Spectactular Cyrano

By Joe Dwyer     10/23/08 7:00pm

The Alley Theatre's latest production of Edmond Rostand's 1897 comedy, Cyrano de Bergerac, is nothing short of spectacular.For anyone who did not read the play in a high school English class, here's a summary: It follows the dashing exploits of French Army cadet Cyrano de Bergerac. He is an expert swordsman who has a penchant for poetry and a gift for words, but he also has an exceptionally large nose that kills his confidence with the ladies, especially with his distant cousin Roxane. When Roxane falls in love with an inarticulate cadet named Christian, who can't string together a coherent sentence to save his life, Cyrano decides to help Christian out by telling him what to say to Roxane, and the play takes off from there.

Jeffrey Bean tackles the role of Cyrano, creating one of the most engrossing and believable performances since Heath Ledger played the Joker in The Dark Knight. Even with his ridiculous prosthetic nose, Bean makes Cyrano a dynamic and familiar figure, nailing the emotions of his character from his confident swagger in the first act to his stubborn resilience in the last. Bean's delivery of lines and monologues deserves some mention as well, since the play is roughly three hours long and Cyrano spends the majority of that time speaking. Bean keeps the dialogue from getting stale and effectively conveys all the intended wit and innuendo, so the audience won't ever have to wonder if that last line was supposed to be funny or not.

Elizabeth Heflin and Justin Doran play the happy couple of Roxane and Christian, and while their scenes together are touching, Doran's humorously repetitive bluntness keeps things from getting too sappy. Heflin's character follows a convincing transformation from her lovestruck beginnings to her resigned mourning of Christian's death at the end of the play.

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In terms of sets and costumes, it is apparent that a lot of time and money went into them. The basic set consists of some weather-beaten columns on a cobblestone floor, but the crew swaps rolling set pieces in and out between scenes to change the stage from a hotel to a bakery and even to the middle of a battlefield. They are simple, with some scenes using only a cloth draped between upstage and downstage to serve as a backdrop, but they are well thought-out, which differentiates them from looking like a pile of two-by-fours knocked together in an afternoon.

While the sets may be humble, the costumes are definitely anything but. The entire cast wears meticulously detailed period clothing, from the marquis' flowery jackets, painted faces and buckled high heels to Cyrano's white panache, drab jacket and ruff.

Cyrano is a lengthy play, but criticizing it for its runtime is impossible because there is no way the play could be any shorter without losing some of its essential meaning. The only times the play runs into some problems are when set pieces or blocking of the actors alienate certain segments of the audience by obstructing their view or showing an actor's back for extended periods of time.

The bottom line is that Cyrano de Bergerac is an exceptional experience that theatre-lovers and newcomers alike will thoroughly enjoy.

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