THEATER : Mr. Cool Tries Passion : Stephen Sondheim’s new musical of obsessive love may be the biggest challenge yet for Broadway’s restless ‘conscience’

“Passion,” the new Stephen Sondheim musical, features a character who is probably the most repulsive, obsessive and uningratiating woman ever to grace the Broadway musical stage. Yet she is arguably the most daring and personally felt character of any of Sondheim’s shows--and one of the most troublesome.

“Stephen and I understand this woman,” says James Lapine, the librettist and director of the musical in which Fosca, a sickly recluse, becomes obsessed with Giorgio, a handsome 19th-Century Italian army captain. “We can relate to her.”

But the question during this preview period is: Can the Broadway audience relate to this woman?

Since “Passion” began performances early last month, the response has been vociferous. Word spread quickly on the street and in the press that the $4.5-million musical was in trouble, plagued with occasional walkouts and derisive laughter during serious moments. Major revisions in the show began, and the producers postponed the opening for 11 days to May 9 to give the creators a chance to clarify a character and to bolster the strange story.

“He ought to be ashamed of himself,” muttered one man as he trundled up the aisle in the middle of a performance.

“I loved it,” confessed another theatergoer, visibly awed.

The wildly divergent views shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed troubled preview periods of other Sondheim musicals, including “Sweeney Todd” and “Sunday in the Park With George”--both of which became hits--and “Merrily We Roll Along,” his last musical with director Harold Prince, which flopped.

This is a composer, after all, who has given musical voice to some of the most unexpected characters in musical theater, including a serial murderer (“Sweeney Todd”), a pointillist painter (“Sunday in the Park With George”) and killers of Presidents (“Assassins”).

Though he began by writing lyrics in a more traditional mode for such musicals as “West Side Story” and “Gypsy” in the ‘50s, Sondheim served notice early on that he was willing to push the envelope. In 1970, he and director Harold Prince began a collaboration with the groundbreaking “Company” and went on to create such memorable shows as “A Little Night Music,” “Follies” and “Pacific Overtures.” When the pair broke up in 1980 after the failure of “Merrily We Roll Along,” Sondheim continued the experiments with Lapine. Together they came up with the non-linear “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods,” a Freudian immersion into fairy tale, and now “Passion.”

Few of his shows have made buckets of money--his first as both composer and lyricist, 1962’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” remains his most lucrative. But Sondheim has been honored with six Tony Awards and numerous tributes, including last year’s Kennedy Center Honor. His fans are so devoted that each new Sondheim show becomes a kind of artistic flashpoint, if not a religious experience, for some theatergoers. Martin Gottfried, in his new book, “Sondheim,” goes so far as to call him “the conscience of all Broadway musicals.”

Sondheim is 63, and his febrile creativity shows no signs of burnout. But this time out, the show’s detractors maintain that Sondheim and Lapine have simply outreached themselves.

“There will always be people in the audience who resist this story because it’s bizarre, it’s very close to the bone,” says Sondheim, sitting in the downstairs lobby of the Plymouth Theater between performances, looking calm and confident amid a hectic schedule of revisions. “Fosca is a wild character but it would be a mistake to water her down. It might make an audience more comfortable but it wouldn’t be the story we had in mind.”

“Passion” is inspired by Ettore Scola’s 1981 Italian film “Passione d’Amore” (“Passion of Love”). Sondheim and Lapine, like Scola, based the musical directly on an 1869 Italian novel, “Fosca,” by Iginio Tarchetti. In it, the soldier Giorgio (Jere Shea) is having an affair with Clara (Marin Mazzie), a lovely married woman, when he is suddenly transferred to a remote and barren post. The commanding officer there has taken responsibility for his cousin Fosca (Donna Murphy), an ugly, mysteriously ill creature who sets her sights on Giorgio--with tragic consequences.

Sondheim says he had an immediate emotional response to the movie when he saw it in 1983 and seized on its possibilities as a musical. At first, he and Lapine had intended to do “Passion” as a one-acter, paired with a musical about a body builder that explored complementary notions about desire and obsession. But once the musical showcased at Lincoln Center last fall, the creators believed it could sustain a full evening by itself.

“Clearly there was some personal connection,” said Sondheim. “All of us are Fosca, all of us are Giorgio, all of us are Clara. Fosca’s feeling of being ugly yet the feeling of passion at the same time. Clara’s feeling of the prettiness and comfortableness of love. And Giorgio’s caught in between.”

