MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

For 280 performances in 1994, Stephen Sondheim asked an audience to care about Fosca. Fosca is the protagonist of Passion, a musical adapted from Ettore Scola’s 1981 film Passione d’Amore which is based on Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s 1869 novel, Fosca. Each tell the story of a young soldier, Giorgio, being transferred away from his married lover in Milan to a tiny northern Italian town where he meets the Colonels’ ugly cousin, Fosca, a woman with a “collection of ailments” whose nerves are “exposed” where everyone else has a “layer of skin.” She falls in love with him after their first meeting, but to Giorgio, she is a character of fascination and largely, disgust. Played during its initial run by Donna Murphy, Fosca is interloping, incorrigible, and inappropriate in her pursuit of Giorgio, tending toward pathetic, yet she is never the villain, she is the diva.

Broadway and Stephen Sondheim have a long history of producing divas: cynical female characters that view the world through large, reflective sunglass lenses of cynicism, drink of choice in hand, played by women older than thirty-five (at least). Divas are meant to be loved by audiences for their witty observations, show stopping numbers, and their devil-may-care façade, however, when they are unapologetically bold, and the façade cracks, as it always does, and they are allowed to be ugly for a moment, they are no longer as loved as they were before. They perform an unpredictable femininity that often veers into mannishness. Regardless audiences will remember divas for the glamor they regain by the finale. The Sondheim canon contains prolific divas already, notably: Mama Rose (Gypsy), Joanne (Company), and Desiree (A Little Night Music) among others. In this paper, I will prove that Fosca, despite seeming ugly and unglamorous, belongs to the canon of Broadway Divas.