The Shaw Festival’s 2026 production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, directed by Artistic Director Tim Carroll, delivers a clear-eyed, psychologically focused reading that honours the play’s moral architecture but underplays its theatrical and musical life. The result is a performance that rewards close attention to its themes of jealousy, faith, rivalry, and human fallibility, yet often feels spare, static, and emotionally distant. It leaves us understanding the frustrated composer Salieri’s grievance against God more than against Mozart, whom he goes to extreme lengths to ruin.
Told as Salieri’s confession to the audience, the play opens in 1823 Vienna with the elderly and impoverished Antonio Salieri (Tom Rooney) claiming that he murdered Mozart and attempting suicide in order to cement his infamy. In flashback, we then see the backstory: the arrival of Mozart (Michael Therriault) in 1780s Vienna, his meteoric rise, and his crude, irreverent behavior, which clashes with Salieri’s pious self-image as God’s chosen instrument in the court of Emperor Joseph (Graeme Somerville). Convinced that God has mocked him by gifting such genius to an unworthy “buffoon,” Salieri feigns friendship with Mozart, while covertly sabotaging his career, blocking commissions, and humiliating his wife Constanze (Kristi Frank). A victim of exhaustion, illness and poverty, Mozart dies at 35. Salieri survives his suicide attempt, but no one believes his confession, leaving him as “God’s joke for eternity”.
Rooney’s Antonio Salieri is the production’s linchpin: controlled, pious, and increasingly desperate as he narrates his undoing. Carroll’s direction leans into the play’s confessional mode by having figures emerge from the sides and rear of the stage, sometimes as shadows, as if summoned by Salieri’s memory. Characters such as the Emperor materialize only when Salieri recalls them — arriving mid-exchange, then receding again once the recollection moves on — reinforcing the sense that we’re watching Salieri assemble the past, rather than observing it directly. Kevin Lamotte’s lighting design is excellent here: conjuring characters into being with a ghostly precision that makes the past feel present and subjective. These choices realize the psychological framework of Shaffer’s text: we are literally inside Salieri’s head, watching him reconstruct, and accuse himself through, the story of Mozart’s downfall.
Judith Bowden’s stylish, spare set reinforces this skewed perspective. The main stage is tilted, rising to the right, visually reinforcing how Salieri’s point of view is slanted or unreliable, and nods at the imbalance between the two composers that Salieri internalizes: in effect, everything flows towards him. Dominating the ramp is a multifunctional table that converts into a pianoforte. It serves as the production’s central set piece, around which conversations, lessons, and compositional moments orbit. It is an economical idea, but one that comes at the expense of visualizing the dynamic public and courtly world which the play also inhabits.
Shaffer’s Mozart is written as a contradiction: he is both a divine composer and an immature, often vulgar young man who never quite grew out of his child-prodigy spotlight. Trotted around Europe as a boy and dominated by a demanding father, Mozart is the egotistical, scatalogical and socially clumsy product of fame and arrested development. Therriault captures this energy with commitment and comic flair: his Mozart is gifted, brash, and at times oddly touching. But the performance teeters on the edge of clowning, and the production leans so hard into infantilism and vulgarity that Mozart’s humanity ultimately recedes. We see the prodigy and the provocateur, but not enough of the warmth, loyalty, or creative joy that would make him someone Salieri could admire, resent, and ultimately destroy, at a real moral cost.
Despite Bowden’s beautiful, period-specific costumes and Alexis Milligan’s movement direction, the production is not interested in realizing the pomp and grandeur of Viennese court life. The device that serves Salieri’s confession works against everyone else: his exquisitely attired wife Teresa (Cosette Derome) and pupil Katerina (Allison Edwards-Crewe) appear on cue, when mentioned, then exit as abruptly, often without a line of their own. The people who embody the public, courtly world register as props in Salieri’s account, rather than as characters with stakes of their own.
The overall effect is a talky, tableau-like evening in which the stakes of patronage, reputation, and public taste are more stated than shown. Even the production’s liveliest device for conjuring the city — a pair of gossips (Julia Course and Sochi Fried) who report rumours back to Salieri — places the overall “buzz” of the Viennese court onto just these two actors’ shoulders. They are excellent, but overall, it feels … thin. So, too, is the overall sonic landscape. Paul Sportelli’s music supervision places prerecorded excerpts at the right moments, but with a play about music, musicians, and the divine nature of composition, one expects the score to be more than punctuation. Unlike some revivals that place musicians onstage and treat performance as action, this Amadeus only tantalizes and hints at Mozart’s genius. It keeps the music at arm’s length, which serves to dull the emotional impact of key scenes.
Where Carroll’s Amadeus succeeds is as a psychological study: the lighting, blocking, and Rooney’s measured Salieri make the play’s moral and spiritual questions clear and legible. But the static staging, the under-nuanced Mozart, and the underused music leave the production feeling more like a seminar than a living drama. As staged here, Amadeus is intellectually well-composed, but theatrically under-orchestrated.
Amadeus runs at the Festival Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake until October 4, 2026. Tickets are available at shawfest.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
