Word: rostand
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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...
...factors make Cyrano de Bergerac a difficult story to stage in any form substantially different from the original. Rostand created an extraordinarily subtle character in Cyrano. The dominant theme of his behavior is a vain defense against feeling ugly-his violence, his grandness, his sense that all the world is his enemy. Roxana eventually discovers that she has been in love with Cyrano's soul, but Cyrano dies a moment afterwards, having been ungraciously clobbered with a log dropped from a window...
CONSEQUENTLY, Cyrano is most entertaining when it most closely approximates Rostand's play's. Plummer, as Cyrano, is throughly moving in the play's balcony scene, wooing Roxana from the darkness while she thinks he is young Christian. The other players fall far short of Plummer's commanding performance. Leigh Beery, as Roxana, is a better singer than an actress. In his role as Christian. Mark Lamos projects little personality. Some of the finest performances come from supporting players-- Arnold Soboloff as the poet Ragueneau, and James Blendick as Le Bret, the captain of Cyrano's company...
Cyrano. Anthony Burgess scripted this musical adaptation of Rostand's play, so it should have plenty of panache, even if it doesn't go as smoothly as clockwork, 7:30 at the Colonial...