Spinning Tree Theatre’s talented cast cannot overcome a marathon Amadeus
About halfway through the first act of Amadeus, the final production of Spinning Tree Theatre’s season, the couple behind me stopped paying attention.
I knew because they had started whispering about Robert Gibby Brand — who plays Antonio Salieri, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s bitter rival — instead of listening to him. “He memorized so many lines,” the woman confided reverently during one of Brand’s monologues.
It’s a compliment I always find grating — it says nothing about the strength of the performer, beyond the perishability of his short-term memory. And Robert Gibby Brand is a prodigious performer. His Salieri seethes, gloats, anguishes and lusts.
But truthfully, I wish he’d had far fewer lines to memorize. Peter Shaffer’s script — which unfolds over three hours — is packed with flowery linguistic arpeggios, needlessly repetitive movements and an overlong coda.
Thankfully, this is Spinning Tree Theatre, and director Michael Grayman has the cast and the vision to keep it on the rails.
Michael Reiser is alternately bewitching and repulsive as Mozart, especially in the first act. He races giddily through the court, making enemies as quickly as he makes music. Megan Herrera is note-perfect as his wife, Constanze, deploying schoolgirl giggles, sexpot pouts and matronly sighs as mood demands. On opening night, the energy surged (and the couple behind me stopped whispering) every time she stepped on stage.
Walter Coppage is charmingly oafish as Austria’s Emperor Joseph II. Amber McKinnon and Bob Wearing give the play an allegro boost as the gossipy, energetic Venticelli. And Matthew Joseph Schmidli infuses a minor role with a precision that makes us feel we know his character intimately — though, because he plays the sour Count Franz Orsini-Rosenberg, we’d rather not.
Amadeus plays at the Arts Asylum, a unique space with several snags for designers — a stage that towers over the seating units, a hospital-white ceiling that pulls focus from the stage, and cathedral-fuzzy acoustics with too few curtains to soak up the sound. Lighting designer Nicole Jaja and sound designer Jeff Eubank work well within those constraints. Still, with a mostly bare stage, much of the task of anchoring us in time falls to costumer Leah Mazur. She rises to the occasion with handsome, upholstery-look jackets for the men (tailored for Salieri to suggest greater girth than the svelte Gibby Brand can provide).
One of the play’s ongoing jokes is that Mozart’s compositions have “too many notes.” Though a clumsy critique of his music, it applies too well to Shaffer’s rendering of the man. Although Spinning Tree plays its collective heart out, even it can’t prevent an overstuffed script from deflating, in the finale, like a soufflé.
Amadeus
Through May 15 at the Arts Asylum
816-569-5277
Spinningtreetheatre.com
