Playwright: Peter Shaffer
At: Chicago Shakespeare Theater
at Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand
Phone: 312-595-5600; $54-$70
Runs through: Nov. 9
Jean-Paul Sartre was wrong. Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself, when you are cursed with the devastating self-awareness that no matter how hard you strive, mediocrity is the most you will ever achieve.
With playwright Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, director Gary Griffin illuminates the tortured despair and twisted lives that spring from such understanding. Shaped by Griffin's deep reservoir of insight and humanity, Amadeus is visually ravishing and emotionally ravaging. Thankfully, it is also leavened with humor, something indispensable in a tale this darkly intense. In all, Amadeus is a stunning fugue for virtuoso performers.
In Mozart ( Robbie Collier Sublett ) , we get a luscious portrait of a juvenile, irreverent genius who delights in fart jokes and tantrums and whose music is so sublime it seems to make the very stars weep.
Listen to Sublett's Mozart describe a quartet and its relation to infinity —the passage seems to rip a pinprick through the universe. Through that miniscule opening, audiences for a split second can glimpse something vast, transcendent and overwhelmingly beautiful.
In Mozart contemporary Antonio Salieri ( Robert Sella ) , we see the tragic, horrifying and self-induced corruption of a severely pious man who believes he's been abandoned by God. As Sella's cadaverous visage and haunted depiction make clear, self-awareness is a rusty razor slowly twisting in Salieri's gut, infecting his very blood while it cruelly eviscerates him from the inside out. Mozart's music, Salieri fully comprehends, is the closest thing most people will ever hear to the voice of God. By comparison, Salieri bitterly intones, his own compositions are 'lifeless scratches.'
'He, from the ordinary, created legends,' Salieri says in a voice as black and hopeless as the underworld, 'I, from legends, created only the ordinary.' A single line, it captures an entire, unbearable lifetime.
In tour-de-force morphing of sound design and perfectly modulated monologue, Salieri denies God in a scene so thrilling it verges on astonishing. Leafing through a portfolio of Mozart's manuscripts as a segment of 'Kyrie Eleison' swells in a heavenly sonic background, Salieri becomes consumed by disbelief, horror, awe and finally rage. By the time the final sheet has fluttered to the floor, he has become monstrous.
Sella and Sublett are surrounded by a supporting cast that is a privilege to behold. The triumvirate of Lance S. Baker ( as Emperor Joseph II ) and John Reeger and David Lively ( as courtroom toadies ) is uproarious from the emperor's stern warning against 'too many notes' to Reeger's Cotton Mather prototype as a baron born without a sense of humor.
Finally, Chicago Shakespeare's storied costume and set budgets are put to excellent use in Daniel Ostling's lavishly mirrored and frescoed set and Virgil Johnson's impossibly elaborate Enlightenment-era frocks. Restricted to playing only snippets of Mozart's greatest hits, sound designers Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen nevertheless capture the essence of the composer.
