Winner by a nose: James Ridge embodies the passion of 'Cyrano de Bergerac'
Near the beginning of the thrilling production of “Cyrano de Bergerac” that opened recently in American Players Theatre’s outdoor Spring Green amphitheater, the infamously long-nosed one is challenged to a duel.
The foolish fop (Casey Hoekstra) taking him on insults Cyrano’s plain appearance. Cyrano “doesn’t even own a pair of gloves,” he sneers. “No ribbons to his dress, no lace!”
This doomed man might have lobbed the same accusation against director and adaptor James DeVita’s production of “Cyrano,” which opened on a relatively unadorned stage.
Simply dressed by scenic designer Nathan Stuber, DeVita’s production is as sharp as Cyrano’s nose and sword in making the point that even as APT settles into its new stage, it will retain its old values, offering work that focuses on text and story rather than frippery. Good as Matthew J. LeFebvre’s 17th-century costumes are, this is no costume romp.
Related:James DeVita, James Ridge embrace humane values of 'Cyrano' in American Players Theatre's production
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Bottom line: If you want to see a swashbuckling “The Three Musketeers” – or another iteration of “Pirates of the Caribbean” – you’ll need to look elsewhere. But if you choose instead to come here, you’ll witness something much better: the latest chapter in James Ridge’s amazing career – proving anew, in the guise of Cyrano, what a piece of work is a man, noble in reason and infinite in faculty.
Marred by his deformity, Cyrano could have gone the way of Shakespeare’s Richard III, a role once inhabited by Ridge in a DeVita-directed APT production. It’s no accident that in DeVita’s adaptation, the poem Cyrano devises and proclaims during his lone onstage fight includes the line “a rhyme, a rhyme! My kingdom for a rhyme!”
But Ridge’s Cyrano doesn’t just have a big nose. He has a huge heart. And for all the fun this production delivers, Ridge’s Cyrano has moments where he’ll break yours. A few illustrative examples:
When Cyrano first tells his incredulous wingman LeBret (a sturdily reliable Chiké Johnson) that he loves, there’s great depth as well as intense feeling. This isn’t a passing infatuation. It’s a passion for the ages.
When Cyrano learns from his beloved Roxane (Laura Rook, striking just the right balance between ingénue and sophisticate) that she loves another, he stumbles away with a stifled groan that emerges as half sardonic laugh, while ascribing his “hurt” to a flesh wound.
Most of all, Ridge pierces the heart during that moment when Cyrano most fully reveals his own: during the balcony scene in which he impersonates Christian, Roxane’s hunky but unpoetic and tongue-tied beau.
Cloaked by night and therefore hidden from Roxane’s eyes, Cyrano here finally lets Roxane see his true self; the love and uncontainable joy in Ridge’s voice will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been there.
No wonder Danny Martinez’s Christian graduates from an initially callow boy willing to let Cyrano plead for him to an increasingly substantial man who wants to state his own case. Cyrano similarly ennobles everyone around him, from Roxane to an initial toad like DeGuiche (John Taylor Phillips). Watching Ridge’s Cyrano, one is inspired to become one’s best self.
Life continually gets in the way; in “Cyrano,” it most fully intervenes through the siege in which most of Cyrano’s company of cadets – a splendid ensemble in this large production – lose their lives.
With assists from lighting designer Michael A. Peterson and composer Sarah Pickett, Jessica Lanius’s striking choreography effects the transition from love to war, as the gear-laden cadets close in on the stage and their own doom from all parts of the theater.
Having thereafter deployed the cadets during the siege to drive home that war is indeed hell, Lanius then delivers a moving coup de théâtre I don’t want to disclose, suggesting we might make our way back from the brink and once again love.
In a world that includes Cyrano, could there be any doubt of it? He proudly tells DeGuiche that he’s read “Don Quixote” “numerous times” and “saw myself in the title role.” Having watched Ridge as Cyrano for three glorious hours, tilting at windmills didn’t seem at all crazy. Dreaming such impossible dreams instead felt exactly right.
