Eliana Willis

When theaters shuttered, Shakespeare turned to poetry. More

Updated March 13Broadway and several other major cultural institutions in New York said Thursday that they would close temporarily in an effort to curtail the spread of the coronavirus.The announcement came as Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered restrictions on public gatherings of more than 500 people. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic all said they would shutter in an effort to help prevent exposure. The New York Public Library is closed through at least March 31, but the Queens and Brooklyn libraries remain open, though public programming and events are suspended.Here is a brief list of closures, cancellations and postponements in New York City.MuseumsThe Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the Met Breuer and the Met Cloisters, are closed starting Friday. The Met will also undergo a thorough cleaning.The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 are closed through March 30.The Whitney Museum of American Art will close temporarily and cancel all events beginning on Friday at 5 p.m.The Guggenheim is closed until further notice. All events have been canceled.The American Museum of Natural History will be temporarily closed starting Friday.The Brooklyn Museum announced it would close temporarily beginning Friday and undergo a deep cleaning. All programs will be postponed or canceled until further notice.The Jewish Museum said it would close on Friday for two weeks. All public programs and events are canceled and refunds will be issued.The Neue Galerie said late Thursday it was closed until further notice.Brooklyn Historical Society is closed starting Friday until March 31. All events are suspended as well.The New-York Historical Society will close at 6 p.m. Friday as a preventive measure, a spokesman said. All programs and events will be closed through the end of April.The Rubin Museum of Art is closed starting Friday at 5 p.m.The 9/11 Museum and Memorial is closed temporarily beginning Friday.The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum will be closed through March 27.The Drawing Center is closed until further notice. All public programs postponed through April 12.American Folk Art Museum is closed and all public programs and events are postponed through March 31.The New Museum has temporarily closed its galleries and offices. A reopen date has not been scheduled.Museum at Eldridge Street will be closed beginning March 15.FilmThe Tribeca Film Festival, which was set to begin April 15, has been delayed until further notice.Film at Lincoln Center, which includes the Walter Reade Theater and Eleanor Bunin Munroe Theater, closed Thursday.Screenings for the final weekend of the 2020 New York International Children’s Film Festival have been canceled.The New Directors/New Films festival, set to open March 25, and the Chaplin Award Gala, honoring Spike Lee, originally scheduled for April 27, will be rescheduled for the fall.Anthology Film Archives in the East Village has suspended programming for the rest of the month.Nitehawk Cinemas in Brooklyn has canceled showings at its two locations.Theaters and Performance SpacesThe Metropolitan Opera has canceled all performances through March 31.Carnegie Hall canceled all events starting Friday through March 31.The New York Philharmonic canceled all performances through March 31.The Shed is suspending exhibitions and performances through March 30.BAM is suspending all live programming through March 29. BAM Rose Cinemas will continue operating at 50 percent capacity.The 92nd Street Y has suspended talks and performances until March 22.National Sawdust is suspending all programming as of Friday through the end of April.Ars Nova suspended all programming for 30 days as of Thursday.59E59 Theaters announced it was suspending public programming and plans to resume performances on April 1.The Sheen Center will be closed starting Friday through March 30.Danspace Project performances are canceled through March 28, which includes the remaining Platform 2020 events, and Megan Williams Dance Projects.Symphony Space said it has suspended all programs through April 1.Rattlestick is suspending performances after the final showing of “The Siblings Play” on March 14.New Victory Theater has canceled its season through June 14. More

Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.Note: Because of the coronavirus outbreak and the state’s ban on gatherings of more than 500 people, many events have been canceled. As of press time, these were still scheduled to take place. Before heading out, visit the website of the performance space or organization for the latest updates.Previews & Openings‘THE FRE’ at the Flea Theater (in previews; opens on March 15). Having brought a dancing-penis kickline to Broadway, Taylor Mac has now sunk low. In this new work, set in and around a mud pit, a young aesthete tries to persuade his grubby hedonists to de-ooze. In this show, directed by Niegel Smith, “audiences will literally and figuratively jump into the mud,” the theater warns. 212-226-0051, theflea.org‘GNIT’ at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (in previews; opens on March 19). Henrik Ibsen’s fairy tale of man’s search for self — plus trolls — arrives in a new, modern-day adaptation from the existentially oriented playwright Will Eno. In this Theater for a New Audience production, Jordan Bellow, Joe Curnutte, Crystal Dickinson, Deborah Hedwall, Matthew Maher and Erin Wilhelmi star. Oliver Butler directs. 866-811-4111, tfana.org[embedded content]‘LUNCH BUNCH’ at 122CC (previews start on March 18; opens on March 29). Sarah Einspanier’s compassionate comedy, about public defenders, their midday meals and what we owe to ourselves and one another, comes back for seconds. The Play Company revives this Summerworks show, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad with a cast that includes the original players Ugo Chukwu, Keilly McQuail and Julia Sirna-Frest. 866-811-4111, playco.org‘NOLLYWOOD DREAMS’ at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater (previews start on March 19; opens on April 13). Jocelyn Bioh, an actress and playwright who has a wicked way with comedy, premieres a new play. In Lagos, Nigeria, in the 1990s, Ayamma (Sandra Okuboyejo), a travel agent, fantasizes about becoming a leading lady in that country’s burgeoning film industry. Then she gets the chance. Saheem Ali directs for MCC. 646-506-9393, mcctheater.org[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]Last Chance‘ANATOMY OF A SUICIDE’ at the Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater (closes on March 15). Alice Birch’s play, dazzling in its form and devastating in its effect, ends its Off Broadway run. With dizzying simultaneity, the play follows three generations of women (Carla Gugino, Celeste Arias, Gabby Beans) in the throes of suicidal depression. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs. 866-811-4111, atlantictheater.org‘EMOJILAND: THE MUSICAL’ at the Duke on 42nd Street (closes on March 19). Get your sad faces ready as this symbolist musical by Keith Harrison and Laura Schein shuts down. A romantic comedy set inside a smartphone and starring Lesli Margherita and Lucas Steele, it was described by Laura Collins-Hughes as “the kind of sheer fun that sends you back into the world feeling a little more upbeat.” 646-223-3010, emojiland.com‘SHE PERSISTED’ at the Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater (closes on March 22). This Atlantic for Kids musical about women who changed history sings its final anthems. Adapted by Adam Tobin and Deborah Wicks La Puma from Chelsea Clinton’s best-selling children’s book, the show, Laura Collins-Hughes wrote, “cleverly conveys positive values.” She added, “This is bouncy fun with a serious streak.” 866-811-4111, atlantictheater.org More

Several of New York’s largest and most prestigious cultural institutions — including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic — announced Thursday that they would temporarily shut down in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus.The closures — which came after cities in Europe, as well as San Francisco and Seattle, had called off performances — underscored the extent to which major institutions of all kinds are trying to prevent large gatherings of people in the hopes of slowing the spread of the disease. Shortly after the closures were announced, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced that he was moving to ban gatherings of more than 500 people in the state, effectively closing all large performances and shutting down Broadway theaters as well.“It would be irresponsible to continue having performances when clearly what is being called for is social distancing,” said Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, which, along with the Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall, is canceling performances through the end of the month in an effort to protect audiences and performers alike.The closures represented a turning point: After days of taking a wait-and-see-approach, even as Europe adopted far more stringent restrictions, American presenters and officials decided it was time for a more aggressive strategy. More

She is probably Africa’s most widely respected international vocalist, and one of its hungriest synthesizers of culture and ideas. More

For Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday, the New York Philharmonic pulled out all the stops with a concert that featured Patti LuPone, Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch, to name a few. In the lead-up to his 90th, the orchestra went early, celebrating Sondheim on New Year’s Eve.But there are plenty of other ways to get your fill of the composer’s music in New York this spring — including two current Broadway productions, an eight-hour binge-listen, and a comic cabaret that promises to re-create that star-studded Philharmonic event of 2010 — with just a pair hard-working singers (and, OK, maybe the occasional guest). Details on a dozen celebratory events follow:ConcertAnthony de Mare and Conrad TaoCommissioning composers to reimagine Sondheim songs as piano pieces has been a longtime project for the concert pianist Anthony de Mare. The latest batch, in honor of Sondheim’s birthday, includes works by Meredith Monk (based on “Poems,” from “Pacific Overtures”) and Jon Batiste (after “The Gun Song” and “The Ballad of Booth,” from “Assassins”). Those will be among the premieres in this pair of programs, the second of which features Conrad Tao as both guest pianist, performing Steve Reich’s “Finishing the Hat — Two Pianos,” and composer of a new work. (March 27 and 29, 92nd Street Y; 92y.org.)Off Broadway‘Assassins’Tavi Gevinson, Judy Kuhn, Ethan Slater and Will Swenson are among the blue-chip performers playing the parade of killers and would-be killers of American presidents in this Off Broadway revival by John Doyle, a Tony Award winner for “Sweeney Todd.” (April 2-June 6, Classic Stage Company; classicstage.org.)Cabaret‘Bonnie Milligan and Natalie Walker Do “Sondheim! The Birthday Concert” (2010) in 2020’Bonnie Milligan (“Head Over Heels”) and Natalie Walker (“Alice by Heart”) re-create the PBS Great Performances classic “Sondheim! The Birthday Concert,” with one or both of them performing every song. They’re not Sondheim veterans — but when this show is done, they will be. (March 28 and April 1, Feinstein’s/54 Below; 54below.com.)BroadWAY‘Company’In Marianne Elliott’s gender-flipping revival, a West End hit, Sondheim’s Bobby is now Bobbie (Katrina Lenk of “The Band’s Visit”), a commitment-averse 30-something woman in a coupled-off world. Joanne, though, is forever a lady who lunches — played by LuPone, reprising her London performance. (In previews, opens March 22, Bernard B. Jacobs Theater; companymusical.com.)Cabaret‘Jeff Harnar Sings Sondheim: I Know Things Now’This is a dip into the songbook from an assertively gay male perspective, embracing many Sondheim tunes originally sung by women. (March 18, Feinstein’s/54 Below; 54below.com.)Concert‘Opus Two Celebrates Sondheim & Bernstein’The violinist ​William Terwilliger​ and the pianist ​Andrew Cooperstock are joined by Broadway veteran Elena Shaddow ​in a tribute that includes songs from Sondheim’s ​“A Little Night Music” and​ “Evening Primrose,” as well as Bernstein’s “Candide.” (March 15, Feinstein’s/54 Below; 54below.com.)Cabaret‘Serving You Sondheim’With singing wait staff, guest performers and an eight-piece band, this is cabaret as immersive experience. Every show includes one song from each produced work in the Sondheim catalog. (March 14, April 24, May 22-23, the Green Room 42; thegreenroom42.poptix.com)Film‘Sing-Along West Side Story’Too well mannered to join in on “Maria” or “Tonight” at a live performance of “West Side Story,” even though you know all the words? This screening of the 1961 film is your invitation to let loose, exuberantly. (May 31, Symphony Space; symphonyspace.org.)Cabaret‘Sondheim at 90’“Sondheim Unplugged” creator Phil Geoffrey Bond​ gathers veterans of Sondheim shows — including Annie Golden, who originated the role of Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme in “Assassins” — for a cabaret extravaganza on the evening of composer’s actual birthday. (March 22, Feinstein’s/54 Below; 54below.com.)Cabaret‘Sondheim Unplugged’This long-running cabaret series promises Sarah Rice, the original Johanna in “Sweeney Todd,” at the March show, which will include songs from “Into the Woods,” “Follies” and “Passion,” with piano accompaniment. (March 29, April 26, May 31, Feinstein’s/54 Below; 54below.com.)Concert’Wall to Wall Stephen Sondheim’The last time Symphony Space held one of these marathon concert celebrations, for Sondheim’s 75th birthday, it lasted 12 hours and involved more than 100 artists, including Stritch and Barbara Cook. This time it’s planned for eight hours, unfolding in three segments, and the still-evolving roster of artists includes Santino Fontana and members of the current casts of “Assassins” and “Company.” Sondheim himself has a hand in the planning. Get there early to try for a free general-admission ticket; a limited number of reserved seats are for sale. (May 16, Symphony Space; symphonyspace.org.)Broadway‘West Side Story’Nearly every move the Sharks and the Jets make is captured on live video projected huge on the upstage wall in Ivo van Hove’s Broadway revival, which transports the Arthur Laurents-Leonard Bernstein-Sondheim musical to present-day New York with a star-free cast and a cool contemporary aesthetic shaped by the designer Jan Versweyveld. (Open run, Broadway Theater; westsidestorybway.com.) More

