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Dec. 29th, 2019 12:27 pmAs I mentioned a couple posts ago, last month I went with ![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
whalefern to go see the new Cyrano de Bergerac musical starring Peter Dinklage and Jasmine Cephas Jones.
All the leads gave incredible performances, and the show absolutely had powerful moments, but overall didn't pack the punch that it should have. The main thing that I personally noticed was the music, by the National -- and I enjoy the National, but they don't necessarily have, uh, a vast ... musical range? Cyrano is a story that's deeply and profoundly about personal style and the ways in which people are and are not able to express themselves, so it's a bit unfortunate to have a Cyrano musical in which the solo numbers for Cyrano, Roxane, and Christian all sound more or less the same.
(ME: The language of the play itself is just so good that it would be difficult to write lyrics clever enough to match ... I think if I were doing it I would just have all the music be diegetic to avoid the problem.
whalefern: Think of the amazing patter-song you could do for the scene in which Cyrano mocks his own nose though! And Roxane attempting to engage Christian in a duet and Christian desperately capping all her interesting rhymes with hopelessly flat ones!
ME: OH YOU'RE RIGHT THAT'S BETTER.)
I hadn't read the actual play since I was a teenager, so I didn't catch the other thing that ended up really bothering both of us untilwhalefern pointed it out: the theme of the play, Cyrano's most important character trait, is his panache. It's his last line as he dies, the thing he holds onto, the personal triumph snatched out of stupid defeat and meaningless death.
In this musical, the word 'panache' is not used; instead, it's translated throughout as 'pride.' These things are not the same. They're especially not the same when the story of Cyrano is specifically framed as being about disability, as it was in this production.
Panache, as Rostand (who innovated the modern use of the word in French as well as English) defines it: "To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero; panache is therefore a timid heroism, like the smile with which one excuses one's superiority." Panache is about wit, confidence, and style as both a virtue and a defense mechanism; these things all mean something, and they mean something especially for a person who is marginalized and nonetheless makes a deliberate decision to live life flamboyantly and on their own terms.
If you strip the humor and the aesthetic out of panache, then maybe what you have left is pride -- a deadly sin and a tragic flaw, without the style in it that also makes it a little sublime.
And for all the fact that it's a story about people consistently making very bad and self-defeating decisions, Cyrano de Bergerac is a little sublime. I just finished rereading the Christopher Fry translation; it's only like 100 pages and it took me two whole weeks because I was enjoying rolling around in the language so much. I'm resisting the urge to just splatter a bunch of quotes in here as I did all over Twitter, but I will say I'm now also extremely mad at the play for not including Roxane's appearance on the battlefield in the fourth act, which I had one hundred percent forgotten about until I reread it.
... but all that said, even though the text disappointed in several key ways, I do think the explicit framing of the play as being about disability was in fact a good and worthwhile staging of the story. We also spent a lot of time after the show talking about how good a queer Cyrano would be. I had never thought to connect Cyrano's enormous nose to the Dreyfus Affair until Nicholas Cronk did it in the introduction to the edition that I was reading, but Edmond Rostand was a Dreyfusard and now I also desperately want to see a production that leans into a Jewish Cyrano:
A good nose is the sign
of a good, courteous, intelligent, benign
liberal, courageous man: such as you see
before you, and such as you will never be.
In conclusion, more Cyranos that are explicitly about the experience of marginalization, please and thank you and goodnight.
All the leads gave incredible performances, and the show absolutely had powerful moments, but overall didn't pack the punch that it should have. The main thing that I personally noticed was the music, by the National -- and I enjoy the National, but they don't necessarily have, uh, a vast ... musical range? Cyrano is a story that's deeply and profoundly about personal style and the ways in which people are and are not able to express themselves, so it's a bit unfortunate to have a Cyrano musical in which the solo numbers for Cyrano, Roxane, and Christian all sound more or less the same.
(ME: The language of the play itself is just so good that it would be difficult to write lyrics clever enough to match ... I think if I were doing it I would just have all the music be diegetic to avoid the problem.
ME: OH YOU'RE RIGHT THAT'S BETTER.)
I hadn't read the actual play since I was a teenager, so I didn't catch the other thing that ended up really bothering both of us until
In this musical, the word 'panache' is not used; instead, it's translated throughout as 'pride.' These things are not the same. They're especially not the same when the story of Cyrano is specifically framed as being about disability, as it was in this production.
Panache, as Rostand (who innovated the modern use of the word in French as well as English) defines it: "To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero; panache is therefore a timid heroism, like the smile with which one excuses one's superiority." Panache is about wit, confidence, and style as both a virtue and a defense mechanism; these things all mean something, and they mean something especially for a person who is marginalized and nonetheless makes a deliberate decision to live life flamboyantly and on their own terms.
If you strip the humor and the aesthetic out of panache, then maybe what you have left is pride -- a deadly sin and a tragic flaw, without the style in it that also makes it a little sublime.
And for all the fact that it's a story about people consistently making very bad and self-defeating decisions, Cyrano de Bergerac is a little sublime. I just finished rereading the Christopher Fry translation; it's only like 100 pages and it took me two whole weeks because I was enjoying rolling around in the language so much. I'm resisting the urge to just splatter a bunch of quotes in here as I did all over Twitter, but I will say I'm now also extremely mad at the play for not including Roxane's appearance on the battlefield in the fourth act, which I had one hundred percent forgotten about until I reread it.
... but all that said, even though the text disappointed in several key ways, I do think the explicit framing of the play as being about disability was in fact a good and worthwhile staging of the story. We also spent a lot of time after the show talking about how good a queer Cyrano would be. I had never thought to connect Cyrano's enormous nose to the Dreyfus Affair until Nicholas Cronk did it in the introduction to the edition that I was reading, but Edmond Rostand was a Dreyfusard and now I also desperately want to see a production that leans into a Jewish Cyrano:
A good nose is the sign
of a good, courteous, intelligent, benign
liberal, courageous man: such as you see
before you, and such as you will never be.
In conclusion, more Cyranos that are explicitly about the experience of marginalization, please and thank you and goodnight.
