Review: 'Amadeus' honors play and film while adding more shenanigans

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

My first thought upon learning that “Amadeus,” the award-winning play and film, had been made into a miniseries, premiering Friday on Starz, was “well, this could be interesting.” And of course it could, though a successful work of film is rarely improved by making it twice as long, and given that playwright Peter Shaffer was also the screenwriter, and Miloš Forman the director of the movie, the project struck me, too, as something of a fool’s errand.Still, foolishness can sometimes bring good results; there are good results here, and some less than good.

One might say it is less than the sum of its parts; if in the end I was not moved in the way I was surely meant to be — the five-part series is a little repetitious, a little exhausting — there was much to like along the way.It did prove interesting.Written by Joe Barton (creator of the wonderful sentimental Christmas thriller “Black Doves”), this new “Amadeus” somehow qualifies as both an interpretation and a remake.

By nature, a play changes from performance to performance, depending on the director, players, designers and so forth, while keeping the text intact.(Usually.) (As Times theater critic Charles McNulty wrote, reviewing a revival at the Pasadena Playhouse this February, every “Amadeus” staging “has one foot in the Vienna of Mozart and another foot in whatever period the production is taking place in.”) In a film remake, even the text is up for grabs.

Barton’s “Amadeus” does both, honoring Shaffer’s structure, themes and events while tossing in a lot of new business — they’ve got to fill that extra time with something, and somehow, it wasn’t more music — to varying effect.Shaffer built his play from the actual, completely unsupported rumor that Mozart (Will Sharpe) was poisoned by Antonio Salieri (Paul Bettany), a rival composer in the Viennese court of Austrian emperor...