Doyle Turns Tony-winning Technique to Amadeus???
Date: 13 July 2006
Director
John Doyle has had remarkable success with his actor-musician chamber piece versions of well-known musicals, most notably his revival of Stephen Sondheim’s
Sweeney Todd, which won two of last year’s Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers’ Choice Awards for its West End run and two of this year’s Tony Awards (Best Direction of a Musical and Best Orchestrations) for its Broadway transfer (See
News, 12 Jun 2006). Now he’s planning to apply a similar approach to a well-known play, albeit one boasting plenty of (classical) music opportunities:
Peter Shaffer’s battle-of-the-composers drama
Amadeus, which explores the relationship between Antonio Salieri and his 18th-century Vienna rival Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Amadeus premiered at the National Theatre in 1979, in a production starring
Simon Callow and
Paul Scofield and directed by
Peter Hall, which subsequently transferred to Broadway with
Tim Curry and
Ian McKellen. In 1998, Hall revived the piece at the Old Vic, with
Michael Sheen and
David Suchet, ahead of another transatlantic transfer. Milos Forman’s Oscar-winning 1984 film version starred Tom Hulse and F Murray Abraham. No casting or dates have yet been announced for Doyle’s staging. However, rather than the Watermill Theatre, Newbury – where Doyle is an associate director and his pre-West End musical productions of
Sweeney Todd, Mack and Mabel and
Gondoliers all started life -
Amadeus is due to be staged first at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London towards the end of the year.
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