The ferocity of Fosca’s passion, according to Sondheim, “is the most profound and immediate life force. It does not follow any logic, knows no bounds, and is a force in and of itself that can crack you open. And that’s what it does to Giorgio. It cracks him open.”

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While Sondheim says he identifies with Giorgio, particularly in the desire to be “cracked open,” he seems to be just as connected to the unsympathetic Fosca.

“I think Fosca is very close to Stephen,” said Donna Murphy, who plays the driven woman. “Like her, he’s a man who’s dealt with a lot of pain in his life and has not been afraid to examine it.”

That’s readily apparent upon meeting Sondheim. His face is a ruin, a grizzled road map of lines and crevices that gives the impression he has been through the wringer. To many, he is the ultimate New York sophisticate--witty, bright and sardonic. But when led grimacing into the lobby by the show’s press agent, he looks far more like a nerdy egghead being marched into gym class. Dressed in baggy corduroys and a cable-knit sweater--”a slob” is what his friend Mary Rodgers calls him--he fidgets, plays with his hair, rubs his eyes, crosses and uncrosses his arms. When he does occasionally look directly at his interviewer, it is through slit eyes, an expression at once wary and available. But, as the conversation progresses, a boyishness creeps through the astringent and bristling intellect.

He has a steel-trap mind that appears to be always racing ahead. Begin a question based on the not unreasonable assumption that much of his work has struggled with various definitions of love, and he’ll interrupt--as he does often.

“Really? Really?!” he says. “Wait a minute. I have to question that.”

Well, what about the soaring ballads in “West Side Story”? The bittersweet romantic musings in “A Little Night Music”? The sharply satiric “Loveland” sequence in “Follies” where he contrasts the gooey sentiments of young lovebirds with the jaded weariness of their older selves? The unabashed anthem “Being Alive” in “Company”?

After more verbal sparring, in which he doesn’t give an inch, he says, brusquely, “Well, every show in a sense, every show, deals with love in one way or another. The reason I’m questioning that is that I’m not aware of having written about the qualities of love before as any central intention.”

“Passion,” at least, is inarguably about love, untinged with the parody, satire and irony that have suffused almost every other Sondheim take on the subject of connection. After decades of writing about the impossibility of union, he has written a musical about the union of the impossible.

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Sondheim has dismissed it as “coincidence,” but one of the reasons for his visceral response to the subject matter in “Passion” is personal: He is in love, reportedly for the first time in his life. Though he is notoriously private, a childhood friend maintains that “Steve is happier and calmer than he’s ever been,” and that is presumably due in part to his involvement with a young musician.

Whether this has influenced, directly or indirectly, his approach to “Passion” can only be armchair psychology. Sondheim says that, though “hidden metaphors” have spurred his other shows, there are none here. “I think this is all exactly what it says it is on the surface,” he observed.

If Sondheim is tackling love head-on for the first time, he’s also playing with his fascination for order and harmony, and turning it on its head. In most of his previous shows, thickets of conflict are resolved through, as he wrote in “Sunday in the Park,” bringing “order to the whole.” But here, Giorgio’s disciplined and well-ordered military life is crushed under the press of a woman’s willful obsession. Emotion defies reason. Intuition, not logic, wins. The scorned woman gets her man.

“What makes the story so extraordinary,” says Sondheim, “is that not only does the guy give her no encouragement but actively tells her to go away all the time. It’s easy to love when you’re loved back, not easy when you’re not.”

Yet, judging from the snickers at previews, some theatergoers see pathology, not love, and self-debasement, not selflessness in Fosca’s obsession with Giorgio. “Fosca doesn’t thrive on rejection like in ‘Fatal Attraction,’ ” counters Sondheim. “It’s not a choice, it defines her life. Behavior be damned. What’s important is to make a very bizarre story seem as inevitable and convincing to an audience as it does to me.”

Sondheim realizes it’s a tall order. “It’s easier for an audience to believe that you can chop people up into meat pies than it is to believe that a handsome young man who is having a perfectly lovely affair with a beautiful woman should become attracted to a relentless, unattractive, completely self-concerned woman. When you deal with this kind of intensity and love and what it does to you, that’s not so different from what is outside the theater and that’s much harder to take.”

If, as Lapine claims, ours is “a passionless society,” it may be a thankless task to raise such disturbing questions, especially in musical theater. Yet some have suggested that the main problem with “Passion” is that Sondheim and Lapine are just too cold and cerebral to be writing about hot emotions.

