Cosette Derome, Andrew Broderick, Allan Louis, Graeme Somerville, David Andrew Reid with members of the Amadeus ensemble. Peter Shaffer’s script, adapted from Alexander Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri, is, in effect, fan fiction.David Cooper/Handout/Supplied
- Title: Amadeus
- Written by: Peter Shaffer
- Directed by: Tim Carroll
- Actors: Tom Rooney, Michael Therriault, Kristi Frank, Allan Louis, Graeme Somerville
- Company: Shaw Festival
- Venue: Festival Theatre
- City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
- Year: Runs until Oct. 4
There’s an adage in theatre criticism that you can’t leave a show humming the scenery.
But that’s not quite the case in the Shaw Festival’s piercing production of Amadeus, playing in the Festival Theatre until Oct. 4. Scenic designer Judith Bowden’s angular set cleverly incorporates musical staves between its floorboards; projections of handwritten eighth notes float over a treacherously slanted playing space.
In this way, Amadeus’s cunning scenery and music are, in effect, one and the same: Even when no concertos or operas play over the theatre’s speakers, there are visual reminders of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s compositional prowess. And, simultaneously, Antonio Salieri’s inferiority.
We meet Salieri (Tom Rooney) at the end of his life. He’s – all around him, disembodied voices whisper his name. When he gazes out to the audience, he sees us. To him, we are “ghosts of the future,” the final witnesses to his murder of the late, great Mozart.
It’s worth stepping in to clarify that Peter Shaffer’s script, adapted from Alexander Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri, is, in effect, fan fiction: Little evidence supports as charged a rivalry between Mozart and Salieri as is suggested by Amadeus. Shaffer’s play, adapted into a 1984 film starring F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce, takes liberties especially with Salieri, who in all likelihood regarded Mozart as a colleague rather than adversary.
Tom Rooney, performing with Alison Edwards-Crewe and Michael Therriault, plays Antonio Salieri, who the audience meets at the end of his life.David Cooper/Handout/Supplied
But in Amadeus, the men are competing kings on a musical chessboard, forever in each other’s orbit as they vie for the affections of Emperor Joseph II (Graeme Somerville).
With Salieri as narrator, we slide into the past, where the Italian musician lives in comfort as the emperor’s court composer. He especially delights in decadent desserts, he tells us: Crema al mascarpone, or rum-drenched mascarpone cheese, is his favourite.
Salieri’s festering resentment begins to brew the first time he and Mozart cross paths. Unbeknownst to wunderkind Mozart, Salieri is in the room as he and his wife Constanze (Kristi Frank) play a mawkish cat-and-mouse game, meowing and squeaking at each other’s heels.
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Salieri, concealed by his chair’s high back, simmers in anger: How could the court allow these young people to tarnish Vienna’s social customs, and so brazenly? And worse, what if Mozart manages to usurp his own status as chief music-maker?
When the rivals officially meet – no mice to be heard – the encounter is tense and musically uninspiring. In Mozart’s honour, Salieri performs a tedious march, his fingers limping across the keyboard as the court politely waits for the piece’s conclusion. When Mozart offers a better version of the same march – a more tuneful, less meandering arrangement of notes – Salieri’s bitterness begins to boil.
All at once, a wicked plan takes shape: Destroy Mozart at all costs.
Shaffer’s Tony Award-winning play is seductive in its historical revisionism, and thrilling in its pacing. Not unlike Hamilton, it manages to conjure tension in a story where two real-life figures inevitably die. Bowden’s set, which sees director Tim Carroll’s cast traverse the surprisingly steep floor, further adds to the danger embedded in Shaffer’s script.
Bowden’s costumes, however, further advance Salieri’s time-addled delusion that he’s speaking to members of some distant future. While the designer’s set embraces all manner of modern design trends, her period costumes are sumptuous and historically accurate – the clash between the clothes and their environs is delicious as Carroll twists the knife ever-further into Mozart and Salieri’s cosmic feud.
Sochi Fried, Kristi Frank and Julia Course in their costumes, which further advance Salieri’s time-addled delusion that he’s speaking to members of some distant futureDavid Cooper/Handout/Supplied
Indeed, the elegant production ranks among Carroll’s strongest during his tenure as the Shaw Festival’s artistic director. But that’s thanks in large part to Rooney’s rich performance as Salieri.
Rooney explores each of Salieri’s senses – his taste for sweets, his ear for betrayal – and peels back his emotional layers without fear of the rot lying just beneath the character’s skin. In Rooney’s care, Salieri seems almost unafraid to face the music of his own mediocrity.
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But when the composer despairs, so do we: Rooney takes care to ensure that empathizing with Amadeus’s villain is no great task, even when the musician acts abominably in his pursuit of Mozart’s downfall.
Therriault is less successful as Mozart. His earliest scenes are his strongest – when the consequences of Mozart’s boorishness don’t yet hang like a guillotine blade – but as Amadeus barrels forward, Therriault’s Mozart never does. Especially in contrast with Frank’s subtle, intricate reading of Constanze, and with Rooney’s Salieri, who evolves and twists over the course of Shaffer’s script, Therriault’s Mozart feels under-considered.
But Carroll’s production, clocking in at a luxurious two-and-a-half hours, is so otherwise plush that the lopsidedness of its central pair nearly (nearly!) doesn’t matter.
On the whole, I’m going to disagree with whomever said you can’t leave a play humming its scenery. Amadeus’s scenography – and, in equal amounts, its blistering Salieri – are going to be stuck in my head for a long while.