I feel guilty not spending as
much time reviewing a Broadway Cyrano de Bergerac as I have in the past, but the
truth is, I haven’t that much to say; and that’s because, at least as far as I
can perceive, the production hasn’t that much to say. Director Jamie
Lloyd expends much effort filling the
stage with rousing testosterone (most of the characters are of course male and
most soldiers), but it tends to come over in a wash of rowdiness without too
much meaningful individual-character particularization. And then there’s
British actor Douglas Hodge—last
seen here as Albin in the most recent Broadway revival of La cage Aux Folles—as
Cyrano. The occasion of his entrance from the house is done so cleverly that it
caused my significant other to utter under her breath, “Great.” It was, alas,
the high point. I won’t spoil it, but the device was thereafter attenuated past
its point, and when Hodge finally got around to taking stage proper…it was all
downhill. And for the stupidest of reasons. And I hate to say it: one I
anticipated.
You
can’t understand half of what he says.
He
makes a lot of great noises, he inflects up, he inflects down, he does loud, he
does soft, but he’s so concerned with effect—racing through a passage
with bullet muscularity, slowing down to mutter in contemplation, “stick
shifting” into dramatic transition when Cyrano is surprised or needs to make a
snap decision—that he sacrifices basic diction. (He did the same in La
Cage, but musical theatre compression, the
metric precision of music and the
familiarity-&-structure of the lyrics [and indeed the show] made the
vocalizes seem merely a self-conscious indulgence. But in Cyrano de
Bergerac, with its speeches and sprawl,
they render him incomprehensible 50% of the time.)
The
rest of the production is Cyrano-generic;
its Chistian (Kyle Soller) and Roxane (Clémence Poséy) filling out the archetypes without standing out;
and the one supporting performance of note being given by Patrick
Page, giving a near-classic delivery of
Cyrano’s nemesis Count De Guiche, silky smooth and resonantly voiced and not
quite part of the same production, as his performance seems to be drawn from a
well of stylistic authenticity, communicable emotion, and even some
inspiration. Come to think of it, one might only wonder how good his Cyrano
might be…
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