Rock Me, Amadeus!

The title might suggest that "Amadeus" is a play about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

That simply isn't the case -- although Mozart's music figures heavily in the TheatreSquared production opening this weekend.

The star of the story, antihero though he is, is Antonio Salieri, a composer who was Mozart's contemporary -- but not his equal.

And that's the dramatic arc on which the play hinges: Salieri, elderly and forgotten, steps back in his memory to wonder why his God, to whom he was so faithful, awarded success and fame to Mozart, not to him.

In fact, says Sean Patrick Reilly, who co-directs the play and portrays Salieri, it doesn't really matter who the characters are.

"How do we feel when we embrace the fact that we might have been betrayed in the most important relationship we have -- which for Salieri was with God," he muses. "Having lived with [the play] for the last five weeks, I can say that as much as I disagree with what Salieri does, I get it. Yeah, I've felt that. It's such an honest examination of how difficult it can be to be a human being sometimes. We all want to be remembered. We all want to be adored in some way. But for an artist, is the act of creation enough? Or are we so obsessed now with legacy that that overshadows the actual act of creation?"

Reilly is a veteran of Broadway, film and television who directed "Hamlet," "Period of Adjustment" and "Superior Donuts" and appeared in "The Spiritualist," "Good People" and "Superior Donuts" for TheatreSquared. But he says he would not have attempted the dual roles of actor and director in this highly demanding production without the co-directing skills of company founder Amy Herzberg. The two have worked together often enough, Herzberg says, "we are like an old married couple who agree on 97 percent of things without talking." "And then you promise not to fight in front of the kids," Reilly throws in.

In this case, the cornerstone of agreement was that the professional company could handle the show. Executive director Martin Miller calls it the "largest-scale production in T2's history" and founder and artistic director Bob Ford says "it's brilliant, risky and ridiculously fun."

"One of the things about TheatreSquared is that we have never looked at a piece and said, 'We can't do this,' only 'How can we do this?," Herzberg says. "That is part of our M.O. We had the revolving set in 'Noises Off,' the rock musical of 'Next to Normal' ... All we do is say, 'How does the script meet what we want to be doing as a theater company?' If we love the story and think it can be told the way TheatreSquared likes to tell it, with intimacy and heart and real connection to the audience? OK, let's get started on it. It'll be fine."

The first challenge was the music -- Mozart's greatest hits including "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni" and "The Magic Flute," all used to introduce Salieri's memories. Herzberg, a classically trained pianist, recorded several of the pieces.

"The moment I realized I was supposed to sound like Mozart playing the piano, I about ran away," she says with a laugh. "Recorded music works very well for us, though, because most of the play is told as flashbacks. And because there is that device, it allowed us to use recorded music. It doesn't feel false. It works well in that idea of memory.

"And with our amazing sound designer, Will Eubanks, the recorded music allows you to envelope the audience in a way that might not otherwise happen. If you're not after that kind of intimacy, full orchestration would be amazing. But this is also amazing with the intimate see-the-hearts-of-the-actors experience," Herzberg says.

"I think walking away from the theater, [an audience member's] first thought will be, 'Wow, what did I just experience there?' The sheer size of the play and the cast and the visual stimulation of everything happening in that space, which is so intimate ..." Reilly says. "That's one of the things I love about making theater in that space. There's nowhere to hide. This is a very, very human story told on a much larger scale."

NAN What's Up on 08/28/2015