“Stephen and James are ascetic and there is something very spare and unforgiving about their work,” said Hollywood film producer Scott Rudin, one of the show’s producers. “But they’re two of the most emotional guys I’ve ever met. They’re just very unsentimental. This show is very passionate and romantic; it takes an audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes them. But then Stephen’s always done that. ‘Passion’ is kind of an apotheosis of a lot of themes he’s been working on since nearly the beginning.”

For such a private man, Sondheim has been unusually frank about his dysfunctional family and its lasting marks on him. Sondheim is the only child of a Park Avenue fashion executive father and designer mother, and his parents were divorced when he was 10. Janet Fox, “Foxy” to her friends, was a rejecting and controlling mother--according to Sondheim, “a genuinely monstrous woman.”

Luckily, he found a way to escape when Dorothy Hammerstein, wife of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, visited her friend “Foxy” with her son Jimmy. The two young men became fast friends and Dorothy invited Stephen to the Hammerstein summer home in Pennsylvania. Sondheim had found his surrogate family.

In 1945, a teen-age Sondheim took a musical he had written at Williams College to Hammerstein for criticism. His future mentor responded with brutal frankness. But Hammerstein then spent hours teaching his eager pupil the rudiments of musical theater.

Asked which of those rules he’s since broken, Sondheim answers quickly, “The curious answer is none. What Oscar taught me to do was to be true to subject and true to characters. And how song should carry out the story. I really think Oscar would recognize his work in everything I’ve done.”

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The composer is also quick to dismiss any notion that his musicals have upended some of the conventions and pat resolutions of the Rodgers & Hammerstein tradition. He describes his work as simply in sync with the post-World War II revolution against “the so-called well-made play.”

“Messy behavior was not dealt with on the stage, or the screen for that matter, because it didn’t make for a very neat script,” Sondheim says. “Suddenly you got movies coming along like ‘Breathless’ and ‘Jules and Jim’ and people don’t behave in neat, logical ways.”

Sondheim, a movie buff, peppers his conversations with numerous film references. A devotee of the film music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Sondheim has also written songs for a number of movies, including two--”Reds” and “Dick Tracy”--for director Warren Beatty. While he says his experiences in Hollywood have all been “terrific” and that he’d like to do more work both as a film composer and screenwriter, the musical theater claims most of his time.

Indeed, his reputation looms so large on Broadway that much has been written about the “Sondheim mystique.” His fans are so avid that RCA Red Seal Records has created something of a cottage industry in Sondheim, not only recording, but also in releasing albums of every unrecorded, re-recorded, newly discovered and newly rediscovered Sondheim song ever written. “I told Steve that the next album will be an anthology of songs which Sondheim has listened to,” quipped Rudin.

Friends of Sondheim note that the composer believes that the extraordinary acclaim--and criticism--has begun to interfere with the perceptions of his work and that it may be at play in the troubled responses to “Passion.” “There is something about the cloud of expectations surrounding any of his shows that can get in the way of the work,” says a theater producer. “People get pretty rabid about him. It’s not as simple as elites-versus-Philistines, but he does push a lot of buttons outside, as well as inside, the theater.”

Sondheim himself assiduously avoids the topic. “I won’t comment on it,” he says. “It would be self-serving.”

It’s tempting to see Sondheim as the iconoclastic artist George in “Sunday in the Park,” misunderstood by his public. But he’s probably just as much like the ambitious lyricist Charley in “Merrily We Roll Along,” enjoying the trappings of success.

“There is a part of Sondheim who’d like to be Andrew Lloyd Webber and vice versa,” said someone who has worked with both of them closely. “He’d never admit it and he’d hate to hear it, but it’s true.”

Cancel out the “Sondheim mystique,” friends say, and what you’ve got is a tunesmith, banging away on a piano, trying to get a show to work.

“The best thing about Stephen Sondheim is that he gets up every morning and goes to the piano,” says Rudin. “In a perverse way, it’s valiant and heroic. Steve’s like Fosca. He doesn’t stop. He’s not safe. Who else goes out on a limb, gets knocked down, and climbs out farther?”

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Sondheim as the relentless and merciless Fosca? The Broadway audience as the rejecting but susceptible Giorgio? It’s an intriguing simile. Only time will tell if Sondheim, like Fosca, ultimately prevails. But there’s no question that the composer admires his anti-heroine’s embrace of her destiny.

“Life, in general, without this kind of passion is not fully realized, I think,” he says. “And I don’t care whether it’s passion for a person or a passion for art or a passion for whatever. If everything is in control, if everything is safe, comfortable and pretty, life is pleasant but nowhere near as full as when there’s something going on that drives you instead of you driving it. It makes life more difficult but much, much richer.”