The Play's the Thing

Tuesday night, I went to see the Denver Center Theater Company's production of the play Amadeus.

Some background for those who don't know. First, this is the stage play by Peter Shaffer, upon which the Oscar-winning film was based. Secondly, the DCTC is essentially the major professional theater in the city of Denver (though there are other professional locales, and plenty of others also doing good work).

Thirdly, I was in a local production of Amadeus at another theater here in town about nine years ago. (Our production got uniformly great reviews, and was picked for a short revival the following summer for "Theater in the Park.") Mainly due to this last tidbit, I was very curious to see what another theater company would do with the show. And actually, this isn't the first time I've seen someone else do Amadeus. During my years in Virginia Beach, I saw the professional stage company there also perform this play.

I wasn't the only one from that old production of mine that was interested in this new version. I attended the performance with a friend who worked the technical side of the show. And of all the nights we picked to go, we happened to run into the director of our production while we were there.

By now, my preamble has probably run as long as what I'll say about the show itself, so let's be on with it. In all, it was a very good staging of Amadeus. Their sets and costumes were incredible (and one would hope so, given how much more money they have at the DCTC than our theater had). Most of their cast was pretty good.

Their Salieri (the role played in the movie by F. Murray Abraham) was an interesting departure from ours. He found a lot of humorous moments in the role that our very severe actor missed. This Salieri was fun at times, while ours was all gravitas, all the time. It made for more of a "ride," with peaks and valleys, and that's quite good. But it made those "peaks" not as high, which was rather bad. Some moments in Amadeus call for extreme drama, and unfortunately this Salieri had the audience so predisposed to laugh at times that some people occasionally laughed at the wrong times. Plusses and minuses to both approaches, I'd say.

On the bad side, their sound design was awful. This is a play about music, arguably even more so than most musical theater. Our production played music to blasts you out of your seats at times, and had several complex, overlapping sound cues. Theirs seemed to play softly from speakers mounted way upstage, in a theater which clearly should have been capable of more.

And their Emperor (a role played in the movie by Jeffrey Jones of Ferris Bueller/Deadwood fame), was horrible. My friend put it perfectly: "I feel like I want to hunt down our guy now and tell him, 'man, I had no idea how important your part was in this show until I saw this other guy do it so badly.'"

But as I said, this production was still great overall. And most importantly, the play itself still works completely. Even after all these years, I found I still knew huge chunks of the dialogue (not just my own), but it still moved me. There's a reason this play is still performed so much, a reason why the film adaptation won Oscars, a reason why it is still popular after so many years.

And I was very glad to have had the chance to revisit it.