Saving Mozart review: A modern classic that doesn’t miss a beat
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Sian McBride
The concert album dropped online three years ago, but the new songs, which use Mozart's music as the foundation, have been 260 years in the making. Now, they’re given an audience in the form of a packed The Other Palace Theatre. The theatregoers here aren’t the royalty you’ll find across the road (no offence to my fellow audience members last night. You still scrub up well), they’re people of all ages, occupations and backgrounds. The ‘common’ people that Mozart, as we learn, dreamed of reaching. The kind he composed for. The kind he lived, and died, for.
This new musical reframes the story we think we know. At its core is the tension between brilliance and expectation: Nannerl, the sister whose talent was used to train her younger brother; Leopold, the obsessive father who orchestrated Mozart’s childhood; and Constanze, the devoted wife who refused to let history silence him.
When we first meet Wolfgang (Wolfie to his friends), he has all the bravo and swagger you’d expect from an internationally renowned rockstar. And who could blame him? His Symphony No. 40 reached #2 on the UK singles chart, 180 years after his death - last year's summer anthem, Espresso, isn’t making the top 50 anymore. He addresses the audience with a self-satisfied smile and mock humility. “You’re all here for me, aren’t you?” before proceeding to lounge on a giant white ‘M’ that dominates most of the stage. A cloth drops from the edge of the letter to reveal mirrored panelling. When we look at the family's initial he is reflected back. He is all we see. He is all history sees. But we learn that wasn’t always the case.
Original Six queen, Aimie Atkinson, reclaims another woman lost to history. Here she’s Mozart’s long-suffering sister, Nannerl. Every bit as talented as her brother, her career is prematurely cut when her father (Douglas Hansell) tells her that a woman of marrying age should not be writing and playing her own music like a ‘whore.’ He states plainly that she was only subjected to years of strict piano lessons and recitals, so that Wolfgang could watch, copy and repeat - not so that she could step into the spotlight. “Playing to my own rules” sung with grit and guts by Atkinson is a self-empowering, motivational, feminist battle cry that wouldn’t feel out of place in Six itself. Which makes it even more heartbreaking when we see her bound by corsets and society's expectations later on. Her talent was never hers to keep; it was a template for someone else’s glory.
Another standout is the deliciously self-aware “Listen to Me” sung with a smile and effortless ease by Erin Caldwell’s Constanze. It opens the second act with cheek and confidence. She knows her own self-worth, and we’re never in doubt that she’ll get what she wants. When the struggling singer meets Mozart, we see how she uses this outlook to guide her new beau, who is far from the wise-cracking fourth-wall-breaking virtuoso we met at the beginning, to greatness. She’s not just his lover, she’s his lifeline.
Wofie’s relationships with these women tear through the mythology to reveal a Wolfgang who is raw, flawed, and lost. We realise that the confidence at the beginning is an act. He knows he’s only standing on the world's stage because of the people who mean the world to him: his sister and his wife. And he is desperately trying to prove to himself and to his audiences that he deserves to be there.
Someone who sees through the facade is Jordan Luke Gage’s Salieri. He deems Mozart and his music as immature and inconsequential, and believes that German is too harsh to be beautiful (anyone that knows the Deutsch for ‘butterfly’, may agree with him here). Gage, whose sharp eyeliner is as cutting as Salieri’s words, revels every second of playing the ‘baddie.’ He saunters across the stage, contempt dripping from every word. It’s impossible not to be enthralled, even if you’re on Team Wolfgang. Just like Beethoven’s Für Elise, he isn’t on for long, but he leaves a lasting impression.
As for Wolfgang himself, Jack Chambers is nothing short of electric. There’s bite in his bravado and tragedy in his self-doubt. His Mozart is no caricatured genius, but a deeply human paradox; equal parts joy and pain, pride and doubt. He moves through the score instinctively: unpredictable, hungry, and heartbreakingly exposed.
Packed with punchy bangers, emotional crescendos and one hell of a cast, Saving Mozart doesn’t just resurrect a legend, it remixes him. This isn’t just a portrait of a prodigy; it’s a rousing, rebellious symphony of survival.
Saving Mozart plays at The Other Palace until 30 August 2025.