Amadeus

Mosaic Theater opens its fourth season in South Florida with a pitch-perfect production of Amadeus, Peter Shaffer's take on the torment wrought on composer Antonio Salieri by the arrival of crude upstart Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Salieri alone recognizes the inspired talent of Mozart and the shallowness of his own work for the court of Austrian Emperor Joseph II. Having, as a teenager, promised God a life of virtue in return fame as a composer, Salieri feels mocked in his successful mediocrity: "God needed Mozart to let Himself into the world. And Mozart needed me to get him wordly advancement. So it would be a battle to the end -- and Mozart was the battleground.''

At Mosaic, the battle is fought on a small stage and with a cast of 15 under the sure-handed direction of Richard Jay Simon. There's ample payoff, thanks to the talents of South Florida theater stalwart John Felix as Salieri and Christian Rockwell as Mozart. This is a fact-based mystery of a death for which there was a legendary confession but perhaps no killing. It opens in 1823 and takes place, as recollection, in the Vienna of 1781-91, a place Shaffer has called "superficial and impatient" and a time when the sober Enlightenment bumped up against rococo ornamentation.

The walls of the set by Ian Almeida reveal scraps of sheet music and contain a stage furnished with period-appropriate pieces. The playing area can become so cramped, the audience may worry for the safety of Rockwell as he skids and bounds about as the childlike Mozart, 25 years old when we meet him -- but Rockwell gives a performance that seems in all ways fearless. In having the vain and tortured Salieri narrate the story, Shaffer provides plenty of perilous opportunities for overacting. Felix, winner of a regional award for his performance last year in Fortune's Fool at Caldwell Theater in Boca Raton, never crosses the line. We recognize the duality of a man who can be clear-eyed as well as conniving about Mozart, his junior by only six years: "We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created legends -- and I from legends created only the ordinary." Lighting by Travis Neff does the job, ranging from a merciless white to subtle projections that reveal location without scenery shifts, and the get-ups from Costume World are attactively of the period. Richard Rick's sound design is most evident when Shaffer calls for excerpts from Mozart's work -- but except for the adagio early on that haunts Salieri, the music seems superfluous, even intrusive, so involving is the pitiless intrigue being played out by Felix an Rockwell.

In a play of such big themes -- God's will, the emptiness of success, the vagaries of ambition -- small touches can mean a lot. At the time of the mysterious commission for a requiem, the German Mozart was sick, starving and gulping wine -- but Rockwell doesn't clutch a bottle of Mosel on stage; rather, it's a basket-hulled bottle instantly recognizable as the sort that contains chianti. That choice silently foreshadows the outburst from the Italian Sailieri a few minutes later when he confronts Mozart: "I eat what God gives me ...His poison. We are both poisoned, Amadeus. I with you and you with me." It's a nice grace note from director Simon.