Mostly Mozart at the New Rep

Tim Spears as Mozart reacts to Salieri's machinations.  Photos: Andrew Brilliant.

Peter Shaffer's biggest hit, Amadeus (now at the New Rep through May 19), a highly fictionalized account of the relationship between composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is oft described as a battle royale between genius (Mozart) and mediocrity (Salieri).

Which is good enough, I suppose, as far as it goes.  But it leaves out one crucial fact.  

Which is that playwright Peter Shaffer himself is - well, something of a mediocrity.  Smart but not insightful, learned but rarely wise, Shaffer made a career out of seemingly criticizing small-mindedness while all the time indulging it.

Thus Shaffer's play works as a kind of pseudo-intellectual stand-up, but never really gets anywhere as drama - for his Salieri is all bitter one-liners; he's a tragic character sans anagnorisis (that is, epiphany); and his Mozart remains clueless to the end, too. Indeed, once the playwright lays out his mildly clever premise (that the jealously aloof Salieri poisoned brilliant-but-boorish Mozart as some sort of cosmic revenge on God), he can only work more and more tedious variations on his set-up, and never really digs beneath his own assumptions. In a way, it's as if Shaffer has constructed one of those Nabokovian follies, like Pale Fire, in which the lead character is unaware he is creating a devastating self-critique - but unfortunately Shaffer leaves the audience in the dark about it, too.

That gap has not prevented the play from being popular, though - people love its heavy irony, its Man-for-All-Seasons-level theology, and the way it gives them credit for artistic insights they wouldn't really have had on their own. But then the music of Salieri once wowed the crowds as well (although what that says about Shaffer's blockbuster I think the playwright may have never pondered).

Not that Amadeus isn't snarky fun. It is - for a while, at least (alas, the second act treads water). And certainly the New Rep has pulled out all the stops to put this middlebrow magnum opus over; they've mustered a large cast, a bold set, sumptuous costumes - the works.  

But even at its best, the play is only a vehicle - a tandem vehicle, perhaps, festooned with Broadway bells and whistles (and to be fair, many witty references to Mozart's oeuvre) but still a vehicle. As Salieri never develops into more than a stick figure, and Mozart remains a clown, the success of Amadeus boils down to its casting.  Essentially, if you have charismatic actors who are perfect for these roles, and can keep burrowing into them for three hours, a production can coast to the finish line on their star power.

But the New Rep hasn't been quite that lucky.  They're halfway home with Tim Spears' Mozart; he doesn't push the role's scatological jokes, and generally conveys a touchingly innocent, if infantile, vulnerability.  I have seen at least one Mozart who conjured from scraps in the script a growing awareness that God was basically as cold to him as he was to Salieri; but that was an exceptional case.  Spears is the best reason to see this show.

As Salieri, local star Benjamin Evett isn't as compelling, but this is almost an accident of casting - Thomas Derrah, a better fit for the role, reportedly withdrew from the production, and Evett graciously stepped in.  But Evett's easy-going, roguish stage presence is almost the opposite of what you'd want in Salieri (which is intended as a compliment); Evett has always been at his best playing confident, cocky dudes; if anything he should be playing Mozart, too.

Benjamin Evett comes to grips with Mozart's genius.

But he's stuck with the lead (left), and he does make a go of it in the play's stronger first half, which also contains most of Shaffer's best set-pieces, such as the moment Mozart makes mincemeat of a trudging Salieri march  (just btw, Salieri wasn't all that bad - judge for yourself). In short, Evett can do indignation.  He has more trouble with envy - but the secret handshake between envy and piety is essentially the sine qua non of the part. Particularly as Salieri seems so block-headed.

At the very top, the composer is clueless enough to offer God a deal (while God, as I recall, only makes deals on his own terms): in exchange for a pious life of Christian decorum, Salieri expects to be accorded fame (note he doesn't ask for talent). And God does grant him celebrity - He keeps his end of the bargain - but He also gives him Mozart, talented beyond measure, despite flaunting all the proprieties that Salieri staked his soul on. It's a pretty obvious life-lesson, but the scales never fall from Salieri's eyes.  Instead, actually insulted, he embarks on a "war" with Jehovah (guess who wins?).

