“My heart always timidly hides itself behind my mind. I set out to bring down stars from the sky, then, for fear of ridicule, I stop and pick little flowers of eloquence.”
Thanks to Tumblr, I had seen this image. And learned that this image was from a production of Cyrano de Bergerac.
Several months ago, I saw the Peter Dinklage movie of the musical Cyrano, and then learned that this stage production with James was going to be in Brooklyn soon. So I thought, 1) I wanna see him kiss this man, 2) I wanna see what changes they have made to this story such that he is kissing Christian.
this is a fascinating take on the show op, I love it. I wanted to discuss the kiss though:
for context I was an usher for this production and have seen it many, many times, so I’ve picked up on some specific lines and staging choices specifically with the regards to the kiss. I also thought it came out of nowhere the first time I saw it, and it took me a few more times of seeing the show to catch where it came from.
the entire show, Cyrano refers to Christian as beautiful, and handsome, and specifically the phrase “pretty boy” is used a lot and repeated often when describing Christian by most of the female actors onstage… but also by Cyrano. The only man to refer to Christian using that phrase is Cyrano.
when they meet, there’s a curiously long hug that lasts *just* long enough for the audience to start laughing uncomfortably before they split apart, but not before they look into each other’s eyes and leave a lingering touch on each other before stepping back. There’s some kind of connection there that goes unspoken.
we do see Cyrano start to be able to joke around more around Christian as the show goes on, and Christian confesses to him that he has always felt more comfortable around men for some reason, and that he doesn’t know how to talk to women. That’s a big part of why he agrees to Cyrano’s plan: he feels confident in speaking intelligently to men and being able to come up with rhyme and verse around the men in the show. But not the women. Around women he feels dull and stupid.
I think part of his “stupidity” in this production is the fact that he feels like of course he’s in love with Roxanne, look at her, everyone’s in love with her! And then he looks at her, and can’t find the words to rhyme anything at all (which is a vastly important aspect of each character in this production.) When he’s with Cyrano, he has much less trouble speaking in rhyme. He can do it just fine. (I very firmly agree with op though that they made him way too unlikable and too much like a bully.)
Cyrano places his forehead against Christian’s very intently quite a few times in the show, and most times it’s Christian who breaks that contact first, scooting back nervously and looking away.
when Roxanne arrives on the battlefield, he isn’t pleased to see her. He doesn’t even smile. If Christian were genuinely being played as a dumb lovesick individual who can’t string two words together, he’d be grinning widely and thrilled to bits. But he isn’t: all he is, is mildly pissed off. he tells her she shouldn’t have come, and we, the audience, can see from her reaction that what she was expecting was the sweet lovesick smile. But she doesn’t get it.
Christian doesn’t even know how many letters Cyrano was writing for him. He doesn’t even know their contents. We see him ask Cyrano for that information after finding out how in love with her Cyrano is. If Christian were truly in love with his wife, he’d want to know every detail. But again- he doesn’t.
when they kiss, it’s Christian who oh so tentatively initiates it. There is a very long drawn-out pause in which Christian is just inching closer to Cyrano, as if to see how close he can get before Cyrano pulls away, but he doesn’t. And then they kiss, and break away, look into each other’s eyes, and then they both go back in for it, simultaneously. Christian breaks the kiss first, clearly panicking, and sprints upstage calling for Roxanne because Cyrano has something to tell her (aka, his love). Cyrano runs after Christian, desperately calling his name, and only stops when Roxanne calls him.
I think Christian realized the truth in that moment. He knew Cyrano loved Roxanne, and he knew that Roxanne loved the man in the letters, aka Cyrano, not him. And he knew, in this moment, that he didn’t love Roxanne back. That’s why he panics.
at the end of the show, after Christian’s death, Roxanne talks about how in love with her he had been, and how much she misses his love, and Cyrano doesn’t comment anything but just softly refers to him as “a confused boy” who didn’t know what he wanted.
