50 Favourite Musicals: 44: PASSION (1994) (Stephen Sondheim)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life:

First performed: 1994, Plymouth Theatre, NY
First seen by me: 1996, Queens Theatre, London

Productions seen: three

Score: Stephen Sondheim
Book: James Lapine

Plot:  In the 1860s, a young Captain in the Italian army is transferred to a remote outpost, leaving his mistress in Milan.  While there he becomes the object of obsessive desire for a withdrawn and sickly woman, his Colonel's cousin.  Her passion repels him but love is a strange thing...

Five memorable numbers: LOVING YOU, I WISH I COULD FORGET YOU, HAPPINESS, I READ, FINALE

Sondheim's deeply intense musical - based on a novel by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti and the Italian film adaptation by Ettore Scola - can leave you feeling claustrophobic at times; it is relentless in it's exploration of the mysterious power of love with hardly any humour to leaven it.  A remarkable chamber musical, it slowly ebbs into your mind as you watch Giorgio - a man who has always been in control of his love life - become enmeshed and undone by Fosca's unrelenting passion.  I had been swept away by the Broadway cast recording but was left somewhat cold by the London premiere where a torturous Maria Friedman and somnambulist Michael Ball rattled around the large Queens Theatre stage but subsequent smaller-scale productions have hit the show's emotional core, culminating in Jamie Lloyd's excellent Donmar production in 2010 which pared the basilisk-stare of Elena Roger's Fosca against the emotional fragility of David Thaxton's Giorgio.

Here the original Fosca, Donna Murphy, casts a spell with LOVING YOU, the score's emotional peak..