And so Shaffer's script devolves into a tedious chess game in which Salieri is always one move behind the Almighty. But imagine how interesting Amadeus might have been if the emotionally crippled court composer changed his mind (after all, he's destroying the source of the music he adores, even fetishizes) - yet was unable to stop the cruel wheels he had set in motion?  Or what if Salieri began to appreciate his own evil, began to worry for his own soul (given his faith in God's presence, this seems all but inevitable?). In any number of ways, Amadeus could grip us to the end.

But no such luck. Schaffer tends to rigidly replicate a certain template (basically, a conventional bureaucrat destroys an ecstatic), and he elaborates that trope here, but can't transcend it.  So the cast at the New Rep does its best to pretend that we're still interested in the latest iteration of Salieri's hopeless battle royale (it's a bit like watching a Roadrunner cartoon in powdered wigs that runs for three hours).

Still, certainly there's plenty of talent on the stage, and director Jim Petosa keeps things moving with flair, although again, subtle casting issues sometimes undermine everyone's best efforts. The lovely and talented McCaela Donovan, for instance, looks far too elegant in Frances Nelson McSherry's gowns for us to believe she'd ever go slumming with the likes of Mozart. It's likewise a pleasure to see the gorgeous Esme Allen on stage again, but she's actually far too good for the part she's got.  On the plus side, Paula Langton makes an impression as one of Schaffer's gossips, as do Paul Farwell and Jeffries Thaiss as various over-dressed courtiers. And Russell Garrett puts an amusingly precise spin on the stupidity of Joseph II.

So there is always someone to watch on stage - and you can even admire the stage itself, too.  The costuming, as I've mentioned, is lavish, while Mary Ellen Stebbins' lighting is always imaginative.  And Cristina Todesco's set is quite brilliant: it features a central oculus - God's eye, literally - from which Mozart tumbles like a mote, and from which emanates the music of the spheres (its lid even turns out to be a cathedral's rose window).  I wish Shaffer's play was worth the efforts of all these talented people. But apparently that wasn't God's plan.

Sometimes "interesting failures" are still just failures . . .

The crazy kids of Assassins

Ah, the "interesting failure."  Every major theatrical artist has one, even Shakespeare - and Stephen Sondheim has a couple - among which Assassins, from 1990, has always been particularly prominent.  I think there's just something so outré about the concept of this revue (I guess it's a revue) that it has exerted a kind of siren call over the musical theatre even though - well, by now we know it really doesn't work.  I mean a musical about assassins?? That's got to be interesting, right?  Well, it failed interestingly at its premiere, and then it failed a little less interestingly in a New York revival, too.  It likewise failed - perhaps even less interestingly - in several regional productions.  And now it has failed again, exuding only a mild level of interest, in a production by the BU School of Theatre, under the direction of Jim Petosa, which closed last weekend.  (I know, another post-mortem - but I'm almost caught up.)

Not that Petosa didn't work hard - he discarded the original "Step right up and shoot the President!" staging, opting instead for a hopeless, breadline-in-the-Great-Recession mise en en scène that relied on a bullet-riddled American flag out of Jasper Johns (or maybe Nashville), and hinted that the show's assassins were being drawn right up out of the audience (i.e., the Masses).  These were good ideas, but they didn't, finally, do much good; I think at this point we can safely say that Assassins is, indeed, a failure, and it's pretty obvious why: its concept may be "interesting," but it only works as an excuse for Stephen Sondheim to stretch out in a number of savage parodies (Marvin Hamlisch is neatly skewered in "Everybody's Got the Right," for instance).  But this invitation to misanthropic indulgence only yields maybe two numbers that can stand up to the rest of the Sondheim canon, and in the meantime, dramatically - whoo-boy, is Assassins ever a mess.