“Cyrano de Bergerac” continues through Oct. 6. For tickets, call (608) 588-2361 or visit americanplayers.org/. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.
PROGRAM NOTES
Books: In both this year’s Book of Summer – the annually anticipated APT preseason catalog that’s so beautiful this year it’s a keepsake – and at the Cyrano page on the APT website, Ridge isn’t shown with a sword, but with a book. Great choice; it’s not only true to the man who can’t stop reading Cervantes, but also true to the man who, near journey’s end, eagerly awaits afterlife communion with “the souls whom I have loved: Socrates and Shakespeare, Galileo, Homer . . .” Summing up his life, Cyrano admits he’s been a “brawler.” But he also describes himself as a “philosopher,” “metaphysician” and “rhymer.” As presented by Ridge, Cyrano is first and foremost a poet, with a poet’s heart.
Illusion and Truth: To steal a line from Tennessee Williams, this production of “Cyrano” doesn’t offer tricked-out illusions pretending to present truth. It instead flaunts its theatricality as a means of highlighting what’s actually true. Again, great choice. Cyrano, after all, is a man who can only convey what he feels when he acts it out; he is a consummate actor, for whom “panache” is not just a style but a means of showing us what’s true about honor and love as well as integrity and courage, with the world as his stage. Watching him inspires us to be better.
David Daniel’s Ragueneau: An illustrative example involves Ragueneau, the poet baker who one might imagine as an everyman Cyrano: a jack of all trades who often lives hand-to-mouth because of his basic decency and integrity, as well as his unabashed love for art and all that is beautiful. As with Cyrano, it makes him an idealist and a misfit in a world that neither values nor understands such goodness. Daniel shines in such roles, because he exudes such goodness, as well as an accompanying kindness and unforced geniality (it comes as no surprise that Daniel plays an integral role in APT’s educational outreach efforts; teachers who’ve participated in his APT workshops with high school students rave about what he can accomplish in a classroom). Ragueneau is a laughably bad poet and fails at most everything he does. But we understand why Cyrano openly professes love for him. More than the heroic, larger-than-life Cyrano, he represents those of us watching Cyrano – inspired by Cyrano’s example to live better, even if we’re consequently misunderstood, underestimated or unacknowledged.
Related:American Players Theatre embraces roots while expanding
Lighting the Night: Commenting on APT’s $8 million upgrade, the buzz among APT patrons attending the five shows I saw over the holiday weekend involves things like the vastly improved outdoor lobby, the new handrails in the theater, the regraded path to the theater and the improved sight lines within; actors, meanwhile, are understandably ecstatic about the huge upgrade to their dressing rooms and rehearsal spaces.
Along with improved exits and entrances to the new stage, one of the enhancements near the top of my own list involves the new lighting grid crowning the rebuilt stage. Peterson demonstrated what the new lighting will allow through this “Cyrano,” in which the light is more nuanced and textured – I want to say thicker – than ever, allowing all-important gradations from the play’s darkened interior scenes to its moments out of doors. During the balcony scene or throughout the elegiac fifth act – unfolding in a courtyard enveloped in the soft light of autumn – the light becomes an additional character in this production. And OK, yeah: Watching what this new lighting grid can simultaneously do to light the woods beyond the stage is pretty spectacular.
Getting Rid of the Bugs: No, I don’t mean those pesky mosquitoes, out in force this year (not to worry: APT supplies plenty of bug spray). I refer instead to the inevitable adjustment period during which theater artists learn what this newly configured space can and can’t do. One example: APT’s long tradition of using the middle aisle as an extension of the stage is going to require some tweaking, now, because this aisle has been dramatically raised above the seating level in the first four rows (to ensure patron safety, one is not even permitted to enter these seats from the raised aisles; one must instead enter from the flanking aisles). As a result, audience members sitting on or near the aisle in these four “sunken” rows – akin, in some ways, to ballplayers’ close-up view from a dugout – are effectively blocked from seeing what’s on stage during those moments when actors stand in the middle aisle in front of them. In this show, actors currently spend a lot of time positioned there.