Gina Ferrall and John Cunningham, as Fosca’s doting parents, joined the others for an ensemble (“Flashback”) of operatic sweep. Alexander Gemignani, Timothy Gulan, Devin Richards, James Clow and John Sloman made up the quintet of Giorgio’s soldier colleagues, who commented on the action like a Greek chorus. Richard Easton was Doctor Tambourri, Fosca’s well-meaning but woefully ill-advised physician, who, for better or for worse, brought her and Giorgio together.

Rose Theater, Broadway & 60^th Street