And, of course, there’s his bravest, stupidest choice of all: He ghostwrites Christian’s love letters to Roxane, pouring his heart into promises that another man will keep. Crawl through a battlefield to fulfill a vow? His pleasure. He throws himself, therefore, under life’s wheels. It’s a community, but Cyrano is alone inside it, tormented by his unrequited love, his hatred for his own enormous nose, and a contempt for aristocrats like the loathsome de Guiche (Tom Edden). Their circle is full of poets like Lignière (Nima Taleghani) and café owner Ragueneau (Michele Austin), and as beatboxer Vaneeka Dadhria gives them a rhythm, they all dazzle one another with verse. Brave, brilliant, ugly Cyrano yearns for Roxane (Evelyn Miller), who has fallen in love with pretty boy Christian (Eben Figueiredo), a soldier who has just enlisted in Cyrano’s tough-talking military regiment. Even when he sits still and silent, you can feel him hurtling along in his mind.Īpart from its obvious anachronisms (including winking comments about gender fluidity and the “male gaze”), Crimp’s plot is similar to Rostand’s. He claims he has decelerated his Glaswegian patter for American audiences so we can understand him … but I can’t believe it. And in this word-crazy scrum, a phenomenal McAvoy goes faster and fiercer than anybody. It’s just so goddamn fast: Actors spit Crimp’s poetry in rap battles and spoken-word flights the language pivots and jukes like it’s trying to get a ball down the field. It takes nearly three hours, but this Cyrano still feels compact and almost claustrophobically compressed. Yes, well, in the sense that fire can be considered a “new version” of wood. For Jamie Lloyd’s heart-stopping production now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the program says that the text is a “new version” by Martin Crimp. There certainly isn’t a rapier or a feathery hat in sight, though there are reams of verse. If you’ve encountered Edmond Rostand’s swashbuckling 1897 romance before - whether in the musical, or the movie of the musical, or one of its retellings, or, heck, the original play - this hype-’em-up chant might not be the Cyrano de Bergerac you remember. Up in the air, their favorite lad is none other than James McAvoy, roaring too, his eyes rolling wild as he crowd-surfs over his troop of rowdies. A bunch of macho British soldiers have torn off their shirts and are hoisting a fellow squaddie on their shoulders.
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