Stephen Sondheim has been the composer and lyricist of 15 stage musicals and the lyricist for three others. Our chief critics weigh in on all of them, dated by the approximate year of their composition or first Broadway performance.Saturday Night (1955)The start of Sondheim’s Broadway career was inauspicious. In his early 20s he wrote the songs for a musical with a book by Julius J. Epstein about a bunch of date-starved Brooklyn bachelors hoping to make a killing in the stock market. Charming and small-scale, with no chorus or other signs of Golden Age grandeur, “Saturday Night” exemplified the changing texture of musical theater — or would have, had its lead producer not died. Though the show would not be staged in New York until 2000, two of its songs became cabaret standards in the meantime: “So Many People” (a lovely ballad) and “What More Do I Need?” (a left-handed tribute to the city, where “even the falling snow looks used”). But it was the title song that introduced Sondheim’s genius for compressing a worldview into a quatrain: “I like the Sunday Times all right,/But not in bed./Alive and alone on a Saturday night/Is dead.” JESSE GREENWest Side Story (1957)/Gypsy (1959)/Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965)Though he thought of himself as a composer first, or at any rate liked writing music more than lyrics, Sondheim served a grudging apprenticeship as the word man to three musical geniuses: Leonard Bernstein on “West Side Story,” Jule Styne on “Gypsy” and Richard Rodgers on “Do I Hear a Waltz?” His mixed emotions showed up in the mixed (if always exceptionally polished) results. For “West Side Story” he wrote “poetic” lyrics that Bernstein loved but that embarrassed their author — yet also produced, as the collaboration matured, lacerating lines that never cloy. (One of his best came straight from Arthur Laurents’s libretto: “A boy like that, who’d kill your brother.”) More confident with Styne, he began to produce words that turned songs into complex scenes (“Rose’s Turn”). Rodgers required a relapse into a Golden Age style that no longer suited the ambitious young Sondheim — or the musical theater he was about to change forever. J.G.A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962)An antic adaptation of several ancient comedies by Plautus, featuring a book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, and the first Broadway show for which Sondheim created both music and lyrics. Under the supervision of the venerable director George Abbott, this tangled farce of scrambled identities in dirty old Rome thrust its 32-year-old composer into a maelstrom of constant revisions and second guesses, including the last-minute substitution of a game-changing opening number. That’s “Comedy Tonight,” and as delivered by its star, Zero Mostel, it set the tone for what (despite out of town travails) became a palpable hit, running 964 performances. Sondheim’s work here is broad, buoyant and melodic, with only tantalizing traces of the complex artist to come. BEN BRANTLEYAnyone Can Whistle (1964)An oddball contribution to the burgeoning creed of 1960s individualism by two self-defined nonconformists, Sondheim and Laurents (the show’s book writer and director). Set in a financially strapped town in search of an economic (and literal) miracle, the plot traffics in the then-fashionable blurring of boundaries between sanity and insanity, with characters who include a corrupt mayor (Angela Lansbury, in a smashing Broadway musical debut), a bogus doctor, and a repressed psychiatric nurse at an institution called the Cookie Jar. Audiences were allergic to its high whimsy, and the show closed after nine performances. It has some strange little jewels of songs, though, including a title number (performed by Lee Remick’s nurse) that is pure Sondheim in its aching wistfulness. B.B.Company (1970)Phone rings, door chimes, in comes “Company.” At the start of a decade that would see five astonishing new Sondheim shows on Broadway — all directed by Harold Prince — this one, with a book by George Furth, helped drag the musical into a new age. Part of that newness was the story: A toxic bachelor named Bobby, turning 35, is forced by the five couples who are his best friends, as well as three women he’s dating, to rethink his reflexive antipathy toward marriage. And part of it was the sideways approach, which emphasized theme over plot and commentary over action. But most of it was the phenomenal score, the first in which Sondheim, writing about people he really knew, inhabited his natural style fully: a style as cosmopolitan as the busy signal that introduces the cast album but also stealthily passionate and, at its thrilling best, both. J.G.Follies (1971)One of the great elegies in Broadway history, this portrait of a reunion of performers from a Ziegfeld-style revue was a luxuriant farewell to a vanishing era of show business and to the American illusion of a happily-ever-after existence. Staged by Prince and Michael Bennett, with a book by James Goldman, “Follies” remains a prime example of Sondheim’s peerless gifts for pastiche songwriting (“Beautiful Girls,” “Broadway Baby”) and the