Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” is, at heart, a great love triangle. At one vortex, there’s 18th century composer Antonio Salieri, wavering between piety and murderous peevishness. At another corner, there’s the God whose favor Salieri craves, quite unrequitedly. And then, standing between them, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, God’s true love, or at least it seems to Salieri for a while. It’s a pleasure to report that all three of these roles are exceptionally well-played in a splendid new production at the Pasadena Playhouse, here to remind us that genius and the lack of it can both be hell.
God does not have a speaking role in “Amadeus,” being an absentee kind of guy, but he does occasionally loom over the proceedings, projected onto the stage house’s back wall as a spooky, painted projection seen just long enough to be established as the apparently disinterested foil for Salieri’s entitled prayers. As far as the actual casting goes, anyone who’s seen the 1979 Broadway play (oft-revised by Shaffer) or the hit 1984 movie comes in knowing this is really going to be a two-hander… bordering at times on a one-hander. As Mozart, Sam Clemmett is wonderful, carefully navigating the silliness and sullenness of a character who’s been drawn as part boy, part man. But it’s no slight to what Clemmett is doing to be reminded that the title of “Amadeus’” is an act of misdirection, and that Salieri sucks up all the main character energy in the drawing room. This ingratiating villain spends so much of the final monolog going on about being the “patron saint of mediocrity,” he’s pretty much daring any actor who plays him to show up with anything short of greatness.
Jefferson Mays is the man for that job. Nothing against more evenly proportioned ensemble dramas, but 22 years after he won the Tony for the one-actor show “I Am My Own Wife,” Mays is giving the kind of singular performance that we all go to the theater for and remember in years to come. It’s a portrayal that sits right at the intersection of ridiculously flamboyant, allowing us to stew, at leisure, in someone else’s juices for a bitter yet delicious two hours and 45 minutes. The most recently revised version of the play is bookended by long stretches of an apparently dying Salieri — decrepit but more poisonous than ever — alone on stage, to the point where even Shakespeare might look at the script and go, “Too many soliloquies.” But who’s to mind, when you’ve got an actor as great as Mays treating the audience as his gossip-hungry confidante, when he’s not bugging the Almighty with a longer list of grievances than Job’s? Bring it all on; we could listen to Mays deliver these death rattles if they went on till dawn.
Not to suggest that “Amadeus” is truly a one-man show, and even positioning it as just an actor’s showcase would be doing this production a disservice. Because even if its Salieri were actually mediocre, the show would still be worth a visit just for every other element firing on all cylinders — most obviously Alexander Dodge’s striking and clever scenic design, followed by costuming by Linda Cho that looks as if every bit was handmade to complement Dodge’s color schemes. (The venue does have its own on-site scene shop, so none of this synergy is a happy coincidence.) Under the direction of Darko Tresnjak — who won his Tony directing Mays 12 years ago in “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” — this overdue revitalization of “Amadeus” is among the most thrilling recent examples of the Pasadena Playhouse consistently punching above its weight.
Pablo Santiago’s lighting design is top-notch, too, in pulling all these other visual threads together. But there’s nothing to dimly light up a room quite like Salieri’s gaslighting. In his many scenes with Clemmett’s Mozart, Mays comes off as so genuinely attentive and supportive that you might find yourself wishing, against all sense, that the earnestness was genuine, and that the genius might be recognized and the arts fully supported. But this is Vienna, not Pasadena, so…
Ensemble in ‘Amadeus’ at the Pasadena Playhouse
Jeff Lorch
The first sight that greets a Playhouse upon lights going down is enough to elicit a very slight gasp from an audience. Behind a scrim painted with the notes of Mozart’s “Phantasie für eine Orgelwalze,” there’s the first glimpse of the magically elongated room that will remain the show’s sole set, a sight that’s intriguing and eye-tickling enough to leave you feeling just fine about the prospect of no major scenic changeovers for the next three hours. It’s a forced-perspective rendering of a hall that seems to extend halfway to Pasadena’s Old Town. (Later on, that will make for a pretty good visual gag when the actor who’s by far the tallest in the show, Matthew Patrick Davis as Emperor Joseph II, climbs through one of the small doors on the far end.) Part of the ensemble stands supernaturally perched over this crimson room, elevated, like a biblical cloud of witnesses gathered to watch the beginning of this slightly demonic fable.
