Tony Award winner Jefferson Mays and West End/Bridgerton breakout star Sam Clemmett burn up the stage in what may well be the most sumptuous production in Pasadena Playhouse history in Darko Tresnjak’s stunning take on Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus.

As anyone who’s seen Shaffer’s Tony-winning Best Play of 1981 or its 1984 film adaptation can tell you, Amadeus focuses on the rivalry between Antonio Salieri (Mays), composer to the court of Austrian Emperor Joseph II, and his upstart competitor, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Clemmett), a rivalry that leads the far less talented Salieri to seek Mozart’s destruction, whatever the cost to his own sanity.

As the citizens of Vienna whisper “Salieri” and “Assassin” in the same breath, the Italian composer begins his confession to the audience, transporting us back to the year 1781, to the night he first crosses paths with Mozart, the big-haired, potty-mouthed man-child in mid-pursuit of his landlady’s daughter Constanze Weber (Lauren Worsham), wild and wacky Wolfgang giggling and meowing while threatening to “pounce-pounce” and “scrunch-munch” and “chew-poo my little mouse-wouse.”

 Salieri may be appalled to his very core by such an infantile display, but this emotion pales in comparison to the awe he feels upon getting his first earful of Mozart’s musical gifts.

Awe soon turns to envy, however, and the seeds of hatred are planted when young Mozart effortlessly transforms the “extremely banal” march Salieri has composed in his honor into something extraordinary.

Later, in one of Amadeus’s most famous and powerful scenes, Salieri scans a stack of Mozart’s manuscripts, and both he and we hear the notes Mozart has put to paper and realize that we are in the presence of genius.

It is Salieri’s recognition that his first impressions of the young Austrian’s prodigious talent “had been no accident” that cause the embittered Italian to embark on a path which will send each one spiraling down into his own particular brand of hell.

 A nearly-three hour running time and Shaffer’s wordy script may be a bit much for the attention-challenged, and I must confess to my mind having wandered at various moments on Opening Night, but that doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm when I tell you that Amadeus at the Playhouse is theater at its most adventurous and monumental, particularly at a time when most regionals are scaling way back on cast size and production values.

Not so Danny Feldman’s Pasadena Playhouse, which has pulled out all the stops in delivering a big-stage, big-budget revival that merits oodles of oohs and an abundance of aahs, and not just because the Playhouse has outdone itself where production design is concerned, the stage positively bursting with the red-and-gold pomp and splendor of an imperial palace.

Darko Tresnjak’s extensive experience directing at both the L.A. Opera and the Met (among other major houses) serves him well in a play whose emotions are grand-opera gigantic (and features an aria or two or three along the way), eliciting performances as sumptuous as the production itself.

The magnificent Mays (whom Tresnjak directed in Broadway’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) takes Salieri from the vitality of a man driven slowly insane with murderous envy to feeble old age, and the more eaten up with envy Salieri becomes, the more mesmerizing Mays is in the role.

Clemmett unleashes Mozart’s inner monster child in a performance that is deliberately and pitch-perfectly over-the-top in the composer’s early moments and absolutely devastating as the musical prodigy finds himself a man destroyed not just by Salieri’s treachery but by his own eccentricities as well.

Supporting performances couldn’t be finer, beginning with Worsham’s as Constanze, whose transition from effervescent girl to a woman hardened by life (and a disastrous marriage to a genius) is a stunner.

 Matthew Patrick Davis makes for a deliciously dim-witted (at least where music is concerned) Emperor Joseph II, Matthew Henerson is terrific as the always proper Count Johann Kilian von Strack, John Lavelle makes for a sublimely supercilious Orsini-Rosenberg, and Kenajuan Bentley exudes cultivation as Van Swietan.

Jared Andrew Bybee (Valet/Major-Domo), Alaysha Fox (Teresa Salieri, Soprano), and Michelle Allie Drever (Teresa Salieri, Soprano) get to show off both acting and operatic chops, and Brent Schindele excels in a trio of cameo roles, one of which showcases his keyboard talents at the harpsicord.

Last but not least, Jennifer Chang and Hilary Ward are double delights as the Venticelli, whose mastery of fact, rumor, and gossip they are more than willing to break the fourth wall to impart.

Pasadena Playhouse has gone all out in assembling a spectacular, mostly New York-based team—Alexander Dodge (scenic design), Linda Cho (costumes), Pablo Santiago (lighting), Jane Shaw (sound), Aaron Rhyne (projections), and Will Vicari (hair, wigs, and makeup)—to design a production that ought to be the envy of Broadway.

Jeff Bernstein is music director. Jennifer Ringo is vocal coach. Sasha Nicole Smith is intimacy coordinator. Miranda Johnson-Haddad is dramaturg. Brad Enlow is technical director and production supervisor.

David S. Franklin is production stage manager and Alyssa Escalante is assistant stage manager. Casting is by Ryan Bernard Tyymensky, CSA. Davidson & Choy Publicity are press representatives.

Despite its length and wordiness, Amadeus is so sensationally directed, designed, and performed at Pasadena Playhouse, it could easily take Broadway by storm, just one reason why SoCal audiences can count themselves lucky that, wherever they live in Los Angeles or its environs, it’s only a hop, skip, and jump away.

Pasadena Playhouse, 39 South El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Through March 15. Wednesdays through Fridays at 8:00, Saturdays at 2:00 and 8:00, Sundays at 2:00 and 7:30.
www.pasadenaplayhouse.org

–Steven Stanley
February 15, 2026
Photos: Jeff Lorch

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Tags: Los Angeles Theater Review, Pasadena Playhouse, Peter Shaffer