>>REVIEW
AMADEUS
Alberta Theatre Projects
Runs until October 9
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
>>REVIEW
STAGE STRUCK
Vertigo Mystery Theatre
Runs until October 9
Vertigo Playhouse (Tower Centre)
Amadeus and I have a bit of a history. You see, the original 1980-81 New York production of Peter Shaffer’s play, starring Ian McKellen and Tim Curry, was one of the first shows I saw on Broadway. I was so blown away, I went to see it again the following year in London, where it had premièred in 1979, and caught the late, great Frank Finlay (Olivier’s Iago) as Salieri. Ever since then, all subsequent productions I’ve seen have had to live up to those beloved – if probably idealized — memories.
That said, I quite enjoyed the new Amadeus at ATP, a lively, youthful production directed by Bob White with some of the same brashness and irreverence as Shaffer’s cocky Mozart. If you’re expecting a faithful piece of museum theatre, forget it – this version employs colour-blind casting, with black actor Nigel Shawn Williams as the northern Italian composer Salieri, and such cheerful anachronisms as having Christian Goutsis’s Wolfgang appear in an ensemble of ratty wig, frock coat, jeans and sneakers, looking like a member of a ’60s British art-rock band.
Williams plays Mozart’s nemesis with winning brio, beginning as a crippled, palsied old man, his face half-drooping from a presumed stroke, who claims to have poisoned the long-dead genius, then slipping smoothly back in time to his heyday as a popular court composer, his chest puffed with pride, his lips pursed with the exquisite taste that makes him the prodigy’s most appreciative critic as well as his bitterest enemy. Listening to his rival’s serenades and operas, he manifests externally Salieri’s inner conflict, at once blissfully transported by artistic perfection and writhing in agony with professional jealousy.
As unrestrained young Wolfy, who commits professional suicide every time he opens his mouth, Goutsis comes off as a hopeless innocent, even when he’s insulting people in his cups or burbling scatological baby talk – he’s like a lovable bad puppy that can’t be housebroken. But in his final scenes when, alone, sick and death-haunted, he struggles to compose the Requiem before he meets the reaper, Goutsis fails to suggest the man’s descent into illness and despair.
Adrienne Smook takes the rather thankless role of Mozart’s wife, too easily played as a ditz, and makes her a naïve but strong character. And there is great, good-humoured support from the eight other cast members playing various aristocrats and servants, especially Doug McKeag’s faux-merry Emperor Joseph II, Grant Linneberg’s heartless opera director and Gerald Matthews’s sympathetic but sober-sided baron.
White’s staging is brisk and economical, on a simple set by Scott Reid consisting mostly of silvery round arches, with some superb, painterly lighting from Brian Pincott and playful costumes by Jenifer Darbellay. For the unfamiliar, this is a fine introduction to a famous play.
STAGE STRUCK
Like Amadeus, Simon Gray’s Stage Struck made its debut in London in ’79 – but it’s a much less distinguished mystery. A comedy thriller with a theatrical theme, it’s both second-rate Sleuth (which was authored, incidentally, by Peter Shaffer’s twin brother Anthony) and second-rate Gray – a playwright who, at his best, gave us those poignant teacher comedies, Butley and Quartermaine’s Terms. Stephen Hair – who, also incidentally, co-starred in Theatre Calgary’s production of Quartermaine’s Terms in the mid-’80s – stars in Vertigo’s revival of Stage Struck as the fussy househusband to a famous West End actress, who has chucked his career as a stage manager to live on her earnings and pamper her in return. But when his wife (Heather Lea MacCallum) announces that she wants to split, he goes back into his SM mode and cunningly stages a Byzantine revenge plot.
The play has "potboiler" written all over it, with topical references to British labour strife and even a dig at Peter S.’s pre-Amadeus hit, Equus – jokes that pandered to the West End audiences of the day and which, of course, no longer get many laughs.
Veteran director Martin Fishman has updated some of the script, but he and his mostly veteran cast fail to rise above its mediocrity. Hair, a subtle actor when he wants to be, plays the flamboyant plotter in one shrill, upper-register note throughout. MacCallum as the bitchy star can’t seem to summon the energy to even spit a little venom – her performance is so tired, it should be put to bed. Chad Nobert as a stereotypical slovenly Aussie is handicapped by an unconvincing accent. Only Terry Lawrence, parachuted in during previews to replace the ailing Christopher Hunt, gives a nicely crafted portrayal as a gruff, domineering psychoanalyst who crumbles into a poor working-class sod when faced with imminent death.
The disappointment extends to the décor. Robert Shannon’s dull design for the couple’s converted Kent farmhouse gives no indication that this is the home of theatre people. I entered the Playhouse with an appetite for a cracking good comic mystery. I left still feeling hungry. |
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