There are so many things wrong with it, in fact, that it's hard for a critic to decide where to begin; which mistake is the central one?  The show is like a sprawling network of dramaturgical error.  But what leaps out at you from the history books, of course, is that America's assassins simply share no connecting thread; they don't have a communal "history," much less a "concept;" so when they speak to each other across the historical ether, as they constantly do in Assassins, there isn't really that much for them to talk about.  John Wilkes Booth, for instance, was a successful, famous actor who led a racist conspiracy.  But Squeaky Fromme was a pathetic lowlife who managed to consistently skirt a laundry list of crimes of really appalling sadism and squalor.  Other killers were loners deranged by obvious mental, or even physical, demons, and a few could be loosely grouped as avatars of the downtrodden immigrants of the late nineteenth century.  And of course Lee Harvey Oswald was a self-destructive cipher who may - or may not - have been the patsy of a kind of coup, but who certainly never communed with Booth on any assassins' astral plane, as posited here.

Although frankly, if librettist John Weidman's concept is a mess, then Petosa's is also a little murky.  We get the vague idea that the whole production is intended to help us "understand" the potential assassins now obviously lurking in the Tea Party.  But sorry, I'm still unsympathetic;  I'm just not the type to confuse patronization with fellow feeling. And frankly, I don't even think the nutty Tea Partiers are desperately seeking celebrity; theirs is simply an evil mix of racism and ignorance, with little of the need for personal validation which is the closest Sondheim & Co. ever come to a psychological explanation for their singing shooting gallery.

This is all too bad, really, because the kids at BU did give these killers their, um, best shot, and a few scenes, particularly those between the gonzo Melissa Carter and Casey Tucker (as Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme) kind of worked.  Elsewhere the singing is stronger than the acting, but things never really bog down, they just never come together, either.  Evan Gambardella does throw off a weird kind of pseudo-innocent energy as both the "Balladeer" and Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Zdrojeski, as John Hinckley, hints at dramatic potential the role doesn't allow him to access.  The rest of the cast is more scattershot, although everyone hits the bulls-eye here and there.  Still, is that enough to float another production of Assassins?  I talked briefly with director Jim Petosa about this after the show, and he argued that academic resources are better spent re-evaluating intriguingly troubled shows than in simply mounting sparkling new productions of the tried-and-true.  Well - maybe.  You might answer that with the observation that until a student triumphs in a true classic, he or she has no yardstick of actual success. Of course there's surely room for both options in any curriculum, I think - but in the meantime, can we please put a bullet in Assassins for good?

Lost on the Camino Real with Beau Jest.

But alas, the BU Theatre Department hasn't been the only local troupe sipping the "interesting failure" Kool-Aid of late. Across town, at the indomitable Charlestown Working Theater, the widely-respected Beau Jest is currently (no, this is not a post-mortem, it runs through next weekend) attempting to revive Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, the one-act source of perhaps Tennessee Williams' most legendary Broadway bomb, Camino Real.

Beau Jest had a hit last year with another Williams one-act, the much-later Remarkable Rooming House of Madame LeMonde; but this time around, I'm afraid they only manage to confirm that Ten Blocks is an artistic traffic jam of truly epic proportions. And I mean truly EPIC proportions; this thing makes Assassins look coherent.

The scuttlebutt on the full-length version's Broadway failure has always been that director Elia Kazan forced Williams' fantasia into a naturalistic straitjacket. Having now sat through the (abbreviated) first version, I can only say I kind of admire Kazan for at least trying to wrestle this embarrassment into some kind of shape (Beau Jest just lets the pieces fall where they may). It's essentially a pretentious pastiche in which Williams' usual hobbyhorses - the stud vs. the seductress, the wisdom of the fallen queen, and of course "life" vs. "death"- all meet in a kind of car crash on some cosmic Latin highway. There are a few poetic stretches, to be sure, along with a tone of amusingly deadpan political horror. There's atmospheric Day-of-the-Dead accompaniment from a live trio that sometimes helps paste things together.  But I'm afraid even when something works, it doesn't work for very long.

