The tagline for the upcoming production at the Gloucester Stage Company, Madame Mozart, the Lacrimosa, says it all: “She’s composing, he’s decomposing.”
The premise of this bold, darkly funny new play by Anne Undeland, running October 9–19, is based on the true story in the wake of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s sudden death at 35 in Vienna before completing his final musical work. Directed by Beverly Farms local Myriam Cyr, the production imagines Mozart’s final days through the eyes of his widow, Constanze Mozart, played by Jocelyn R. Duford, who must finish what her husband could not.
Widowed at just 29 with two young children and mounting debts, Constanze refuses to let Mozart’s brilliant final commission, Requiem in D minor, vanish unfinished. She enlists others, including Franz Xaver Süssmayr, to complete the score. She then negotiates with Count Franz von Walsegg who commissioned the work, organizes memorial concerts—and in doing so, preserves the music and fights for her and her family’s place in Mozart’s legacy.
It’s dark. It’s funny and witty. It’s also highly relatable for anyone who’s had to pull strength out of themselves that they didn’t realize was there all along.
Then there’s Jeremy Beazlie, who has spent the last 20 years in New York City as a working actor building a career in theater and television commercials before moving to Manchester with his wife three years ago. He grew up in the Midwest and trained as a teenager at the Walden Theater Conservatory in Louisville, KY,
performing in productions of Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde before moving into professional work.
In Madame Mozart, Beazlie takes on an extraordinary challenge: he plays six different roles. That’s right, six different characters. Among them, he portrays Count Süssmayr, Mozart and Constanze’s son Karl, and even turns in a hilarious performance as Constanze’s mother—each character demanding a different tone and style, not to mention all that dialog. His shape-shifting presence adds humor and poignancy to the production.
When he moved to the North Shore from New York, Beazlie said he went through a challenging time figuring out where to go next with his art. The answer came in form of a project—he wrote a play, called “Dr. Edmund Shine,” which features 13 monologues. He memorized them all. At the encouragement of his wife, Beazlie reached out to Gloucester Stage Company’s Paula Plum, and performed one of those monologues in his audition. He won the role of Plum’s son, Ben, in the 2022 Gloucester Stage’s “Grand Horizons.” When Cyr called looking for strong actors for Madame Mozart, it was Plum who connected her with Beazlie.
Without giving away too much, Madame Mozart uses clever stage devices and visual tools to support and drive the storytelling. There’s the use of projections of color and light, used to highlight the true neurological disorder that Constanze suffered from called “synesthesia,” the condition in which someone involuntarily sees colors when hearing music. Then, there’s live music, which almost serves as another character in the play and is performed by pianist John L. Churchwell, who embodies the spirit of Mozart and weaves his compositions into the soundscape.
In the end, it’s hard to blend humor, pathos, defiance, and a story of brilliance. Madame Mozart does it, and does it well.
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