Review: PASSION at Chromolume Theatre At The Zephyr

To love without limit is to be brave. Or maybe a little bit insane, depending on one’s perspective.  The same might be said about staging some of the works of Stephen Sondheim.

That comparison may seem like a reach, but there are very clear reasons why everybody and their French bulldog stages Sondheim and Jame’s Lapine’s INTO THE WOODS, and plenty more will take on the team’s SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. But only a select few will attempt their WOODS’ follow-up, PASSION, despite the 1994 opus being a 10-time Tony Award nominee and a Best Musical winner. While deeply, even disturbingly romantic, the one-act musical chronicling a love triangle between a solider, his married mistress and the sickly cousin of his commanding officer, will not be for all musical theater palettes.

Bravery points, certainly, to the Chromolume Theatre which, with its moody and affecting production of PASSION, is completing its 2025 season at the Zephyr Theatre. Returning to the L.A. scene after a six-year hiatus in 2024, the company had planned to stage PASSION back in 2018 at its previous location. That didn’t happen, but marshalling some tenacity that the musical’s obsessed heroine Fosca would admire, Chromolume held on and director James Esposito plugged it into the 2025 season. A company that is inspired by Sondheim  - and does at least one of the composer’s musicals per season kinda has to wrestle this beast at some point, no?

Yes, and that time is now. Employing a 12-person cast who are largely at ease with difficult music, Esposito and company deliver a rare opportunity to commune with this difficult play. The scenery (also designed by Esposito) is minimal; Shon LeBlanc’s costumes solid and to the purpose. This production is not much to look at. It falls to music director and pianist Joshua Bartley and percussionist Tony Jones – and of course the performers – to make these proceedings sing. Which they do.

Most of their “songs” of this largely sung-through piece are about love, but not in the hummable, quotable way like what Sondheim has done with “Being Alive,” “Send in the Clowns” and dozens of others. PASSION begins with Captain Georgio (played by Paul Luoma) and his mistress, Clara (Mary DeLan), making love. Their first post-coital song, “Happiness” is about the unbridled wonder of their being in love. With Georgio shipping out to a remote Italian outpost (where he will be surrounded by men), the love sentiments between he and Clara continue via sung letters.

Also at the outpost, the only woman amidst a group of carousing, gossipy soldiers is Fosca (Nora Elkind), the plain and sickly cousin of Giorgio’s commanding officer, Col Ricci (Gavin Michael Harris). Before we ever see her, we periodically hear an offscreen screech of pain. The woman who finally emerges is tall, pale, emaciated. Giorgio shows her kindness, which Fosca – who we are to learn was jilted years ago - instantly transforms into obsession, and which persists even as Giorgio makes visits back to Milan and affirms his open passion for Clara.  “Will you never learn when too far is too far,” Giorgio sings in a song/admonition titled “Is This What you Call Love?”. “Have you no concern for what I want, what I feel? Love is what you earn and return when you care for another so much that the other’s set free. Don’t you see?”

Fosca most emphatically does not see. Or rather, she sees, but doesn’t care. Vampire-like, her obsession ultimately consumes, drains and overwhelms Giorgio. As the doctor attending her explains, it’s this love that is basically keeping her alive. Looking like she is one step away from spontaneous combustion, Elkind’s rendering of this anti-hero is simultaneously lovely, nuanced and difficult to watch

Luoma effectively takes us on Giorgio’s journey from a kind, if somewhat callow, man to a kind of prisoner. Even in his freest moments alone with Clara, Luoma conveys there is something holding Giorgio back, some part of himself that he hasn’t tapped into.  If it takes an obsessed monster to make him realize that he has never experienced love, well, maybe that’s a fate that Lapine and Sondheim feel is devoutly to be wished for.

DeLan’s Clara offers a nice counterpoint; she’s also in love, and also conflicted. The actress generates some genuine heat in her interactions with Luoma, and she sings beautifully. The chorus of soldiers build some powerful harmonies in their gossip interludes and in the finale.

Thanks to Bartley, Esposito and the company, Chromolume’s PASSION makes beautiful noise. The company returns to Sondheim territory at the end of 2026 with another less-produced opus, one of the composer’s final works, ROAD SHOW.

PASSION plays through November 30 at 7456 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles.

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