Amadeus at Steppenwolf
In Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, genius is not just a blessing: It’s a declaration of war. Composer Antonio Salieri sees himself as one of its principal casualties. Once the darling of the 18th-century Viennese court, he watches in mounting horror as “the creature”—his term for the rising musical prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—launches an artistic takeover that endangers not just Salieri’s career but his very conception of himself. The scaffolding of his principles collapses beneath his suspicion that God has chosen someone else above him, and his devotion rots into destruction.
Amadeus | Photograph: Courtesy Michael Brosilow
Salieri never leaves the stage. Recounting his venomous rivalry from the safety of his deathbed, he is both Amadeus’s antagonist and its narrator, and his voice is the lens that refracts the entire story. Once he had offered his life in monastic devotion to music and to God; now he confesses how swiftly he turned away from both when Mozart revealed what true genius sounds like. In a lesser actor’s hands the role might wear thin, but Ian Barford, seasoned in Steppenwolf cynics since 2017’s Linda Vista, is magnetic. Salieri insists on being the omniscient puppeteer behind Mozart’s downfall, yet the audience can’t quite believe him. His envy is so vast it becomes its own orbiting body, circling a sun named Mozart.
That sun is played by David Darrow, whose Mozart radiates an irresistible, maddening charm. Darrow leans into the character’s impish, sophomoric...