CYRANO

QUERIDA AMIGA,

TE ESCRIBO SOBRE LA IDEA DE HACER UNA VERSIÓN DEL CYRANO DE BERGEREAC DE ROSTAND. SI ALGUIEN NO SABE QUIEN ES SIEMPRE A INVESTIGAR, POR FAVOR. YA SE HIZO UNA VERSION EN HOLANDA EN 1973 Y QUE SE ESTRENO EN BROADWAY EN 1993, CON MALAS CRITICAS Y SIENDO UN FRACASO ECONOMICO Y DE CRITICAS.
LA IDEA DEL CYRAO, AUN SIENDO MUY BELLA NO ES UNA QUE ME IENTERESE EN LO PERSONAL. SON GUSTOS. PEROD ESDE YA GRACIAS POR APORTARMELA. SIEMPRE SIRVE. SI QUERES O QUIEREN SABER MAS SOBRE ESTE ENTRANDO EN YAHOO Y PONIENDO CYRANO THE MUSICAL, VERAN ESCENAS.. ACA TE TARNSCRIBO LO QUE DICE WIKIPEDIA Y LA CRITICA DE NUEVA YORK DEL NEW YORK TIMES.

O SEA, MAS ALLA DE LA BUENISIMA Y GENTIL IDEA DE PROPONER, ¿NO SERIA FANTASTICO, COMO ACABO DE HACER PARA ACLARAR PUNTOS A MI AMIGA, HACER LO MISMO CON TODO? Y DE ESA MANREA SE PODRAN INFFORMAR Y VER MUCHO DE MUSICALES.


Cyrano: The Musical
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For the 1973 musical adaptation, see Cyrano (musical) and Cyrano.
Cyrano
The Musical

Original Broadway Playbill
Music Ad van Dijk
Lyrics Koen van Dijk
Peter Reeves
Sheldon Harnick
Book Koen van Dijk
Based upon Edmond Rostand's classic Cyrano de Bergerac
Productions Holland
1993 Broadway
Cyrano: The Musical is a musical with an original book and lyrics by Koen van Dijk, English lyrics by Peter Reeves, additional lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and music by Ad van Dijk.

An English translation of a Dutch production, it is based on Edmond Rostand's classic 1897 play of the same name focusing on a love triangle involving the large-nosed poetic Cyrano de Bergerac, his beautiful cousin Roxane, and his classically handsome but inarticulate friend Christian de Neuvillette who, unaware of Cyrano's unrequited passion for Roxane, imposes upon him to provide the romantic words he can use to woo her successfully in mid-17th century Paris. Its style is closer to that of the pop operas Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera than a traditional Broadway book musical.

After 38 previews, the Broadway production, directed by Eddy Habbema, opened on November 21, 1993 at the Neil Simon Theatre, where it ran for 137 performances. The cast included Bill van Dijk as Cyrano, Anne Runolfsson as Roxane, and Paul Anthony Stewart as Christian, with James Barbour and Jeff Gardner in supporting roles.



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Review/Theater: Cyrano: The Musical; Cyrano's Flights Have Touched Down On West 52d Street
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By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: November 22, 1993, Monday

Credit the many people involved in turning "Cyrano de Bergerac" from a lyrical, swashbuckling French play into a Dutch musical into a $7 million English-language musical with at least one success: its plot is as easy to follow as a synopsis laid out in Cliffs Notes.

Indeed, for all its technologically sophisticated sets and elaborately orchestrated score, "Cyrano: The Musical," which opened last night at the Neil Simon Theater, comes across as a lavishly illustrated study guide, with many helpful, cipherlike characters in sumptuous historical costumes taking pains to explain who they are and what they're doing. It is not unusual for songs to include phrases like "But let me tell you what happened yesterday" or "Roxane, so you're still here. It must be seven years."

Now such clarity of exposition may be a virtue. But it doesn't leave much room for the rhapsodic infatuation with words that was at the heart of Edmond Rostand's 1898 masterpiece of theatrical hokum and was the very lifeblood of its title character, the long-beaked, poetic-souled chevalier of 17th-century Paris.

Even though the lines are almost entirely sung (this "Cyrano" is more a pop-operetta than a conventional musical), so many of them are devoted to expositional recitative that the entire work feels closer to textbook prose than poetry. As directed by Eddy Habbema (who also staged the production in Amsterdam, to great success), it is a fairly efficient piece of storytelling. But it seldom gets much closer to Rostand's heady flights of rodomontade and romanticism, or truly felt emotions, than an entry in a reader's encyclopedia.

Don't put too much blame on Bill Van Dijk, the Dutch actor who created the title part in the original version and stars again here. He is a likable and charming performer, who sings in English with a clarion voice and un-self-conscious fluency. But he lacks the titanic presence of a character who has created, through flamboyantly heroic words and gestures, an outsized aura commensurate to the size of his legendary nose.

