Review: CYRANO DE BERGERAC at Pasadena Playhouse

Monsieur de Bergerac, tu es vraiment fou!

Yes, you are bonkers…crazy in your cockamamie loyalty, in your obsessive need to live – and die – entirely by the terms of your own ultra-romantic playbook. Certainly you are out of your mind in who and how you choose to love (more on that presently). Not that theater-goers over the past 130+ years would have had things any differently. As countless theater producers – and more than a few filmmakers - can easily attest, Edmond Rostand wrote a keeper.  

This Cyrano, the play and the man, is the Cyrano we all know, but he is also wonderfully his own animalferent. Martin Crimp’s free adaptation – first staged in 2019 with James McAvoy in the title role -  is as urgent and beguiling as it is contemporary, a classic with a fiery heart and not an inch of dustiness or quaintness. In the revival directed by Mike Donahue at The Pasadena Playhouse, CYRANO bursts with energy and excitement. Chukwudi Iwuji brings the man blazingly and heartbreakingly into existence and Rosa Salazar offers him a Roxane – sorry! – who is to die for.

The physically beautiful but not so poetical Christian, steady Ragueneau, scheming De Guiche and lyrical Ligniere…they’re all present and accounted for too, though purists may not square them with the 19th century prototypes they have in their minds. Perhaps it was a group of those purists who cleared out my row at intermission at a Friday night performance during opening week. Otherwise, where in the hell were they going? Admittedly, Donahue and company pack a ton of stuff into a lengthy first half, but those poor exiting blighters missed a honey of a second act!

The realization that this is not your grand-pere’s CYRANO is established at the drop as Larry Powell’s poet Ligniere comes out to welcome us, resplendent in a pastel blouse and matching pants. They shortly introduce Christian (Will Hochman), the play’s “alpha male,” an attractive bloke, not overly stylish, but – yeah – there’s definitely an appeal. And he’s in love, he tells Ligniere, with someone he just met. The space is a theater. All is familiar yet also different.

The scene will unfold with foppish hambone Montfleury (Jonathan Slavin) making a dog’s breakfast out of assorted HAMLET soliloquies only to be shouted down by a ghostly voice out the darkness who orders him to get the hell off the stage. The man everybody has been waiting to appear, the chevalier of the title, has arrived, and he is … well… rather unspectacular of appearance, jeans, a black leather motorcycle jacket with a neon stripe running from his arms to his shoulders. This gentleman has a way with words, fences dangerously (but not always lethally) and tends to wax eloquently about the length of his nose. Which, by the by, is ordinary sized, though to hear Iwuji and others  describe it, you’d think that schnoz was the size of a small island nation.

Therein lies the simple elegance both of Crimp’s adaptation and of Donahue’s staging. The costumes (designed by Carolyn Mazuca) may be modern; the players resembling people like you and me. If you pay attention, sure, you’ll notice the verse and rhymes, but it shouldn’t make any difference in the enjoyment because CYRANO DE BERGERAC is an eternally wonderful story recounted at The Pasadena Playhouse by artists who know precisely how to set it ablaze.  

Salazar’s sexy and cerebral Roxane, when we meet her, is a progressive-thinking student, a lover of words and ideas, not a some dainty ingenue waiting to be bowled over by a pretty face. Still she’s smitten, and single-minded champion will move heaven, earth and army regiments and subterfuge to bring that man into existence and help the course of what Roxane believes is true love run smooth. This takes some maneuvering since Cyrano’s regiment leader De Guiche (Michael Nathanson, self-adoring and weaseley) wants Roxane for himself.

The famous seduction scene in which Cyrano, ostensibly under the cover of darkness with Roxane on her balcony, woos Roxane as Christian is accomplished here with no walls, lighting or stage trickery. The two men stand behind her or her eyes are closed, Iwuji and Hochman trading off dialog until Cyrano takes over and brings it home with honeyed language delivered almost in rap. It’s all seriously seductive.

That’s the skill of Iwuji, an accomplished British thespian who has also enjoyed some success in American action films (He and Slazar will both be seen in the upcoming Mark Wahlberg film PLAY DIRTY). His Cyrano is not a showman. In fact he’s a man entirely free of ostentation, consumed and ultimately beaten down by a love he can’t bring himself to confess. Beloved as he may be by his friends and fellow cadets, Iwuji takes no pleasure in anything other than uniting his rival with his (their) beloved and then cementing that relationship. With no prosthetic nose to distract us, making the deformity metaphoric, the production allows us to witness Cyrano suffering the same pangs of insecurity that anybody in love will face: I’m not good enough. I’m not beautiful enough.

Except that this Cyrano employs words in a way that nobody else does. Which makes him beautiful indeed. Donahue surrounds him with a production that does him proud – nose, neuroses and all.  

CYRANO DE BERGERAC plays through September 29 at 33 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena.

Photo of Rosa Salazar and Chukwudi Iwuji by Jeff Lorch.

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