Word: roxana
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 youth, seeks triumph of the flesh; Cyrano, the poet, seeks glorification of the spirit...
...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...
Married. William Harrah, 61, gambling impresario who parlayed a bingo parlor into Nevada casinos (Harrah's Reno and Lake Tahoe clubs), second in winnings only to those of Howard Hughes; and Roxana Carlson, 32, a model; he for the fifth time, she for the second; at his Lake Tahoe estate...
Betty Byrne, as Ariel, the "light and airy spirit" who does Prospero's bidding, is active and agile in the part, and Roxana Proser, as Caliban, creates a growling, beastly slave. Kaarel Kaljot, who plays both Antonio and Stephano, the King of Naples' drunken butler is particularly expressive and imaginative in both roles, prancing and reeling as Stephano and striding somberly as Antonio...