In his dueling scenes, Mr. Van Dijk is scrappy but curiously inept. And, urging his fellow soldiers on to glory through death in the play's climactic battle scenes, he seems more like a spunky mascot than a charismatic leader.

The biggest problem, however, in raising this Cyrano into the theatrical empyrean where he belongs lies not with Mr. Van Dijk but with the show's lyricists: Koen Van Dijk, who wrote the original book and score in Dutch; Peter Reeves, its English lyricist, and the Broadway veteran Sheldon Harnick, who is credited with "additional lyrics." (Just to get this out of the way, the show's composer is Ad Van Dijk, and none of these Van Dijks are related.)

The writers have been unable to find a way of translating the bravura linguistic arias Rostand gave his title hero with any comparable flair. The most famous of them, in which Cyrano offers 19 stylistic variations on ways to make fun of his nose here shrivels into a limp succession of rhymes -- "a snorer or a borer or an odor explorer," for example -- that are hardly the stuff of verbal pyrotechnics. Most of the lyrics, actually, are simply functional and as unquotable as recipes.

Most of Cyrano's grand gestures, both physical and verbal, tend to get lost amid the truly spectacular multiple changes of Baroque-flavored scenery by Paul Gallis (often achieved with the gasp-inducing use of hydraulic lifts) and the successive ensemble scenes of crowds in opulent period costumes by Yan Tax. These grandiose set pieces keep coming at us so rapidly and dazzlingly that they don't really have a chance to establish their reason to be. And some of them, like an unbearably cute dancing-nun sequence in the convent to which Roxane has retired at the play's end, should have been scrapped long ago.

Ad Van Dijk's music, which recalls the mechanically propulsive score of "Les Miserables," keeps the plot marching, marching, marching along at a military clip, with suspenseful shadings of orchestral dissonance in the background. For the scenes involving the triangular love story between Cyrano, his beautiful cousin Roxane (Anne Runolfsson) and the handsome but inarticulate Christian (Paul Anthony Stewart), for whom Cyrano provides the words to court the woman both men love, the music shifts into a romantic pop tunefulness that suggests the ballads from the Disney cartoon fantasies "Beauty and the Beast" and "Aladdin."

The famous balcony scene, in which Cyrano plays eloquent prompt-master to the tongue-tied Christian, still retains vestiges of its comic poignancy. But, for the most part, the characters have all the individualized vividness of figures in a history pageant.

The principals generally sing pleasantly and cleanly, although the amplification system sometimes makes it difficult to tell who is singing what. Ms. Runolfsson has a flexible voice that shifts, with crowd-pleasing virtuosity, between ethereal melodiousness and piercing big-moment resonance. She is a curiously stalwart Roxane, more at home visiting the lines of battle than in the misty tableaux that place her on a platform against a full moon, where she looks like Glenda the Good Witch in "The Wizard of Oz."

That round, melancholy moon hovers symbolically over much of the evening. In one of the more memorable scenes from the original, Cyrano actually pretends to be a visitor from the moon, who expatiates whimsically on his travels through the stars.

In a way, of course, Cyrano is from the moon, from a realm of vaulting fancy that disdains the paltriness and mediocrity of the society in which he finds himself. In this new version, that kinship is absent. Cyrano sees the moon as a distant, omniscient watcher who looks down on him with a "cold objective eye." He actually tells it, "Yes, I know you perceive the reason why I can never tell Roxane what she means to me."

Clearly, this "Cyrano" and its title character will always be grounded on the earth. Cyrano: The Musical Book and lyrics by Koen van Dijk, based on the play by Edmond Rostand; music by Ad van Dijk; English lyrics by Peter Reeves; additional lyrics by Sheldon Harnick; directed by Eddy Habbema; associate director, Eleanor Fazan; set by Paul Gallis; costumes by Yan Tax; lighting by Reinier Tweebeeke; sound by Rogier van Rossum; orchestrations by Don Sebesky and Tony Cox; musical director, Constantine Kitsopoulos; musical coordinator, John Miller; production stage manager, Bob Borod; technical supervisor, Roy Sears; special effects by Gregory Meeh; fight director, Malcolm Ranson, executive producer, Robin de Levita. Presented by Joop van den Ende, in association with Peter T. Kulok. At Neil Simon Theater, 250 West 52d Street, Manhattan. Man and Captain de Castel Jaloux Geoffrey Blaisdell Le Bret . . . Paul Schoeffler Ragueneau . . . Ed Dixon Christian . . . Paul Anthony Stewart De Guiche . . . Timothy Nolen Roxane . . . Anne Runolfsson Valvert . . . Adam Pelty Chaperone . . . Joy Hermalyn Montfleury . . . Mark Agnes Cyrano . . . Bill van Dijk Mother Superior . . . Elizabeth Acosta Novice . . . Michele Ragusa





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