Word: amadeus
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...instant more to top it. He curled his mouth so it looked like a squeezed citrus. His eyelids shut down like blinds, into a squint, his hands shriveled into a kind of angular cupped shape, somewhere between a claw and a crotch, and he started throwing off lines from Amadeus. He became, in almost supersonic succession, the man at the neighboring table, then the character he has been playing in Peter Shaffer's smash Broadway play and, finally, some wonderfully stylized hybrid of them both. Then, suddenly, McKellen laughed and turned back to his meal...
...regarded on home ground in England as the pre-eminent stage actor of his generation, the class of a very classy field, he has been on Broadway only once before, in a short-lived Russian play staged in 1967. By the harsh standards of Broadway, McKellen before Amadeus was less a reality than a reputation. Even now he receives no applause of respectful recognition when he starts to speak in the first act. But when he reappears for the start of the second, the applause sounds like a curtain call. And when the curtain call itself finally comes...
...Amadeus. Was Mozart poisoned by a rival? Britain's Peter Shaffer draws a cunning eternal triangle with God at the apex, music in the air and Byzantine intrigue everywhere. There are sumptuous performances by Ian McKellen, Tim Curry, Jane Seymour and Nicholas Kepros...
...Amadeus, Shaffer reworks these themes in a drama that is less dramatically arresting or emotionally compelling than the previous two plays. In a threadbare season, it nonetheless sheds the glow of Joseph's coat of many colors. This time Shaffer focuses on two contenders on the treacherous fields of artistic fame and glory. Both are composers. One is Antonio Salieri (Ian McKellen), a man who achieved phenomenal musical renown at the royal court of Vienna in the late 18th and early 19th centuries...
...other is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tim Curry), who may be called a man or an immortal. We first meet Salieri on the day of his attempted suicide, when, with a twisted senile smirk, he begs the audience for absolution...