Cynic's Delight - Beverley Pooley Redeems Wordy Stage Version Of 'Amadeus'

CYNIC'S DELIGHT

Beverley Pooley redeems wordy stage version of 'Amadeus'

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
NEWS ARTS WRITER

If it accomplishes little else, Ann Arbor Civic Theater’s “Amadeus” certainly makes a worthy showcase for that certified Ann Arbor thespian treasure, Beverley Pooley.

Clearly here's a performer who could charm the turban off the ayatollah. A “weekend” actor when he’s not busy pursuing his professorial duties at the University of Michigan Law School, Pooley has specialized in lending surging life to crusty/suave curmudgeons from Noel Coward to Captain Hook, characters for whom elocutionary venom comes as naturally as breathing.

It’s a cynic’s delight to watch Pooley, bedecked in waistcoat and old-man’s wrinkles, saber-tooth his way through the snarly testimony of Peter Shaffer’s Antonio Salieri — who yearned to “blaze like a comet across the firmament of Europe” as a composer, but was instead forced to hear God’s music funneled through “the voice of an obscene child,” i.e. the unruly Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Whether berating the Almighty for making him the “Patron Saint of Mediocrities,” or quietly sniffing at his musical contemporaries (“I have been listening to the cats in the courtyard...They are all singing Rossini”), Pooley’s sardonic Salieri is gloriously and maliciously in the groove. In fact one would be perfectly happy to listen to this wondrous actor, who serves as a combination narrator/philosopher, hiss and bite his way through a one-man show, trilling killer epigrams off his acrobatic tongue ’til the cows come home.

Sadly, Old Salieri is merely a single, albeit vital, cog in Shaffer's “Amadeus,” a sprawling history lesson that succeeds mostly in reminding us how much more enjoyable the subsequent movie version was. Few contemporary playwrights are as mercilessly long-winded as Shaffer; scarcely any seem similarly distended in torment over one’s dashed metaphysical yearning to hobnob with the gods. Does Shaffer really regard such yearnings a central tragedy of the human condition?

Weighed down in 18th-century angst, the stage “Amadeus” nearly founders in the wordy muck of Viennese court intrigue and foghorn philosophizing. So much so that Shaffer’s central, ironic point — that the gauche Mozart was undone less by Salieri than by the snobby indifference of a reactionary, musically tone-deaf ruling class — is likely to induce a yawny “So what? ” from a nodding-out audience.

This is true despite Civic director Ala Faik’s best efforts to infuse “Amadeus” with genuine crackle and snap. Powdered upper-class gossips infest the stage like buzzing bees, aglow with the latest Mozart scandal. Besides Pooley, Faik has coaxed an energetic and moving performance from co-star Duncan Williams, whose coarse, slope-shouldered Mozart regresses from comic to tragic with the startled look of one who can’t quite believe the disaster that’s befallen him.

Equally good is Kathleen Davies as wife Constanze, whose mutation from vivacious coquette to cynical frau reflects the gnawing terror of economic deprivation. Less successful is Faik’s decision to have two actors (instead of the traditional one) play Salieri: Though Stephen Skelley’s Young Salieri seems the embodiment of stiff-backed upper-crust corruption — all surface suavity and sub-surface bile — Skelley is all too reserved an actor to lend us even a glimpse of the jealous-artist rage that propels his character into the most heartless of offenses.

For all its hustle and bustle, Civic’s “Amadeus” is a rather somber production, its black-on-gray visual/emotional motif stoking viewer nostalgia for the gilded (and less wordy) opulence of “Amadeus” the movie. Yet even Milos Forman didn’t have Pooley, an actor capable of redeeming a production all by himself. Thank heaven he’s ours.

AMADEUS
Ann Arbor Civic Theater presents 'Amadeus,' by Peter Shaffer. Ala Faik, director; Christopher Korow and Wendy Wright, assistant directors; Adonis El-Mohtar and Bob Seaman, set design; Sally West, costume design; Johanna Broughton, lighting design; Peter Greenquist, sound design. Cast includes Beverley Pooley, Stephen Skelley, Duncan Williams, Kathleen Davies, Christopher Korow, Marty Smith, Tom Wieder, Skip Bailey, plus supporting actors. Amadeus will continue at Lydia Mendelssohn Theater through Sunday. For ticket Information call 662-7282.

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