SOURCE: “Love in Gloom,” in New Yorker, Vol. 70, No. 14, May 23, 1994, pp. 89–92.

In the following negative review of Passion, Lahr condemns Sondheim's lack of distinction between psychotic obsession and true passionate love, his conversational tone, his lack of melody, his use of a predictable gothic Romantic formula, and the musical’s failure to be convincing.

There are animals in the jungle that survive by playing dead and Fosca, the heroine of Stephen Sondheim's Passion, is one of them. Ugly, hysterical, unrelenting, joyless, she's an amalgam of alienations, and personifies both romantic agony and the dead end to which Sondheim, in his perverse brilliance, has brought the American musical. In Passion, the charm of angst replaces the charm of action, and the American musical, once a noisy, vulgar, bumptious exhibition of our appetite for life, is deconstructed into an elegant flirtation with death. Sondheim's “revolution” is not really one of...