First performed in France in 1897, then a transatlantic sensation for many subsequent years, with numerous stage adaptations and film versions starring everyone from José Ferrer to Steve Martin, Cyrano de Bergerac endures today as a great romantic story:
The brave, brainy, but big-nosed swashbuckler poet. The secret, hopeless love he nurtures for his beauteous cousin Roxanne, who’s crushed on that gorgeous illiterate dope Christian. The lurking aristocratic villain. Those spiels of witty poetry. Swordfights. A siege and a battle. One of the best balcony scenes in all dramatic literature. Finally a poignant conclusion as autumn leaves flutter down in the courtyard of a convent. All this and a picturesque 1650s France, too.
Embracing such surefire elements, and evoking a bittersweet magic all its own, there’s little wonder that Edmond Rostand’s classic has been musicalized so frequently over the decades.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★ review here.]
The great Victor Herbert made it into a comic operetta that did not impress 1899 Broadway. The Met premiered in 1913 an opera composed by Walter Damrosch that was never heard again. A musical with songs by Vernon Duke was a pre-Broadway casualty in 1940.
More recent iterations were two different but scarcely popular musical versions that survived only briefly on Broadway in 1973 (Christopher Plummer won a Tony for it) and 1993 (the so-called “Dutch Cyrano,” imported from the Netherlands). Even composer Frank Wildhorn had a Cyrano de Bergerac: The Musical produced in Japan in 2009. Then there is Calvin Berger, which retunes the story to high school circumstances today; a bright piece that several regional theaters have produced but has yet to venture New York.
Let’s add that my collegial chum Michael Feingold will be annoyed should I fail to mention that before any of these tuners appeared, first came the satirical Cyranose de Bric-a-Brac, a musical burlesque that was a major sequence in Hurly Burly, a revue produced by the Broadway team of Weber & Fields. Kidding the play’s flowery excesses, the parody popped up in November 1898, less than a year after the original opened in Paris.
Such history is noted because most of these musical efforts were created in vain. Cyrano de Bergerac remains so satisfying as a romantic play that it usually defies musical adaptation.
So now there is Cyrano, the story of which is adapted by Erica Schmidt, who also directs the show that is produced by The New Group and opened on Thursday at the Daryl Roth Theatre.
The music is composed by Aaron Dessner and Bryce Dessner and the lyrics are written by Matt Berninger and Carin Besser, artists unknown to me but associated with The National, an indie rock band. Schmidt has half a dozen or so off-Broadway credits as a writer/director for shows ranging from Debbie Does Dallas in 2002 to a Red Bull rendition of Macbeth earlier this year.
Modest in scale and mostly melancholy in mood, their two-act musical Cyrano is a faithful, if rather flat, retelling of the story in an indeterminate though obviously bygone period. The setting, designed by Christine Jones and Amy Rubin within a proscenium frame, involves a relatively low horizontal wall that on closer inspection is a blackboard covered with scrawled fragments of poetry. Portals and ramps open up as necessary for the action and wisteria garlands appear for the balcony scene.
Schmidt’s dialogue is contemporary and terse. The score sounds handsome, though generally subdued in expression, and it possesses a pleasing folk-rock music quality enhanced by sonorous guitars and cello arrangements for a six-member band. Much of the dialogue is underscored and every so often the music rises into plaintive songs that paraphrase rather than heighten the action. (Incidentally, no swordplay ever erupts in this saga of a celebrated duelist.)
Perhaps the most effective number is “Wherever I Fall,” a heartfelt choral piece for soldiers on the brink of battle. “Overcome,” a duet as Cyrano clandestinely woos Roxanne on her balcony, swells towards romantic heights but is undercut by terribly pedestrian lyrics. The musical’s concluding song and scene are so weak that for several seconds the audience did not seem to realize the show had ended.
The 11-member company is led by a Cyrano portrayed by Peter Dinklage, a solid stage actor elevated to TV stardom via Game of Thrones. Cyrano’s enormous nose is remarked upon by the characters, but Dinklage sports no fake beak. Instead, through some sort of theatrical osmosis, Dinklage’s diminutive 4’5” height substitutes as Cyrano’s physical drawback. In any event, Dinklage depicts an hirsute, disheveled, and fiercely proud Cyrano who roughly croons his songs in a husky baritone.
Jasmine Cephas Jones sings as nicely as she looks as Roxanne, while Blake Jenner is smoothly boyish as Christian. The ensemble inhabits numerous small roles with ease and enthusiasm.
So there it is—an ably staged and performed production of a decent though unexciting musical version of Cyrano de Bergerac. Like so many other musical attempts before it, Cyrano scarcely improves upon Rostand’s immortal creation.
Cyrano opened November 7, 2019, at the Daryl Roth Theatre and runs through December 22. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
