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Amadeus – according to Salieri

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Amadeus, by Peter Shaffer, was a play (1979) before it was a movie (1985 Best Picture Oscar).

The play, in the Psychopomp Theatre production directed by Jon Shields, starts with an angelic choir singing in opera style, surrounding a very old man huddled in a wheelchair and containing a hand tremor. He is composer Antonio Salieri (Randy Brososky), the narrator and the central character in the play, despite it being named for Mozart.

Salieri rises from his chair with difficulty and calls for house lights to see the audience he is addressing. He seems to be endowing us with powers of extra-human witnessing or perhaps divine judgement – are we the choir of angels? – as he promises to tell us the story of what he did to Mozart long ago and how he’s paying for it. He speaks to us in English, but he also speaks to God in what appears to be fluent Italian.

The scene shifts – Salieri morphs to an active 30 year old – and this is when he first meets his rival, the younger composer and former child prodigy Mozart. Salieri tells us that he wanted so badly to be famous for his music that he had made bargains with God. He had the position of Court Composer to Emperor Joseph (John Evans) in Vienna. He shows the audience his servants and his “venticelli” or gentle winds, flamboyant gossips he engages to bring him the latest rumours (Andrew Mecready and Randall MacDonald). The venticelli tell him that young Mozart is coming to court, so he arranges to eavesdrop and then to be introduced. But to Salieri’s disgust, in person Wolfgang Mozart (Drake Seipert) is vulgar and annoying and self-centred. Seipert portrays Mozart with the most irritating laugh ever.

Salieri is astonished and resentful that someone so vulgar can have the gifts of music and fame that he longs for himself. The quid-pro-quo that seems to be central to his relationship with the Divine launches him into resentment and the most disturbing portrayal of artistic jealousy that I have ever seen.

Brososky’s portrayal of Salieri is brilliant. His bitterness poisons his own nature as he goes further and further in trying to harm Mozart. Mozart’s wife Constanze Weber-Mozart (Cassie Hymen) tries to protect her husband and is also affected by Salieri’s schemes.

A cast of 14 plays many ensemble roles, nobles and servants and citizens. I was fascinated to encounter references to several of Mozart’s operas I recognized, including Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, and Marriage of Figaro. Costuming (Nancy Skorobohach) conveys the excesses of the period and provides clues to class and character.

I was also fascinated to see allusions to Mozart’s character traits which I had first learned of in Erin Hutchison’s Fringe musical Regression last summer – in particular his persistent scatological humour. I’d already encountered a portrayal of Van Gogh on the Shadow Theatre stage this winter, consistent with Hutchison’s characterization, so it amuses me that the third avatar of art in the musical Regression, Willliam Shakespeare, will be on stage in Shakespeare in Love at Walterdale Theatre this summer.

Amadeus has a short run (May 8-15 only) in the auditorium at Campus St-Jean, with tickets available here. The main entrance to the building is under construction, but there is labelled access through the main entrance to an elevator.

And Then, the Lights Went Out …

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The first show of the Walterdale Theatre’s season is And Then, The Lights Went Out, written by Andy Garland and directed by David Johnston.   It’s partly a funny story about a writer’s life and partly a hard-boiled detective tale using all the tropes of that genre.

John Evans plays Thomas, a young novelist who is running out of ideas for his detective-story series.  Erin Forwick-Whalley and Jennifer Peebles are his landlady and neighbour, providing stakes, comic relief, and encouragement for him to finish his seventh novel for tomorrow’s deadline.  The rest of the characters in the play are the characters in Thomas’s work-in-progress, ‘tried and true archetypes’ of the trenchcoat-wearing private detective (Kyle Lahti), the mysterious alluring woman (Erika Conway), the thug (Chance Heck), the perky sidekick police officer (Hayley Moorhouse), and a menacing Southern not-such-a-gentleman who reminded me of a Die-Nasty character from the Tennessee-Williams-pastiche season (Curtis Knecht).

At first, there is some amusement in the concept of the characters having life outside of the story and having opinions on the writer’s work, especially the thug who wants to be different.  But I’d seen that done before.  I was reminded of stories about moviemaking, like Make Mine Love, or the Die-Nasty marathon weekend where everyone was a soap-opera character and also an actor.  I noticed that most of the characters spoke with different accents when they were “on stage” in the story, accents that evoked the hard-boiled stories of Raymond Chandler and Humphrey Bogart in Maltese Falcon, and then shifted to speech similar to Thomas’ own when they were not acting out the story.  Lights Went Out got more interesting and satisfying when the characters started pushing Thomas to make them more than stock characters, and then as he wrote they played out a story which had a satisfying and not entirely predictable ending.

And Then, The Lights Went Out continues at the Walterdale Theatre until this Saturday (October 25th).  Tickets are available at the door, or in advance through Tix on the Square.   The next show on the Walterdale stage will be John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, in early December.  I’ve been helping out with that one, and I think it will be good.