Coolheaded Gascon

By T.E.K.

CYRANO

Translated and adapted from EDMOND ROSTAND by ANTHONY BURGESS

Some of the classics in the world of the arts are like family heirlooms, objects of lingering sentiment rather than pinnacles of aesthetic quality. Is the Mona Lisa a great painting, Les Sylphides a great ballet, or Clair de Lune a great piece of music? Not really, but they are all sentimental favorites. So it is with Cyrano de Bergerac. Both the play and its hero are more than a trifle silly. Yet this poet-duelist ham who boasts of besting 100 men in a single encounter has proved endearing.

It may be because Cyrano wears his soul with panache, a plume of the lyric spirit. He has the brio of a Don Juan, yet he dares not woo the beautiful and shallow Roxane for fear that his monstrous nose will render him ridiculously ugly in her eyes. And so he puts his words of eloquence, passion and longing at the service of the handsome and inarticulate dolt Christian, whom Roxane fancies. Cyrano also possesses some of the romantic chivalry of Don Quixote. He tilts at the crass, compromising windbags of this world. He has an in nate gallantry that makes his last-act death scene extremely poignant.

For all its intrinsic appeal, the cur rent revival of Cyrano is less than wholly satisfying. For mystifying reasons, the play has been converted into a musical. Since the songs are clumsily inserted into the text, they simply interrupt the narrative flow. The music was composed by Michael J. Lewis and he has the soaring melodic imagination of a computer. The lyrics, supplied by Anthony Burgess, lean more toward economy than eloquence, and while Burgess's adaptation of the main body of the text is brisk and fluently idiomatic, it is emotionally reserved and poetically undernourished.

Something of the same dry, businesslike efficiency infects Christopher Plummer's performance in the title role.

His Cyrano is too coolheaded to quite suit the hot-blooded son of Gascony.

Plummer commands our admiration without stirring our hearts.

-T.E.K.

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