musical nervous breakdown, often combining elements of both. Designed with an extravagance that would be financially impossible today, it featured a cast that included vintage Hollywood stars like Alexis Smith and Yvonne de Carlo, who introduced the barbed evergreen “I’m Still Here.” A once misunderstood show that looks more beautiful every time it’s revived. B.B.A Little Night Music (1973)Marriage was the open question in “Company” and definitely not the answer in “Follies.” Finally, in “A Little Night Music,” Sondheim, working with a book by Hugh Wheeler, wrote a musical in which the realignment of mismatched lovers made for a happy ending. Is it a coincidence that the result brought Sondheim the best reviews of his career to that point? Suddenly the snarky wit was a romantic, the angular composer a melodist. True, “A Little Night Music” is sumptuous, as befits its setting among the Swedish upper class in 1900. And Sondheim’s spectacular all-waltz-time score (orchestrated, like all his ’70s shows, by Jonathan Tunick) included a bona fide crossover hit: “Send in the Clowns.” But as could be expected from a story based on an Ingmar Bergman film, “A Little Night Music” serves up more than whipped cream. It’s about the uncomfortable proximity of maturity and mortality. Bergman loved it. J.G.The Frogs (1974)In the midst of his Broadway triumphs, Sondheim went to Yale. There at the School of Drama, along with his “Forum” collaborator Shevelove, he revisited ancient comedy with “The Frogs,” based on the Aristophanes play in which Dionysus moderates a contest in Hades between the playwriting giants Euripides and Aeschylus. (The winner comes back from the dead to save the theater.) Shevelove’s larky hourlong production updated the debaters to Shakespeare and Shaw, and was staged at Yale’s pool, with the swim team as the title characters and Meryl Streep in the ensemble. Despite acoustics that Sondheim compared to “putting on a show in a men’s urinal,” “The Frogs” was an eight-performance hit, eventually spawning a Broadway version starring (and expanded by) Nathan Lane. The score represents Sondheim at both his funniest (“Invocation to the Gods and Instructions to the Audience”) and his strangest — but also, as in his setting of Shakespeare’s “Fear No More,” his most haunting. J.G.Pacific Overtures (1976)The concept was complicated: a show about the “opening” of Japan by Adm. Matthew Perry in 1853, told, Sondheim said, as if by “a Japanese who’s seen a lot of American musicals.” Perhaps that’s why, by conventional measures, it was not a major success: It had the shortest run of his ’70s shows and, despite Prince’s jaw-dropping production, was all but shut out at the Tony Awards. Yet in telling a cautionary tale about cultural imperialism, “Pacific Overtures,” with a precision-tooled book by John Weidman, pushed Sondheim to explore a harmonic and lyrical language that opened a new chapter in his artistic life. (We would soon hear more of it in “Sunday in the Park With George.”) Characterized by extreme compression and allusiveness, that language allowed songs like “A Bowler Hat” and “Someone in a Tree” (his own favorite among his works) to offer the world in a phrase. J.G.Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979)The darkest, angriest and most improbably entertaining work in the Sondheim canon. Wheeler wrote the book for this “black operetta,” in which revenge is a meat pie served piping hot, and made from the title character’s dismembered victims. Sondheim gave transcendent musical voice to monomaniacal rage, with a shivery riff on the Dies Irae of the Catholic mass. But he also plied his signature wit with wicked word play on matters macabre (see: “A Little Priest”). First staged as a big-picture indictment of the industrial revolution by Prince — in a production memorably starring Len Cariou as the deranged barber and Lansbury as his pie-making accomplice — “Sweeney” has since proved itself ideally suited to more intimate interpretations, like John Doyle’s 2005 revival, which invite audiences directly into the clammy confines of a madman’s mind. B.B.Merrily We Roll Along (1981)The much-loved problem child of Sondheim’s musicals, and one that directors keep returning to in the hopes of finally getting it right. When this reversed-chronology portrait — about the intersecting roads to success and disillusionment in showbiz — opened on Broadway with a young and untried cast, it not only crashed and burned; it also signaled the end of the long and fruitful years of collaboration between Sondheim and the show’s director, Prince. (That sundering strangely echoed the musical’s portrait of the unraveling of a longtime creative friendship.) Furth’s cliché-stoked script, adapted from a 1934 play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, has remained a stumbling block for subsequent revivals. But Sondheim’s rueful score captured the sweep and sting of regretful memory and abandoned hopes, and introduced