And then, for most of the introductory stretch, it is Mays’ scenery to chew — and we say that lovingly, because he is a bit like a fleshier version of the Crypt Keeper, when we meet him in his most rickety capacity, not so much raging against the dying of the light as against the memory of the frenemy, Mozart, who died 33 years earlier. Mays is wheelchair-bound for this wheezing prelude, so there’s a bit of a magic act that seems to happen when he is transformed into a young Salieri for most of what follows. Fellow cast members turn the chair around and perform some ministrations, and when we suddenly see him turned back around, transformed, we’re convinced they must have done some kind of makeup job while Mays’ back was turned. But then it happens again, later in the play, with the actor facing the audience, and we realize that really all that happened in either transformation is the addition or removal of a wig that covers up a bald pate and age spots. The second instance is kind of an “illusionist reveals the trick” moment, and the trick is… maybe not so surprisingly… acting.
Jefferson Mays in ‘Amadeus’ at the Pasadena Playhouse
Jeff Lorch
Once we’ve gotten quite a good dose of that openng spittle, the action moves on to scenes from decades earlier being recalled by Salieri — a character that has been called an unreliable narrator over the years, but actually seems a lot more reliable than he’s been given credit for. Having been warned that a former child prodigy is coming to town, Salieri first happens to spy Mozart playing a naughty game of hide-and-seek with his wife-to-be, Constanze Weber (Lauren Worsham), in and out of her skirt. Maybe it’s meant to be suggested that Salieri is remembering Mozart as more childish than he really was. But beyond some introductory goofiness, the composer that many consider the greatest of all time is not portrayed as being as much of an idiot savant as he was in the Milos Forman movie. Then, Tom Hulce gave us certainly the most vivid Mozart we could ever get, with that unforgettable giggle. That was a fine choice, in drawing sharp contrasts for a fable about how unchoosy the Almighty can be in picking his prime vessels. But to the extent that audiences may want to believe that the character really could have composed all those masterpieces — with or without channeling the divine — it may be helpful to have him feel more grounded, as in the portrayal here by Clemmett (known for “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story” and playing Albus Potter on Broadway in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”). He veers more toward adult than child in the man/boy equation, but we see just enough of him as a sweetly arrogant Li’l Rascal to understand why a humorless rival might devote his life to ruining him. He’s Goofus, to Salieri’s Gallant, but also touched by God, a mixture that never gets old, or at least hasn’t since 1979.
Sam Clemmett and Lauren Worsham in ‘Amadeus’ at the Pasadena Playhouse
Jeff Lorch
If you really started to internalize the themes in “Amadeus,” you might start to develop a mid-show ulcer to rival whatever maladies there are that begin to sap Mozart of his strength. Every time Salieri starts to fool Mozart again, you may have the impulse to shout at the stage the way someone might at a horror movie screening. The idea that some of the greatest artists of all time were treated poorly or forgotten during their lifetimes? That’s about as upsetting to dwell on as anything in the news right now. So it’s a good thing that Mays is able to make Salieri actually feel like a good hang, however hatable he might be. The framing device for the play makes it pretty clear how things are going to turn out, so there’s only so much creeping dread to deal with as we see Mozart be dealt the bad cards of poverty, illness and notes about “too many notes.” There’s plenty of satisfying comic justice to come when Salieri is left alone to his own devices — and to spend a lot of climactic alone time with the audience — long after his personal bete noire is gone. He suffers a fate worse than death: living too long. And boy, does Mays wring some laughs out of that, even as he appears increasingly corpselike.
There are so many pleasures along the way, even if that tiny knot is developing in your stomach. Like: some great tunes. The instrumentation is pre-recorded, naturally. (If you do want to hear a full orchestra play this stuff, there will be a live-to-picture performance at the Hollywood Bowl on Sept. 3, with the L.A. Phil delivering every cue.) But there are some real operatic voices on stage for the performance scenes, principally Michelle Allie Drever and Alaysha Fox, and it’s like taking a wonderful vacation from all the seriocomic anxiety any time real singers pop in to show us what all the verbal jousting and jealousy has been about. Rock me, “Amadeus,” indeed.
Is there an appetite to revive “Amadeus” on Broadway? There ought to be. (Right now there’s a five-part Sky series that adapts this same material that has been just picked up by Starz for the U.S., which may offer an indication of how much hunger Americans have to see a variation on this particular cat-and-mouse game right now.) It’s hard not to believe that if producers were to keep building a house for Mays to do his thing, they will come. Certainly all of us who’ve suffered from imposters’ syndrome at one point or another deserve a chance to come identify with, if not bow to, the ultimate embodiment of a guy tortured with the secret knowledge that he really is overrated. No one will ever play just-good-enough greater than Mays does.
“Amadeus” runs at the Pasadena Playhouse through March 15. For tickets, call 626-356-7529 or visit Pasadena Playhouse.