I think they should have done a better job making this obvious to the audience, it definitely took me a while to figure out where in the show they made this kind of thing happen. So I think it definitely is there, but it’s subtle.
I do love to hear the uncomfortable laughter in the audience every night when the two of them kiss in the second act though, regardless of how unclear the build-up is. they are two men in a show that is famously about unrequited love, and they will kiss, slowly, onstage, right in front of you, forcing you to watch and accept that they are part of the story. and if that makes you uncomfortable? this show says too bad.
Hello. We’ve been writing this blog every day for almost twelve months now. As it was our intention to find out why every single day of the year is BRILLIANT, we’re almost there and it seems appropriate to have some sort of countdown. If we make it, there will be nine more posts after this one. You can also find this blog on Wordpress, along with a short explanation of how it came about, and in which we reveal which of us has actually written all of this on the ’about’ page. Thank you all for reading, liking and re-posting. Will we reach a hundred followers my March 15th? Probably not…
Why March 6th is BRILLIANT
Choose Your Own Adventure
Today we want to talk about Cyrano de Bergerac. It isn’t going to be very easy, as details of his life are scant. But he does have one, arguably two, totally fictional accounts of his life that we can tell you about.
The real Cyrano was probably baptised in Paris on this day in 1619. He was the son of Abel de Cyrano, lord of Mauvières and Bergerac. He was first educated in the countryside by a parish priest along with his friend Henri Lebret, who later became his biographer. He didn’t pay much attention to his lessons there and sounds like an awful student. His father sent him to Paris to finish his education. We don’t know where, it might have been Collège de Beauvais, because he later wrote a play called ‘The Pedant Tricked’ which made fun of one of the tutors there.
Alternatively, he was not aristocratic at all, but descended from a Sardinian fishmonger. He was the lover of Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, a burlesque poet, until 1653 when they fell out horribly and wrote lots of rude things about each other. Pick which one you like best. We suppose it is possible that they might both be true to some extent.
He enjoyed a life of drinking gambling and duelling and joined the army when he was nineteen. As he wasn’t keen on discipline, war or the death penalty, he didn’t fit in particularly well there. Cyrano was severely wounded twice, he was shot through the body and wounded in the neck with a sword. In 1641, he left the army and began to study under the philosopher and mathematician Pierre Gassendi. Gassendi tried to reconcile Christianity with Epicurean atomism, which we don’t have time to look into today, but it must have been odd as Epicurus didn’t believe any gods were watching us at all, ever.
Cyrano de Bergerac died in 1655, either as the result of a wooden beam falling on his head or because he was involved in a botched assassination attempt and suffered from ill health after he was subsequently confined to a private asylum by his brother. Or perhaps it was syphilis. Again, you choose. Or take all of them…
Cyrano’s life was fictionalised in the form of a play by Edmond Rosand in 1897. The fictional Cyrano is a renowned duellist and a gifted and joyful poet. He is also crippled by self-doubt because he has a very large nose. So he cannot tell his beautiful cousin, Roxane, that he loves her. She is also loved by a handsome young man called Christian. Just when Cyrano is about to tell Roxane how he feels, she tells him she is in love with someone. At first he thinks, and hopes that she means him But when she describes him as handsome, he finds out it is Christian. Roxane also asks Cyrano to look after Christian, they are both soldiers and she doesn’t want to see Christian hurt. After that, the two men become friends and, because Christian doesn’t have the gift of poetry, Cyrano agrees to write his love letters for him. Now Cyrano can pour out his heart to Roxane without her ever knowing that the words are his. Roxanne falls deeply in love with Christian because of his beautiful words and eventually confesses to Cyrano that the letters mean so much to her that she would love Christian even if he was ugly. Just as Cyrano is about to confess that he is the author Christian is wounded and dies. So Cyrano feels he can now never confess that it was him all along.
