(no subject)
Dec. 29th, 2019 12:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsAs I mentioned a couple posts ago, last month I went with ![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.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.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-29 06:53 pm (UTC)Co-signed. I have seen a queer Cyrano, but I have never seen a Jewish one, and as a person who consciously used the character as a bulwark against being teased/bullied about my nose in middle and high school, I would like to.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-29 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 02:56 am (UTC)(Also, your nose is a wonderful nose and I'll fight anyone who says differently.)
no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 04:18 am (UTC)I never put the dates together before! You have a very useful introduction to your edition there.
(Also, your nose is a wonderful nose and I'll fight anyone who says differently.)
(Thank you! I am in fact quite fond of it.)
no subject
Date: 2019-12-29 08:04 pm (UTC)I love Roxane's battlefield appearance. It's her own biggest show of panache.
Also, panache is not the same as pride, what the hell! It's a totally different concept. If I had to translate it, "style" would be better. But best to just leave it alone. People know what it means.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-29 09:01 pm (UTC)You might be able to pull it off with a queer Cyrano, where people would hear Pride, capitalized: that might catch some of the defiant flamboyance, style as celebration and armor, queer-as-in-fuck-you. I'm not sure it would activate in any other context. (Clearly it didn't, here.)
no subject
Date: 2019-12-29 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 04:27 am (UTC)What an odd choice to translate...a word that we have incorporated into English. (The connotations that are lost in the adoption are rather, I think, lost even further with "pride", outside the queer context obv.)
no subject
Date: 2019-12-31 01:44 am (UTC)The more I think about it the more I really do think it was done to emphasize that Pride is Cyrano's Tragic Flaw, which is such a reduction of the point!
no subject
Date: 2020-01-01 09:17 pm (UTC)Arghk.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 03:02 am (UTC)RIGHT? I actually spent the first three acts feeling moderately warmly towards the musical's presentation of Roxane for giving her the opening scene and an opening dialogue of the show, rather than letting Cyrano completely steal the first half hour of the show, but as soon as I realized they'd cut the battlefield scene instead I took it all back. (Also, it's so important that Cyrano has an actual chance to confess to Roxane there before Christian dies and squanders it.)
IT IS OFFICIALLY AN ENGLISH WORD (thanks, in fact, to Cyrano). Just let it be a word!
no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 03:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 12:13 am (UTC)And yeah, translating panache as pride is an odd choice.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 02:18 am (UTC)ARGH.
I love Fry's translation too.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 03:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-30 04:05 am (UTC)This is why I own the number of plays by Christopher Fry that I do.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-01 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-01 09:52 pm (UTC)I have eight, counting The Lady's Not for Burning and my missing copies of Ring Round the Moon (1950) and A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946) which have been hiding in a box somewhere for like five years now. The others are A Sleep of Prisoners (1951), The Firstborn (1946), Thor, with Angels (1948), The Boy with a Cart (1938), and Venus Observed (1950). I have never seen any but The Lady's Not for Burning staged.
I really like A Sleep of Prisoners and did even before I noticed that Denholm Elliott was in the original cast; it's a religious play in which four English POWs dream their way through an interleaving of Biblical narratives which are mixed up with their memories and relationships in a kind of mystery cycle that is also about war trauma and philosophy. The Firstborn is an Exodus retelling and frankly it's batshit; it made enough of an impression on me in college that I used a couple of lines from it as an epigraph to a story, but I would probably have to re-read it to decide if I think it works for me now. Thor, with Angels is a historical play about Norse paganism vs. Christianity and I haven't re-read it in years because the title promised a synthesis and the plot went all out for Christianity. The Boy with a Cart is a straightforward miracle play about Saint Cuthman of Steyning and it is totally fine as such; I like the language. Venus Observed is an extremely funny drawing-room comedy-romance involving an intergenerational love triangle, an impending solar eclipse, and a heroine who in her introductory scene shoots an apple out of the hand of her prospective father-in-law without warning anybody, including the audience. Between the second and third acts the house burns down. I would desperately love to see someone stage it. Ring Round the Moon is an adaptation of Jean Anouilh's L'Invitation au château (1947) and is a sort of Shavian farce concerning a pair of identical twins of diametrically opposed temperaments—played by the same actor, who must never get a break—and the plans of one of them to interfere in the other's romance by introducing an alternative, which naturally all goes sideways at a midsummer's house party. There are a lot of class issues and a lot of slamming doors. I would love to see it staged, too, if only for the mechanics of the double-act. I remember almost nothing about A Phoenix Too Frequent except that it has a classical Roman setting and I was more interested in the numinous than Fry was.
I feel as though I've read The Dark Is Light Enough, just because it was the last of his seasonal quartet, but don't believe I ever owned a copy.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-01 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-01 11:24 pm (UTC)You're welcome! I went through a phase when every time I saw an unfamiliar play by Christopher Fry in a used book store, I bought it. It mostly paid off!