Unfair to Middling
Amadeus is a bloated trifle of a play.
Ilove highbrow theater. Also lowbrow theater. What I despise is middlebrow theater with pretensions, which brings us to Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, a bloated trifle of a play currently enshrined in a mystifying production at the Wilma Theater.
By now, the whole world must know Shaffer's specious premise — that Antonio Salieri, the favored court composer in Vienna, attempted to undermine the career of newcomer W. A. Mozart. Salieri, a good suck-up, is merely a competent hack. Mozart is a giggling idiot but a genius. Salieri plots to avenge the injustice of it all, and achieves what history will reveal as a merely temporary victory.
Though seemingly chock-full of facts, Amadeus is rubbish. One could scarcely catalog the many vulgarities of Shaffer's script (and I don't mean the silly fart jokes): radical oversimplification, tired clichés about court intrigue, an especially crude portrayal of Mozart's wife, Constanze (in fact, she was a musician of note). I could go on, but why?
OK, so there are millions of shitty plays. What's the big deal about this one? Because Amadeus isn't merely bad — it's insidious. Shaffer, a Salieri among playwrights if ever there was one, works a smug faux-literateness that allows the audience to congratulate themselves on their elevated tastes. Running nearly three hours, the show is designed to knock us out with its importance, but the endless, repetitive scenes (Salieri newly stunned by every Mozart score) add length, not depth.
And then there's Jiri Zizka's production — or what seem like elements from two competing productions. First is a visual world filled with panache: cartoonish black-and-white images literally spill across the stage and into the house, filling the theater with distorted chandeliers and spooky draperies. Photographs and video are projected onto this Hogarth-meets-Dali frame, and while it's very busy, it's also pretty stunning. (Unnecessarily literal, though — we don't need a wig framing the proscenium arch to understand this is happening inside Salieri's head.)
But against this ambitiously rethought setting is a dull staging of Amadeus, with performances full of hammy posturing and fakery. The enigmatic question of the evening has nothing to do with Mozart or Salieri — it's how a director with such a cultivated imagination appears not to be able to distinguish good acting from bad. Amid the darkness, there's a saving grace. Sound designer Adam Wernick has picked exceptionally fine recorded performances of Mozart's works, and these are interspersed very effectively throughout. The excerpts are short, but they make their point: Mozart wins out, after all.
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