The Beau Jest version, directed by Davis Robinson, is nevertheless funkily likable, even though it doesn't come close to getting the dramatic job done. The basic problem is that these folks are essentially very smart comedians - so they nail the droll asides that Williams often wickedly slips into, but can't really convey at all the "wild and moving" sense of dramatic freedom the playwright thought he was unleashing. Gypsies re-growing their maidenheads as they dance wildly in the moonlight, death as a form of orgasm - sorry, much as I love 'em, this just ain't Beau Jest; imagine the Flight of the Conchords trying to do Blood Wedding and you've got roughly the situation here. As expected, the comic scenes - particularly an amusing shakedown by the local fortune teller - worked best; the orgasmic flights toward inevitable Death, less so. And then there were the ridiculous interpolations from Cervantes, Proust, and others (Don Quixote AND the Baron de Charlus both wander through!); Beau Jest offered a weak smile here at the playwright's own pretensions (Williams is hardly on a par with either writer), but couldn't make much more of these interludes.

Oh, well. I suppose I'm glad that I've seen this rarity, but I can't honestly say I'd willingly sit through it again. And perhaps it's time we began to formulate a critical approach - or even a mode of intervention - toward the temptations of the "interesting failure." A first precept might be to resist the illusion that audiences of the past were necessarily philistines (and at any rate, let's face it, even philistines sometimes have a point). The second might be to question the true "interest"of a failure that only rehashes, or just plain hashes, elements which reach obvious fruition - or at least balance - in an artist's other, successful works (as is the case with Ten Blocks). I mean, is it so "interesting" to discover that a particular gambit works in one way, but not another? Perhaps to an academic  - but rarely to an audience.

So it's Jim Petosa at the New Rep . . .

The announcement came in yesterday, but I didn't open it till this morning.  Jim Petosa of BU, who helmed the New Rep's recent success Three Viewings, and also directed Opus there, has been named the theatre's new Artistic Director.  I don't have time this morning to think this through (I've got laundry to do, then Wagner), although my reaction is generally positive.  The press release follows:

NEW REPERTORY THEATER NAMES
NEW ARTISTIC DIRECTOR JIM PETOSA

[WATERTOWN, MA, February 8, 2012] – Today, New Repertory Theatre names Jim Petosa, nationally-known, award-winning theatre artist, educator, and leader as its new Artistic Director.

After a nation-wide search, New Rep Board Chair Daniel Newton says, “I am excited that New Rep is bringing on board such an eminently qualified, visionary leader as Jim Petosa for this critical role. As a guest director at New Rep, Jim has been involved with our artistic family for years. I am confident he will ensure the continued production of the highest quality theatre our audiences have come to expect.” 

Petosa served as Artistic Director of Olney Theatre Center outside of Washington D.C. (Montgomery County, MD) since 1994. High notes of his tenure include expanding the company from a summer theatre to year-round; growing the company into a theater-center campus, including a new theatre lab and amphitheatre; and earning many local, regional, and national awards for the institution and his directing, including the Helen Hayes Award. He will finish out Olney’s 2012 Season.

Additionally, Petosa will continue to serve as Director of the School of Theatre, College of Fine Arts, at Boston University, a position he has held since 2002. In this role, he also established the Boston Center for American Performance, the professional production extension of BU’s School of Theatre.

While Petosa’s New Rep appointment officially begins August 1, he says, “I’ll become involved immediately in the remainder of New Rep’s current season, as well as plans for the 2012-2013 upcoming season. Every day is an opportunity to share ideas and build relationships.”

Petosa plans to encourage “an era of collaboration that strengthens New Rep. He says, “It’s an exciting time for regional theatre in our country. We need to examine current models and make them relevant for the future. I have an incessant belief in the power and possibility of the theatre, and a deep desire to foster dialogues of discovery that continue advocating for its relevance and meaning.”

“Having directed three productions in three years at New Rep,” he continues, “I came to understand the organization’s commitment to quality, intelligence, and revealing human truths through thoughtful story-telling.” Petosa most recently directed Three Viewings this season, called “compelling” by The Boston Globe.

“I am truly looking forward to partnering with Jim,” says Managing Director Harriet Sheets. “Since his directorial debut ofOpus with us in 2010, he has proven to be an effective team-player. With Jim, I expect to develop an inviting creative home for our artists.”

New Rep plans to celebrate the announcement of its 2012-2013 season next month at its Premiere Party, where patrons may personally meet Petosa.