Word: shaffers
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Mozart's death has been variously ascribed to rheumatic fever, uremia and even murder by poisoning. Alexander Pushkin wrote a play that pinned the guilt on Mozart's musical rival Antonio Salieri, and Rimski-Korsakov turned the literary libel into a miniopera. Playwright Peter Shaffer recently gave the Salieri legend a new stage life with Amadeus, in which Mozart has the sex habits of a randy poodle and the court manners of John McEnroe...
DEATHTRAP BEGS to be compared to Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, another closed-room, twist-filled thriller, and unquestionably loses out in the comparison. But with intricate plot twists (which unfortunately tend to fizzle toward the end), and some snappy dialogue, it makes a fair attempt at matching the wit and elegance of Shaffer's play. Tendorp, the psychic, adds a nice comic touch by dropping by to see Sidney at all the wrong times, and prophesying ominously about a dangerous playwright named "Smith-Collona." Cannon is suitably daffy as the gushing Myra, and Reeve is, well, a hunk. Caine...
...excitement and ceremony surrounding the symphony are one more example of the Mozart boom; not since Mahler became a cult figure in the 1960s has a composer been as popular. On Broadway, Peter Shaffer's hit play Amadeus recently won five Tony Awards. Mozart last year led all composers in the number of new listings in the Schwann record catalogue, and record companies are assiduously exploring the nooks and crannies of the composer's output in search of further repertory-the oratorio La Betulia Liberata, for example, or the opera Mitridate, Re di Ponto, both written when Mozart...
...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. It was a day off, after...
During working hours, McKellen can be found deploying this same unique combination of high art, low cunning and surreptitious showmanship. His incarnation of Play wright Shaffer's antagonist, Antonio Salieri, owes much to the offhand technical virtuosity McKellen displayed in that restaurant and even more to an analytic actor's intelligence that is restless and ruth less at once. "If I couldn't defend a performance intellectually, I'd be very un happy indeed," McKellen remarks, and his Salieri is a seamless reconciliation of paradox. It is a portrait in depth of a shallow...