It’s really, really complicated

Better late than never. Stephen Sondheim’s Passion netted multiple Tony Awards when it premiered in New York in 1994. But it is only now that we’re seeing a local production. Sacramento’s Music Circus has never gone in big for Sondheim. And let’s be fair, Passion is a chamber piece that probably wouldn’t translate well in the vast 2,000-seat Wells Fargo Pavilion.

But Passion is an excellent choice for the 90-seat New Helvetia Theatre, where artistic director Connor Mickiewicz has been staging marvelous compact (and thrifty) productions of prizewinning musicals on the darker and artier side. Sometimes good things come in small packages.

“Dark” is a descriptor oft applied to Sondheim. And Passion (which includes the line “Unhappiness can be seductive”) is quirky, even by his standards. The setting is 19th-century Italy, where handsome soldier Giorgio (Matt Surges) is posted to a drab mountain garrison—separating him from hot love interest Clara (Courtney Glass) in Milan. Soon, Giorgio meets Fosca (Jackie Vanderbeck)—as a perpetually ailing, twitchy recluse who obsessively presses for Giorgio’s affection. It’s a complicated, warped, manipulative relationship (this is Sondheim, after all). But by the end, Fosca does not seem quite so crazed.

Vanderbeck (who played the equally reclusive Emily Dickinson at Sacramento Theatre Company a while back) is on top of her game as Fosca, and Surges makes Giorgio’s gradual shift of romantic allegiance believable; Glass floats through regretfully as the distance between Clara and Giorgio grows. Sondheim’s score is elegantly beautiful—much closer to “art music” than up-tempo Broadway. The singers are backed by a spare but effective combination of piano (Graham Sobelman) and percussion (Brian Manchen). Several supporting actors do well in cameos. Mickiewicz stages this strange love story sensitively, quietly and convincingly, without intermission.