the cabaret standard “Not a Day Goes By.” B.B.Sunday in the Park With George (1984)Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize winner and a show that breathtakingly expanded the possibilities for the form and subject of the genre. George is the 19th-century French pointillist painter Georges Seurat and also his (fictional) 20th-century grandson, a conceptual artist. And “Sunday,” with an inventive book by James Lapine (its original director), both portrays and embodies art’s role in weaving form and order out of daily life. Sondheim’s use of song as character study is at its most acute, with unforgettably idiosyncratic portraits of the obsessively focused Seurat and his neglected lover and model, Dot (originally portrayed by Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters). The first act’s final scene, a re-creation of the painting of the title, is the stuff of legends; a 2017 revival, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, showed it had lost none of its magic. B.B.Into the Woods (1987)Built on familiar tropes and repeated melodic motifs, “Into the Woods” is deceptively welcoming; thanks to the 2014 movie and innumerable school performances, it is probably Sondheim’s best-known work. But Lapine’s story about a witch’s curse, a couple’s quest, a girl’s gluttony and a giant’s revenge (among other elements of the densely woven plot) is far darker than its jaunty title song indicates. Act I, which sends the characters working toward their wishes, is followed in Act II by the dark consequences of their achievement: discord, separation, death. Likewise, the songs, many built from musical cells Sondheim flips and shuffles, darken into warnings, laments and lullabies. So don’t let the fairy-tale ending fool you: This is a sophisticated musical about sophistication — about the dangers, for both parents and children, of growing up. “Isn’t it nice to know a lot?” Red Riding Hood sings. “And a little bit not.” J.G.Assassins (1990)Resounding proof that Sondheim, at 60, had lost none of his artistic daring or precision, or his willingness to defy convention. Set in a sort of purgatorial shooting gallery, “Assassins” presented an assortment of men and women who had killed — or attempted to kill — American presidents, including John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley. Weidman wrote the connective, poker-faced script. But it was Sondheim’s score, inflected with regional accents of the American songbook through the ages, that gave the show its radiant chill, as its dispossessed characters sang longingly of a hunger for glory. “Assassins” opened Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons just as the Persian Gulf war was beginning, and critics recoiled at its perceived glibness in a moment of national crisis. But when it finally arrived on Broadway in 2004, its depiction of the rabid lust of celebrity felt scaldingly relevant. A forthcoming Off-Broadway incarnation, directed by Doyle, may well reveal it to be a sobering mirror for our own age of resentful populism. B.B.Passion (1994)Why did audiences at the Plymouth Theater giggle and groan during previews of “Passion”? Certainly, it was an uncomfortable story: A sickly, unattractive woman named Fosca (actually the beautiful Donna Murphy, with a mole) falls in love with a handsome young captain — then makes him fall in love with her. And though Lapine’s book neatly theatricalized the film “Passione d’Amore” — as well as “Fosca,” the epistolary novel it was based on — his staging could not solve the problem of the crazy lady popping up everywhere to torment that nice soldier. This was the audience’s loss, as revivals, especially in smaller spaces, have since proved. “Passion,” kept close to the eyes and ears, is overwhelmingly beautiful, filled with rhapsodic inquiries into the impossibility and ultimate necessity of love. If it contains some of Sondheim’s most moving music and probing lyrics, perhaps that’s because it was, unusually, his idea to do it. Very much like Fosca, he knew what he wanted. J.G.Wise Guys (1999)/Bounce (2003)/Road Show (2008)Since its buzz-generating inception as a starry workshop production in 1999, this endlessly evolving collaboration with Weidman has undergone repeated changes of casts, dialogue, song lists and directors. It has remained Sondheim’s most picaresque piece, a tale of two itinerant brothers, at odds with and reliant on each other (one of whom is the only gay leading character in a Sondheim musical). Inspired by the real-life entrepreneurs (and flim-flammers) extraordinaire Addison and Wilson Mizner, the show is a country-crossing map of fortunes lost and made, in which unbounded success always looms as a tantalizing chimera. The brothers, like many Sondheim characters, may be casualties of unfulfilled American dreams. But he, and we, can’t help admiring their determination in reinventing themselves. The show’s last line: “Sooner or later, we’re bound to get it right.” B.B. More