April full

I didn't see a single April Fool joke this year, not even while surfing online. Good. The last time this was funny was PigeonRank, and even that would have been damp this year.

Instead, I made my first visit to the virtual theater. I'd read an enthusiastic review of Syracuse Stage's online presentation of Amadeus, and it was available for a reasonable ticket price, so I bought one. You can't get it now, though, because due to the actors' contracts it went off sale when the original run was scheduled to close last week (though the video itself remains online to purchasers for a little while yet).

As I understand it, they managed one live performance before the shutdown, but this was skillfully captured on a multi-camera setup by technicians from, I believe, the local PBS station, and that's what the video was of. As that species goes, it was well-done. If not quite like being there, it was captivating enough.

The acting was good throughout, but the play succeeded above all through the performance as Salieri by Jason O'Connell. With a saturnine countenance vaguely reminiscent of James Mason, he played both old and young Salieri with urgent intensity, and transitioned between them eerily well. It was all good except for one thing.

What I didn't know is that Peter Shaffer rewrote the play several times. This was the final version, from not long before his death. The ending was very different from what I remember from another stage production decades ago, or the movie adaptation. The director likes this version: "turning the melodramatic original into a more humane quest for forgiveness and redemption." No, it doesn't work that way. It undercut the entire previous thrust of the play, like the ending of Schindler's List which I didn't like either. Throughout this scene, Mozart keeps saying "This makes no sense!" and "This is stupid!" and I couldn't have agreed more. Authors, you can't negate your own failure by having your characters futilely protest. They're trying to tell you something.