Word: bergerac
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...EVER a superb 19th century play were ripe for musical adaptation on the American stage, Cyrano de Bergerac is it. The swashbuckling hero, the ever-so-radiantly-beautiful heroine, the villain, the grand gestures, the love poems and pathetic deaths-any playwright who missed out on Man of La Mancha would have to be almost a genius to blow theis opportunity...
Anthony Burgess is undoubtedly a genius. If it weren't for Christopher Plummer's nearly flawless performance and the percise, well-conceived staging of director Michael Kidd, Burgess might have succeeded in turning Edmond Rostand's intelligent play into the sentimental pap Cyrano de Bergerac clearly wasn't. Cyrano the new musical running three weeks in Boston before its Broadway debut, muffles the impact of the original play...
Burgess did have the sense to stick to Rostand's structure. Cyrano de Bergerac, France's greatest swordsman and a distinguished poet, is hated by the nobility for his iconoclastic boorishness and unflinching sense of independence. Admired by friends, loathed by enemies, he is cursed by his grotesquely protuberant nose. Because of his ugliness, he cannot confess his deepest secret-a passionate love for his cousin Roxana. But when the heroine falls in love with an Adonean but doltish young soldier, Cyrano offers to help him by writing the love-letters whose beauty win Roxana's heart. Christian, the beautiful...
...along the precarious edge of the reader's tolerance, never quite falling off. For whenever the author leans too far in the direction of obscenity-which is frequently--he bounces right back with a metaphor or reference to feed any appetite Jackie Kennedy and James Joyce. Cyrano de Bergerac and the Berrigan Brothers. While Mays and Richard Wagner all raise their heads at one point of another in the parenthetical Who's Who that attends this narrative...
Rewards and Penalties. Some do leave. But for those who stay-and most do-there are lavish rewards, including high salaries and the sense of belonging to a management elite. Standing at the head of that elite, Bergerac has great decision-making powers. Last week he was reviewing reports on the German economy. His assessment: "We expect some growth next year, but not much. If things get really bad, we shall cut back on automotive products, but may actually pick up in telecommunications." The fact that so much of ITT's volume is in telecommunications equipment should...