Fifteen years later, Roxane is in a convent, still mourning the loss of Christian. Cyrano comes to visit her, but on the way, someone drops a log on his head and he is mortally wounded. He arrives at the convent, knowing it will be the last time he sees her. She asks him to read Christian’s last love letter to her, which he does. But as he is reading it grows dark. As he continues to read even though it is too dark to see, she finally realises that he is the author of the letters. He denies it to his dying breath. He dies saying that he has lost everything, except one important thing his 'panache’. The play has been performed many times, rewritten and adapted for film. Off the top of our heads, there is the one with Gérard Depardieu, a modern day version starring Steve Martin with an upbeat ending and 'The Truth About Cats and Dogs’ is a gender reversed version of the same story. It is from the original play that the word 'panache’ first entered the English language.
Cyrano de Bergerac also wrote stories with a hero named Cyrano which were published after his death by his biographer Lebret. But they are not obviously about his life. Cyrano’s Cyrano travels to the moon and the sun. 'L'Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune.’ (The other world: states and empires of the Moon) and 'Les États et Empires du Soleil.’ (The states and empires of the Sun) are, in a way, science fiction novels before there was any such thing as science fiction.
Cyrano first tries to reach the Moon by strapping bottles of dew to his body. The sun shines on the bottles which become clouds and lift him into the sky. When he comes down again he is in New France (Canada) because the earth has moved round beneath him. He meets a tribe of people who are naked. He, thinking he is in France, wonders how long French people in the provinces have gone about naked but expects that they are equally surprised to meet someone wearing bottles. Eventually he meets the governor of New France and explains to him that all matter is formed inside, and expelled by stars, which is a pretty surprising idea coming from the seventeenth century. He thinks that the reason the Americas have been only recently discovered is that they have only just been put there by the sun.
In his second attempt to reach the moon, he builds a flying machine and launches it off a cliff. It crashes but he escapes from the wreckage. Then some soldiers find it and think if they attach rockets to it, it will fly into the sky and look like a dragon. He catches them and is upset. He climbs into the machine to try to unfasten the rockets and is blasted into space. On the moon he meets people with four legs who have musical voices and weapons that can cook game at the same time as it is being shot. He also meet the ghost of Socrates and a man named Domingo Gonsales. Domingo is a character from an earlier novel by an English bishop, called Francis Godwin, who flies to the Moon in a chariot drawn by swans. They all decide that the concept of God is nonsense and that men have no souls. Cyrano returns to earth and lands in Italy.
He builds a second flying machine that focuses solar energy, using mirrors to create burst of air. It takes him to the sun. He lands on a sun spot and the beings that live there explain to him how the solar system works by comparing it with the movement of atoms. On the sun, he is tried by a court of birds for all the crimes of humanity But luckily, he is saved by a parrot who recognises him. Then he meets an Italian philosopher called Tommaso Campanella. They start to discuss what sex would be like in Utopia and the book pretty much ends there. As we said, it was published posthumously and it is likely that there was more but Lebret was not brave enough to publish it. There may also be a third story about a journey to the stars, but his original work is now lost. So, if you read it, you’ll have to decide how it ends.
circa 1950: American actor Jose Ferrer (1912 - 1992) being made up for his part in the film ‘Cyrano De Bergerac’, the story of a 17th century French soldier with an extraordinarily long nose. The film is adapted from the play by Edmond Rostand and was directed by Michael Gordon for United Artists. Original Publication: Picture Post - 5298 - We Go To Hollywood - pub. 1951 (Photo by Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Getty Images)
I am having Kanej thoughts after descending head first into Cyrano-obsession. So in the song “Every Letter” from the musical, the general idea is “Love letters as a form of intimacy” Or to be more crude “Sexting, they’re sexting” BUT it got me thinking about the intimacy of words and how for two people who might struggle with touch…love letters could get pretty intense.
Kanej love letters y’all. While Inej is at sea and Kaz is in Ketterdam. Every Letter is a Kanej song.
“My first sight of you/Was my first heart attack”
“And if I told you how much I need you/Would you give me yourself or turn and run”
“These words are the truth/Just let them sink in Through your thin fingered gloves/To your hand, to your skin”
