PATRON SAINT OF THE SECOND-RATE

A rigorously intelligent and theatrically thrilling
revival that restores Shaffer’s parable to full force

Schopenhauer once drew a distinction between talent, which hits a target no one else can hit, and genius, which hits a target no one else can see. The remark could serve as an epigraph for Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, a play that has been circling this idea since its 1979 première at the National Theatre, with Paul Scofield and Simon Callow, and that has now received what may be its most fully realized American staging in decades. At Pasadena Playhouse, under the direction of Darko Tresnjak, with Jefferson Mays as Salieri and Sam Clemmett as Mozart, the play sheds its accumulated reputation as a costume drama warhorse and reveals itself again as what it always was: a parable about the silence of God, dressed up in wigs and Rococo gilt. It is, in fact, the most thrilling American staging of Amadeus in a generation.

Sam Clemmett

The play finds Salieri in 1825, on the night of his death at seventy four, more than three decades after Mozart’s own end at thirty five. The citizens of Vienna are whispering “Salieri” and “assassin” in the same breath, and the old composer, hearing the rumors circle him like dogs, begins to confess. The confession carries us back to 1781 and to the Schönbrunn Palace library, where Salieri first encounters Mozart. The Mozart who appears is not the serene prodigy of popular imagination. He is a big haired, potty mouthed man child chasing Constanze Weber, his landlady’s daughter, through the furniture, giggling and meowing and threatening to “pounce pounce” and “scrunch munch” his “little mouse wouse.” Salieri is appalled. The shock, however, is nothing compared to what follows: his first real exposure to Mozart’s music, which arrives with the force of revelation.

Sam Clemmett and Lauren Worsham

Awe curdles into envy almost immediately, the seeds planted when the young Austrian takes a march Salieri has composed in his honor, a piece Salieri himself knows to be “extremely banal,” and transforms it offhandedly into something astonishing. Later, in one of the play’s most celebrated scenes, Salieri leafs through a stack of Mozart’s manuscripts, and both he and the audience hear the notes lift off the page, and in that instant the scope of what he is up against becomes inescapable. It is Salieri’s recognition that his first impression of the young man’s gifts was no accident, that the talent is bottomless and the gap between them permanent, that sends him down a path from which neither composer will return.

Jefferson Mays

I should say at the outset that Amadeus is an imperfect vehicle. Shaffer’s dramaturgy can be heavy handed; he tends to italicize his themes, and there are stretches in the second act where Salieri’s narration over explains what the staging has already made plain. The court scenes occasionally flatten into editorial cartoons about institutional mediocrity. And the play’s treatment of Constanze betrays a structural weakness: she exists primarily as a function of the rivalry between the two men. These are old complaints. They are also, in this production, largely beside the point, because Tresnjak and his company have found a way to stage the play that makes its flaws feel like the flaws of an ambitious mind rather than a complacent one.

Sam Clemmett, Jefferson Mays and Ensemble

The production operates as a memory play, and Alexander Dodge’s scenic design makes that commitment physical in ways I have not seen before. He has constructed a red and gold Baroque chamber in forced perspective, so that the room appears to recede toward two tiny doors at upstage center, shrinking as it goes. Wall sconces and candle holders, built by the Playhouse’s on site scene shop, diminish in scale as they approach the back wall. The trick descends from the Bibiena family and their eighteenth-century stage illusions, those vertiginous painted perspectives that made small court theaters feel infinite, but Dodge repurposes it for psychological ends: the room collapses inward, toward obsession, which is the opposite of what Baroque perspective was designed to do and exactly what this production needs it to do. When Matthew Patrick Davis, playing Emperor Joseph II, folds himself through those miniature upstage doors and proceeds downstage in two inch period heels, suddenly enormous, the audience registers not a man entering a room but a figure inflating to grotesque size inside Salieri’s anxious imagination. I did not expect scenery to make me uneasy, but it did. Every surface in Dodge’s design is telling you something untrue, and the pleasure of watching it is inseparable from the knowledge that you are being deceived.

