The Shaw Festival Review: Tim Carroll’s “Amadeus” lets Mozart’s music soar while Salieri’s great confession struggles to ignite
By Ross
“Pardon your assassin,” the aging Salieri cries, pleading with a God he believes has betrayed him as whispers of scandal fill the air around us. The two Venticelli, Julia Course and Sochi Fried, pose deliciously on the edges of the Shaw Festival’s Amadeus, gathering and delivering gossip with sharp, stylized precision, their tight Whispering choreography giving the opening an almost conspiratorial energy. What exactly is Salieri confessing to? What terrible thing has this old man carried with him all these years? “Did he do it after all?” becomes the question infiltrating the air in the room as Salieri, old and reclined in his armchair, releases his servants into the night and begs for the ghosts of the past to become visible. Peter Shaffer (Equus) expertly gives us a confession built around envy, faith, genius, and revenge from the first note, and director Tim Carroll’s production begins by promising that we are about to enter the darkest corners of a man’s guilt, shame, and anger, believing he has waged a war against God himself.
Embodying that bitter frame, Tom Rooney (ShawFest’s Heartbreak House) plays Salieri with almost painstaking care. We watch this aging composer, bathed in emotion, summon the people who populated the most consequential years of his life. The house lights that come up during the opening, however, briefly disrupt that intimacy, holding the audience in the house lights long enough for the theatrical spell to falter before we are finally returned to darkness. Salieri then takes us back to 1781, and we lean in, wondering just how dark this journey is going to be. The slanted playing floor gives the production an immediate physical instability as the actors navigate the world of the Viennese court. Its purpose, though, remains elusive beyond giving everyone a slightly treacherous surface upon which to move. Salieri tells us that this is the beginning of his downfall, the moment when his honoured and pious existence begins to unravel with the arrival of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and the production needs that descent to feel like a gathering storm.
Michael Therriault (ShawFest’s Anything Goes) gives us plenty of it. His Mozart is a rambunctious powerhouse of physical and vocal energy, a brilliant composer trapped inside the body of a man who seems incapable of behaving appropriately in polite society. He giggles, flings himself around the court and arrives with “such gaiety of spirit,” immediately becoming the performing monkey that Salieri sees before him. The joke, of course, is that the clownish figure everyone is watching contains music of extraordinary genius, and Therriault makes the contradiction wonderfully alive. Mozart’s behaviour becomes increasingly infuriating precisely because his talent is so undeniable and his vision is so modern and alive, while Salieri is forced to stand before a gift he believes God has deliberately withheld from him. As Mozart’s wife, Constanze, Kristi Frank (ShawFest’s On The Razzle) brings another kind of intelligence to the story, playing her with a sharp, pragmatic instinct that cuts through the elaborate machinery of the court. Her encounter with Salieri disturbs the very air around them, as his pathetic attempt at seduction gives way to anger, desperation, and an ugly threat. Graeme Somerville’s Emperor Joseph II walks a similarly dynamic line, delivering the monarch’s catchphrases, “Well, there it is!” and “too many notes,” with immaculate comic timing while keeping the Emperor recognizably superficial and musically inept without turning him into a hollow joke.
The main problem is that the fire at the centre of Amadeus never fully catches. Salieri tells us that this is his “war with God and Amadeus,” yet Rooney’s performance remains so measured and controlled that the hatred driving the confessional rarely breaks through the surface. There is a sinister quality buried inside this man, but it remains too carefully contained, and without feeling the depth of Salieri’s brokenness, his actions begin to lose their terrible logic. That moment when he realizes that the joke God has played upon him needs to feel unbearable: he has devoted his life to serving a God who has granted transcendent musical genius to a man Salieri considers a vulgar fool. That contradiction should be almost physically painful. Instead, the production often leaves Salieri standing at a measured distance from his own outrage, and the connection between the two composers consequently never develops the psychological tension the play requires.
The court around them often feels caught in the same restraint. Course and Fried’s Venticelli are an effective exception, their whispering bodies turning gossip into a kind of theatrical current that moves information through Vienna like electricity. The secondary court figures, Andrew Broderick’s Count Johann Kilian von Strack, Allan Louis’s Count Franz Orsini-Rosenberg, and Savion Roach’s Baron Gottfried van Swieten, provide a bureaucratic wall of resistance, although the production never gives them quite enough weight to create the suffocating obstacles against which Mozart is struggling. Judith Bowden’s richly detailed period costumes supply much of the visual life that the court scenes require, giving the characters a sumptuous social identity and attitude. Kevin Lamotte’s lighting adds evocative tableaus and carefully shaped atmosphere, helping the production find visual moments of grandeur that the set itself rarely generates.
That sparseness becomes particularly noticeable in the central playing space. The elevated, treacherously slanted floor gives the actors something physical to contend with, but the production never quite turns that instability into a meaningful dramatic language or strong metaphor. The table that slides in to become a makeshift pianoforte is economical and functional, yet its very economy shrinks the grand public world around Mozart and Salieri. This is a story about genius being recognized, resisted, and manipulated within the glittering court of Vienna, but the stage rarely gives that world the sense of scale it requires. The famous music provides a much-needed boost of grandeur that the scenery withholds, and when Mozart’s compositions fill the space, the production suddenly seems to remember the magnitude of the story it is telling. Paul Sportelli’s musical supervision is essential to those moments, because the music itself carries a majesty that the staging does not always manage to manufacture.
The production moves through the story’s major events with competence, but the dramatic arc remains surprisingly muted. The first act ends without the eruption we have been waiting for, shooing us all out for a shared bathroom break that ignites nothing powerful, and when Act Two returns, Salieri’s revenge continues without the necessary acceleration of fury. The production has everything it needs to sizzle: one man possesses divine musical genius while another is possessed by the knowledge that he will never possess it himself, only witness it in another. Yet the conflict rarely feels as dangerous as the premise suggests. Mozart’s brilliance and ridiculousness keep the show moving, and Therriault gives the production moments of genuine theatrical electricity, but the dramatic pressure depends upon Salieri’s pain becoming unbearable and red hot, and that fire never fully builds. The result is a curious tension between the famous music soaring through the theatre and the man who is supposed to be consumed by his painful realization that he is unable to create it.
Amadeus is a fascinating piece of theatricality that fills the air with madness and music. It asks us to sit inside the mind of a man who believes he has been personally insulted by God, then watch him turn that grievance into a campaign against the person who received the gift he wanted for himself. That should be a confessional lit by fire, fueled by shame, rage, and terrible self-awareness. Rooney gives Salieri dignity, intelligence, and control, but the production needs the wound festering beneath those qualities to remain unbearable. Therriault’s Mozart provides the spark for that fire to roar. Yet Salieri keeps asking us to witness his anguish without quite allowing us to feel its heat. He has spent a lifetime listening to music he believes should have been his, and now he is asking us to understand what that knowledge did to him. The music answers him beautifully. His fury never quite does.