EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Michael Sheen and Callum Scott Howells will strike up the orchestra — and each other — in a new West End-bound production of Peter Shaffer’s acclaimed play Amadeus, about the disharmony between music prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, his rival composer at the Habsburg court of Joseph II, the Holy Roman Emperor.

The thrilling drama will be directed by Jeremy Herrin, who staged, with Duncan Macmillan the current Broadway hit Every Brilliant Thing, starring Daniel Radcliffe in a role that Mariska Hargitay will take over from May 26.

“With Michael Sheen — who is an absolute master of stage acting, he really is one of the greatest — I think it’s good moment, and he’ll be challenged by young Callum… It’ll be wonderful to see the fireworks. I can’t wait,” Herrin said in an exclusive interview with Deadline. 

Amadeus will be a co-production between Herrin’s Second Half Productions and the Welsh National Theatre, the company founded by Sheen. It will run at Cardiff’s New Theatre from March 9-27 before  heading into London’s Nöel Coward Theatre for a 16-week season from April 17.

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Sheen (Good Omens, The Queen) knows the composition of Shaffer’s Tony Award-winning play down to the last note, having played the potty-mouthed composer in a breakthrough performance opposite David Suchet at the Old Vic, directed by the play’s original director Peter Hall in 1998. The show later transferred to the appropriately named, at least on that occasion, Music Box Theatre on Broadway. Then in late 2022, the Welsh-born actor took on the role of Salieri in a sumptuous production at the Sydney Opera House.

In a comment released for the announcement, Sheen said it’s “a full-circle moment for me to return to the West End with Amadeus.”

“So Michael had been keen to do it again, and it all came together,” Herrin noted, when he and Alan Stacey, lead producer and a director of Secondhand Half Productions “got hold of the rights and went to Michael and worked out how to do it with Welsh National Theatre, which is really exciting.”

He said that it’s the WNT’s first West End show, “and we’re delighted to be part of a very exciting chapter for them,” Herrin told us.

It’s a Sin star Howells, noted for his celebrated work on stage and screen, also hails from Wales, and Sheen directed him in television drama The Way. “It’s going to be a celebration of Welsh acting talent with those two, and we’ll see who else we can attract to it,” Herrin remarked.

There are several versions of Amadeus that Shaffer created over the years. “Shaffer wrote and rewrote it,” Herrin explained.

The playwright made refinements to his script when the play originally premiered in New York in 1980, starring  Ian McKellen as Salieri and Tim Curry as the rowdy genius behind Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte and The Magic Flute.

Later, for the Oscar-winning 1984 feature film version that Miloš Forman directed, Shaffer and Forman holed up for four months in a Connecticut farmhouse to thrash out the screenplay for the movie with F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce.

“What I’m keen to do is dig into all of the drafts and all the versions over the years and do a kind of page-by-page comparison,” Herrin revealed.

“I don’t anticipate anything radical with the text, but if there are any questions, I’ll ask for permission. But the latest version is probably the best one. It was certainly the one that Peter Shaffer was most happy with,” Herrin observed.

“It’s going to be as definitive a version of Amadeus as we can do,” he added.

The last London production of the play was a stunning one at the National Theatre in 2016 with Lucian Msamati and Adam Gillen that featured a 20-piece orchestra — perfect for the NT’s Olivier stage but difficult to replicate at the Nöel Coward, where it would also be prohibitively expensive.     

“We’re going to focus on the theatre of it, the acting and the characters,” Herrin said.

“There will be an element of live music, but there won’t be an orchestra,” he added.

“The thing about having an orchestra is that then suddenly the event becomes about that, and actually it’s a play about human beings in conflict. The backdrop is music,” he reasoned.

“It’s about love and admiration and how that can slip over into the darker emotions of betrayal and disappointment. … And Salieri takes it really far — it’s about a man on the edge. He feels like he’s been a good man, and yet this vulgarian is the one with the God-given talent and he feels that that’s unfair. It precipitates a spiritual crisis … and the height of the emotion is equivalent to the height of where the music can take you,” Herrin said.

The creatives so far: set design by Bunny Christie, costume design by Lez Brotherston and casting by Sam Jones.

Sheen and the producers have ensured that 15,000 tickets for the run will be available for £30, just over $40. General sale from today.