{"id":305923,"date":"2026-05-08T12:23:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T12:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/305923\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T12:23:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T12:23:09","slug":"amadeus-review-a-new-longer-take-on-peter-shaffers-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/305923\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Amadeus’ review: A new, longer take on Peter Shaffer’s play"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My first thought upon learning that \u201cAmadeus,\u201d the award-winning play and film, had been made into a miniseries, premiering Friday on Starz, was \u201cwell, this could be interesting.\u201d And of course it could, though a successful work of film<\/a> is rarely improved by making it twice as long, and given that playwright Peter Shaffer was also the screenwriter, and Milo\u0161 Forman the director of the movie, the project struck me, too, as something of a fool\u2019s errand. <\/p>\n

Still, foolishness can sometimes bring good results; there are good results here, and some less than good. One might say it is less than the sum of its parts; if in the end I was not moved in the way I was surely meant to be \u2014 the five-part series is a little repetitious, a little exhausting \u2014 there was much to like along the way. It did prove interesting.<\/p>\n

Written by Joe Barton (creator of the wonderful sentimental Christmas thriller \u201cBlack Doves\u201d<\/a>), this new \u201cAmadeus\u201d somehow qualifies as both an interpretation and a remake. By nature, a play changes from performance to performance, depending on the director, players, designers and so forth, while keeping the text intact. (Usually.) (As Times theater critic Charles McNulty wrote, reviewing a revival<\/a> at the Pasadena Playhouse this February, every \u201cAmadeus\u201d staging \u201chas one foot in the Vienna of Mozart and another foot in whatever period the production is taking place in.\u201d) In a film remake, even the text is up for grabs. Barton\u2019s \u201cAmadeus\u201d does both, honoring Shaffer\u2019s structure, themes and events while tossing in a lot of new business \u2014 they\u2019ve got to fill that extra time with something, and somehow, it wasn\u2019t more music \u2014 to varying effect.<\/p>\n

Shaffer built his play from the actual, completely unsupported rumor that Mozart (Will Sharpe) was poisoned by Antonio Salieri (Paul Bettany), a rival composer in the Viennese court of Austrian emperor Joseph II (Rory Kinnear); although, as an unreliable narrator, all that matters is that Salieri, telling his tale from the future, believes he was somehow responsible for the composer\u2019s death. The argument of the play is this: As a young man, Salieri had asked God to make him a great and famous composer; he\u2019s done well, but is jealous of and confused by the newly arrived Mozart, a greater talent who seems a conduit for the divine inspiration Salieri lacks, while being vulgar, boisterous, licentious and sure of his superiority in a way another composer might find insulting. (He is also, comparatively, a guileless, pure spirit.) And so, as court composer and Mozart\u2019s boss, he determines to do all he can to undermine the newcomer \u2014 much of the plot has to do with these shenanigans, with some new ones inserted by Barton \u2014 ultimately deciding that the only thing to do is murder him.<\/p>\n

An antagonist who feels himself a protagonist, Salieri is the main character of the play, and to a great extent, the film, while Mozart functions as the unwitting instrument through which Salieri loses his faith in God. Barton builds up Mozart\u2019s role, with emphasis on his home life, which he fills with discord and challenges of his own devising. Librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (Enyi Okoronkwo) is promoted to chief fellow party animal and tempter, showing up at Mozart\u2019s door draped in women. Mozart\u2019s missus, Constanze (Gabrielle Creevy), is a much bigger presence here than before, extending into scenes set after the composer\u2019s death. She\u2019s made the ear into which Salieri pours his late-life confessions, and in an even later episode is visited by Alexander Pushkin (Jack Farthing), the Russian writer, who wants to write a play based on the Mozart-Salieri legend. (Pushkin did, in fact, write his \u201cMozart and Salieri,\u201d which has been accounted as the inspiration for \u201cAmadeus.\u201d Meta!)<\/p>\n

The actors are all very fine. Casting sexy, hunky Sharpe as Mozart \u2014 quite in contrast to the movie\u2019s Tom Hulce, with his Harpo Marx energy and strange explosive giggle \u2014 signals that this is meant to be a Serious Take on the material. (The animated opening credits, in which a sheep is disemboweled to make violin strings, underscores the impression.) Bettany, too, is more tamped down, more monkish as Salieri than his Oscar-winning screen predecessor, F. Murray Abraham. The series, which can run to melodrama, with lead director Julian Farino piling on flash montages and tipsy camera effects, is best when these two are simply talking; Mozart is unable to recognize Salieri\u2019s antipathy through his assumed cordiality (he\u2019s simple that way), and Salieri is honestly intrigued by Mozart despite himself.<\/p>\n

Biopics are suspect as a class, though \u201cAmadeus,\u201d which is so clearly a work of the imagination, gets at least a partial pass. The series, which filmed in Bucharest, Hungary \u2014 not all that far from Vienna \u2014 recreates some documented events, including Mozart\u2019s famous piano duel with Muzio Clementi and a funeral for his pet starling, and it is, of course, full of period pomp. We get glimpses of \u201cThe Abduction From the Seraglio,\u201d \u201cThe Marriage of Figaro\u201d and \u201cThe Magic Flute\u201d \u2014 operas, apart from the unfinished \u201cRequiem\u201d that figures in Salieri\u2019s final plot, are practically the only works mentioned here because they have plots and characters and can be used to suggest dubious psychological motivations on the part of the composer. \u201cDon Giovanni\u201d somehow becomes about Mozart\u2019s father issues. (You would not know from \u201cAmadeus\u201d that the man wrote 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos and so on.)<\/p>\n

The broader biographical facts are obeyed, but \u201cAmadeus\u201d is fundamentally ahistorical, and sometimes implausible: It is to be trusted only as television.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My first thought upon learning that \u201cAmadeus,\u201d the award-winning play and film, had been made into a miniseries,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[128776,86516,128772,67164,1758,1924,128774,2641,14876,128773,48,52,51,47,50,49,86515,3238,44242,128775,8843],"class_list":["post-305923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-alexander-pushkin","tag-amadeus","tag-antonio-salieri","tag-composer","tag-director","tag-film","tag-five-part-series","tag-foot","tag-god","tag-joe-barton","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mozart","tag-play","tag-plot","tag-shaffer","tag-way"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}