Word: cyrano
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...Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, try ignoring Roxanne. It is a sleeper summer hit, Martin's biggest since The Jerk. It is based on an honorable property, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. It dares to plump for the supremacy of two old-fashioned notions: romantic love as the meeting of true minds and the English language as a tool for wooing and wonder. The script challenges its star to be at once noble and fatuous, strong and swooning, utterly in control and desperately in love -- all of which Martin handles as gracefully as if he'd written it himself (which...
...nose that looks like a fairy-tale Nixon's after he'd told a lie. So C.D. agrees to become Chris' voice and soul, whispering the music of love for Chris to shout up to Roxanne's balcony . . . But you've heard this story before. It is Cyrano de Bergerac replanted in rural Washington State. Chivalric C.D. is no swordsman; he duels with tennis racquet and walking stick. Rostand's purple poetry is replaced with C.D.'s Hallmarkian attempt to turn palship into passion: "Why should we sip from a teacup when we can drink from the river...
Steve Martin plays Cyrano in the sappy, entertaining Roxanne. -- Bigfoot bumbles; Coppola stumbles; Stepfather rumbles...
...what-is-he-doing-in-this-play department, Ted Dane suffers mightily as the hopelessly inadequate Christian. That a honey like Roxanne could ever fall for Dane's sniveling wimp of a Gascon seems harder to believe than that Cyrano could ever see beyond that nose of his. Of the supporting cast, Donal Logue as the rightous Captain Le Bret is appropriately stiff-backed, and nuns Jane Avrich and Chalon Emmons scamper and giggle most agreeably during the last scene...
...ONLY OTHER FLAW left to pick on is the decidely dodgy quality of Cyrano's nose. This may be splitting nose hairs, as it were, but Cyrano's shnozz is so prominent, both visually and symbolically, that its obvious artificiality detracts mightily from the atmosphere of the play. Not only was the seam obvious from my fourth row seat, but it made Roe sound like an extra in a Dristan commercial. During one of the more tedious sections, I started to hope that the nose would fall off and add some needed comic relief, but it never did--another disappointment...