Word: cyrano
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hasn't started yet; b) it's already over. Only two new musicals and four new plays--and no certifiable hits--have opened since Labor Day. For the moment, Broadway is dominated by the Brits and the blacks. The Royal Shakespeare Company has extended its repertory run of Cyrano de Bergerac and the enchanting Much Ado About Nothing. But the English are invaders. New native works measure the pulse of the American theater, and just now three new Broadway shows are the creations of blacks. Once again black performers are lighting up the Great White...
...Stratford-upon-Avon, the R.S.C. may perform as many as five plays a week. The company's tours of North America, though, have displayed only a fraction of its versatility: one play at a time. So the R.S.C.'s twin bill of Much Ado About Nothing and Cyrano de Bergerac, now on Broadway for a ten-week run, offers the American theatergoer a rare opportunity to see the world's top rep company in its element - an "at home" abroad...
This applies even when (especially when) one production is sublime and the other soso. Much Ado thrills the senses with its fairy-tale weave of love, honor and wit. Cyrano is a lesser play and a lesser production, a theatrical war horse that keeps buckling at the knees. Yet Cyrano is a more typical Royal Shakespeare evening. The capacious stage of the Gershwin Theater teems with actors and activity; Ralph Koltai's set is brownish, broody, tattered just so; the tone of the crowd scenes is strenuously raunchy; during the battle scene, cannon fire pops your eardrums...
...that the play is unworthy of resuscitation. Edmond Rostand was 29 when he wrote Cyrano; he seasoned this tale of a 17th century cavalier with the dash, sweep, idealism and tireless eloquence of youth. In 1898, when the original French production played London, it arrived like a gust of rose-scented air in the stolid cathedral of naturalism. Proclaimed Critic Max Beerbohm: "Even if Cyrano be not a classic, it is at least a wonderfully ingenious counterfeit of one." And even if, in this century, the counterfeit has become more evident than the ingenuity, Rostand's rhapsody has attracted...
...three most famous set pieces-Cyrano's duel while composing a poem, the balcony scene in which the shy cavalier ventriloquizes his love for Roxane (Sinead Cusack) through the voice of his friend Christian (Tom Mannion), and Cyrano's lingering death-Hands does go full throttle. So does the star, Derek Jacobi, in the rising-geyser cadences that just about every serious English actor of the past 20 years has borrowed from Laurence Olivier. In his best roles Jacobi finds heroism in gray ordinariness: the stammering honesty of Claudius in TV's I, Claudius, the grace...