Virginia Gay’s romantic comedy, Cyrano, could almost have been a party. There are dances, songs, and an audience wearing party hats chucking streamers across the stage. The show finishes in a shower of glitter.
As we entered the auditorium, cast members were chatting to us individually about what kind of poem we would like. As I sat in my seat and the cast member Joseph Evans (Yan) ran through my options, I wondered if he was going to give me a personal reading. Instead, I was handed a streamer to chuck on signal and a printed fourteen-line poem “Asleep You Become a Continent” by Francisco Aragon.
Virginia Gay has a warm-up chat with the audience, responding to the laughter by telling us she just wanted to “check in with my young cool queer.”
As Cyrano, she doesn’t wear a false nose, though another character jokes that “Cyrano was late, but her nose was on time.” There is just the suggestion that we imagine her nose as a physical obstacle to a romance with Roxanne (Jessica Whitehurst).
The romantic story is wrapped around a key plot-line of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac in which two characters fall for Roxanne who is initially attracted to the body of the one who is not great with words. Thus he is reliant on Cyrano to secretly deliver his verbal charm.
That is no easy task with Yan. He may have a tall, muscular, tattooed body, but his idea of wooing Roxanne standing on a balcony above him is to say, “I want to touch your tits.”
When Cyrano tries to coax him into a more romantic mood by telling him, “the soul of a woman is the body of a Greek God”, he looks puzzled saying, “I’m from Manchester,” and then tries the phrase substituting Manchester for the word Greek.
He’s not the only dopey character in the play, as the character listed as 3 (Tanvi Virmani) illustrates when she tells Cyrano, “you can’t make an envelope without breaking eggs.”
She is one of three cast members known as 1 (Tessa Wong), 2 (David Tarkenter) and 3 who stand at the back of the stage watching events unfold, occasionally commenting on the action and dancing. At one point, spotting Yan hyperventilating, she urges him to put his head between her knees. The gesture wouldn’t have impressed any first aider, but it makes enough of an impact on Yan for him to take a bit of a fancy to her and to ask her name. Smiling at the interest, she tells him her name is Charlotte.
There are no deaths or injuries in this version of Cyrano, which finishes with all the characters having someone to happily “bond” with.
The light, well-performed, ninety-minute comedy has likeable, one-dimensional characters and a simple, entertaining storyline that allows Park Theatre on its web site to describe it as “a big-hearted, irreverent rom-com, perfect for a feel-good Christmas treat.”
Reviewer: Keith Mckenna