Word: cyrano
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac immediately took the world by greater storm than any other play in the history of the theatre. And today it still easily holds its position as the towering peak of 19th-century French drama...
...critics complain that it is not a "well-made play" a la Sardou--something it had no intention of being. Cyrano's unity is emotional, not academic. It presents an ideal attitude, tests it for three acts, and verifies it in the last act. The attitude here, as in Rostand's other works, is, as Rostand himself put it, "the need to preserve one's dream; to have eyes which, seeing the ugly, can see the beautiful all the same." Consequently, it is a play whose focus and mood is always rapidly changing, like a kaleidoscope...
Henry Treece's Carnival King was an especially unhappy choice for the Theatre on the Green's opening number by contrast with the remainder of the 1957 bill of fare, which includes Moliere's Would-be Gentleman this week and next, and later Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac and Shaw's Man and Superman--all of which present a delightful and heady prospect indeed...
...success of the play's low comedy is due mainly to the freshness of Roger Moldovan, Thomas Teal, and Judith Gilmartin, as Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria, the wench, respectively. Moldovan's Cyrano de Bergerac nose is unnecessary to show that he is a sot, but this does not detract from his relaxed, happily debauched portrayal. Teal's Augecheek borders on an elongated Jerry Lewis, and is very funny, dithering, and lovable. Miss Gilmartin, beguiling and spirited, ably completes their juvenile comradery...
Comfortably established and drinking hot tea last week in the San Diego Zoo were a pair of proboscis monkeys from Borneo. Roxanne, the female, looks like an ordinary monkey, but Cyrano, the male, has a long, drooping, flexible nose that would make the fortune of a TV comedian. Perhaps Roxanne admires the nose, but it has no use except to give Cyrano's cry a nasal, down-East twang...