Word: ado
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...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...
...country estate at 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...
...length. More important, Anthony Burgess's verse translation, while lean and clever ("Our devil's changed into a Christian brother,/ Attack one nostril and he turns the other"), irons out the swellings of Rostand's perfervid rhetoric. The direction, by Terry Hands, who also staged Much Ado, is as antiromantic as the translation. It retreats from the play's signal qualities: passion and panache...
...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 and pain beneath the raillery in Much Ado. But Cyrano is extraordinary, unique; his heart and his compulsive excellence set him apart from other mortals more than his prominent proboscis. Jacobi, for all his energetic resourcefulness, has neither the swagger nor the stature for the part. He commandeers the stage with his ambition to fill the role...