“No Nose for Cyrano”
An old
novelty song I learned as a kid goes: “Noses, noses / they run in my family
/ Some are big / Some are small / Some you cannot see at all.” As most sapient theatregoers
know, there’s a particular nose that didn’t belong to Jimmy Durante and has
dominated the stage and screen since 1897. It’s the one planted on the face of Edmond
Rostand’s eponymous hero in Cyrano de
Bergerac, the still widely produced romantic melodrama about the 17th
century duelist, poet, and playwright. So significant is Cyrano’s elongated proboscis
that Rostand provides him with the opportunity to defend it against insult in
one of the most brilliant satirical monologues in theatre history.
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| Scott Stangland, Peter Dinklage, Christopher Gurr. All photos: Monique Carboni. |
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| Ritchie Coster, Peter Dinklage. |
Not that there aren’t one or two snotty references to it. However,
since Dinklage’s own muzzle is more cute than colossal, all negative comments
regarding his appearance are of the euphemistic, wink-wink variety,
allowing him and us to react to such slights with an awareness of what they’re
really looking down their noses at. The diminutive hero even laughs at himself, saying, “I am
proof that God has a sick sense of humor.”
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| Jasmine Cephas Jones. |
Dinklage is unquestionably a marvelous actor, recognized not
only for his renowned, multiple award-winning work on “Game of Thrones,” but
for many other screen and stage roles. Gamely cast against type as Rostand’s
master swordsman/sacrificial lover/poetic wordsmith, he provides a host of
interesting readings and makes his presence indelible.
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| Christopher Gurr, Hillary Fisher, Nehal Joshi, Josh A. Dawson, Scott Stangland. |
Cyrano is a musical, though, and Dinklage’s singing
talent is, shall we say, modest. His few songs are designed to exploit his powerfully
resonant but severely limited baritone by allowing him to act-speak-sing them in
a Leonard Cohen-like delivery rather than give them full-out musical expression.
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| Peter Dinklage, Josh A. Dawson. |
Dinklage handles Cyrano’s emotional life—from his critical arrogance
to his outsized pride to his erotic passion to his wounded heart to his ironic
wit—with panache, but he remains unpersuasive as a character so devastatingly
skilled at swordplay he can lay waste to 100 men. On the other hand, if you would
accept Tommy Tune as Toulouse Lautrec or Rebel Wilson as Marilyn Monroe, you
might consider him an apropos Cyrano.
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| Blake Jenner, Peter Dinklage. |
Panache,
by the way, is nearly as significant a part of Cyrano de Bergerac as Cyrano’s
nose but it, too, has vanished from the script. Not only is the word never
spoken, the performance fails to provide it either as an attribute of the hero’s
character or as the flair embodied in Rostand’s style.
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| Blake Jenner, Peter Dinklage, Jasmine Cephas Jones. |
Schmidt sets the action, which takes place in 1640, in a
timeless world suggested by Tom Broecker’s costume scheme, combining classical
and modern elements, with Rostand’s flowery dialogue replaced by contemporary commonplaces
(including several iterations of “shit”). Her minimalist approach deprives
Rostand’s play of the flamboyance necessary to disguise the implausibility of
its impossibly sentimental plot, making the entire enterprise seem absurd
(reductio ad absurdum, as they say).
Rostand’s original somehow manages to suspend our disbelief in
the possibility that Cyrano, secretly in love with the beauteous Roxanne (Jasmine
Cephas Jones), would selflessly conspire to further the aspirations of a love
rival, the tongue-tied Christian (Blake Jenner), merely because Roxanne is enamored
of Christian’s looks. In Schmidt’s watered-down version, the concept seems
exaggeratedly artificial. This is particularly evident in the scene when Cyrano,
in the garden’s shadows, woos Roxanne, overlooking the scene from a balcony, on
Christian’s behalf. Moreover, the inability of anyone to realize that it will
only be a matter of minutes after Christian and Roxanne are married that she’ll
realize the extent both of her, his, and Cyrano’s stupidity seems ridiculously
apparent here.
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| Peter Dinklage, Jasmine Cephas Jones. |
Schmidt’s script waters the five-act play down to two,
taking up a little more than two hours. Its music is by Aaron Dessner and Bryce
Dessner, and its lyrics by Matt Berninger and Carin Besser, members of the
Grammy-winning indie rock band The National. One song after the other, played
by a six-piece band, repeats a simple note progression over and over as the
lyrics, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, carry plodding narrative messages. While
occasionally clicking, the score too frequently flirts with the banal. And with
a dominant tone of rueful melancholy depriving the score of variety, the show begins
to drag.
Still, Jasmine Cephas Jones (Hamilton) has
such an exceptional sound she manages to make even sow’s ear lyrics sound like silk
purse ones. Blake Jenner’s voice goes far toward compensating for Dinklage’s musical
limitations, while Josh A. Dawson does nicely as Cyrano’s friend, Le Bret. Ritchie
Coster, as the posh-accented De Guiche, the nobleman love rival for Roxanne, creates
an effective blend of the insidious and sympathetic, and Grace McClean is pleasing
as Roxanne’s chaperone, Marie. The remaining ensemble of five keeps busy
doubling nicely in a variety of roles.
Schmidt’s staging, combined with Jeff and Rick Kuperman’s
choreography, is enacted on an efficient set by Christine Jones and Amy Rubin
that allows for rapid scene shifts with a minimum of props and scenic
decorations (like the wisteria hanging in Roxanne’s garden). The overall tone
is dark. Even the costumes, with the exception of several dresses—red, blue,
and white—worn by Roxanne, are mainly on the black and gray scale. Such
bleakness requires considerable input from Jeff Croiter’s strikingly dramatic
lighting.
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| Peter Dinklage, Blake Jenner. |
Several scenes are creatively realized, the best being the
battlefield sequence, especially when the doomed soldiers sing (“Southern Blood”)
of the loved ones who will learn of their deaths. There are too few such
moments to rescue the show from blandness.
Cyrano, produced by the New Group at the Daryl Roth
Theatre following its premiere last year at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Theatre, is
the latest in a line of musical (and operatic) adaptations of Rostand’s play, including two on Broadway (1973 and 1993). There’s
even a modest little musical called Serrano:
The Musical, which sets the action among mobsters in Little Italy. It isn't The Godfather but, in a creative shootout with Cyrano, it wins by more than a nose.
Daryl Roth Theatre
101 E. 15th St., NYC
Through December 22