Jefferson Mays and Sam Clemmett (photo by Jenny Graham)

No computer automation anywhere in the production. Flats, escape stairs, rolling platforms. A mobile throne operated by antiquated hand winches. In a theatrical climate saturated with LED walls and programmed spectacle, this feels quietly defiant, and also faintly precarious, because handmade things can fail in ways that programmed things cannot, and the audience knows it. There is an uncomfortable irony here that the production is wise enough not to underline: the craftsmanship on display behind the scenes, skilled and painstaking and human scaled, is doing work that closely resembles the craftsmanship Salieri practices onstage. Both are admirable. Neither is genius.

The Ensemble

Mays’s Salieri is, by a wide margin, the finest performance I have encountered on a Los Angeles stage this season, and possibly in several seasons. The role is a trap. It invites scenery chewing; it rewards self pity; it can curdle into a three hour whine. Mays sidesteps all of this by locating the character not in his emotions but in his intelligence. His Salieri sees clearly, thinks precisely, and suffers because his perceptions outstrip his abilities. The cruelty of the part, which Mays understands better than any actor I have seen attempt it, is that Salieri’s discernment is itself a kind of affliction: he can identify perfection but not produce it, which is a theological problem as much as a professional one. He sustains a double register across nearly three hours, narrating his own past with dry control while simultaneously losing composure inside the memories he is recounting. The erosion is so gradual you barely notice it happening. I realized halfway through that I had stopped taking notes; I was simply watching, held in place, which is not something I am inclined to admit in print. When his declaration of war against God finally erupts, it lands with force because he has built a man who would never, under ordinary circumstances, raise his voice.

Jefferson Mays

Sam Clemmett’s Mozart operates on something closer to electrical instability. He shifts from boyish stupidity to startling artistic focus so rapidly that the transitions feel involuntary. The laugh is shrill and socially ruinous, but it lands as genuine neurological misfiring rather than actorly flourish. He does not sand the rough surfaces. And when the music arrives, there is a moment, visible mostly in his eyes, when the chaos organizes itself into something focused and terrifying. The genius does not announce itself. It interrupts.

Jennifer Chang and Hilary Ward

The ensemble sustains the world. Jennifer Chang and Hilary Ward play the Venticelli, the whispering gossips who feed Salieri his intelligence, with a rhythmic precision that turns exposition into something closer to a musical duet. John Lavelle’s Orsini-Rosenberg is a bureaucratic predator who barely needs to move to convey menace. The operatic voices, including Michelle Allie Drever and Alaysha Fox, perform extended passages of Mozart live, and the difference between live singing and recorded playback in this context is the difference between weather and a photograph of weather. You feel the air in the room change. The balance is delicate and largely invisible.

Sam Clemmett, Jefferson Mays and Ensemble

Shaffer’s play has always attracted complaints about historical accuracy. The real Salieri was not a murderer. These objections miss the play’s actual project. Shaffer was constructing a parable about the distribution of grace. If genius arrives unearned, if it lodges in a vessel that does not deserve it by any conventional standard of discipline, what happens to faith? Salieri’s rage is not professional jealousy in evening dress. It is the sound of a worldview breaking apart.

The Ensemble

The last Broadway revival, Peter Hall’s 1999 production, was not so much bad as inert: workmanlike direction, uninspired scenery, and a central performance from David Suchet that made Salieri too sympathetic too early, draining the second act of its theological stakes. Michael Sheen’s Mozart, meanwhile, played the vulgarity so relentlessly that the genius underneath never quite surfaced. That production did the play a disservice that lingers to this day, and this Pasadena staging refutes the assumption it created, that the play has exhausted its theatrical life. Broadway has not revived it in more than twenty six years, which now feels less like caution than negligence.

I left the theater shaken and a little furious at the universe, exactly as Shaffer intended.

The Schopenhauer distinction holds. Talent hits a target no one else can hit. The rest of us stand around watching, which is its own kind of wound, and which is the only subject this play has ever really had.

Sam Clemmett and Jefferson Mays

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photos by Jeff Lorch

Amadeus
Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave. in Pasadena
ends on March 15, 2026
for tickets, call 626.356.7529 or visit Pasadena Playhouse

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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