CDs: You Have Made Me Love

Edmond Rostand's classic 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac has been musicalized numerous times. The team of Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire fashioned a musical Cyrano at Yale in 1958, with a cast that included Dick Cavett and Austin Pendleton. In 1974, the team of Robert Wright and George Forrest Song of Norway, Kismet, Kean wrote an original score for A Song for Cyrano, which had a stock tour starring Jose Ferrer, one of the most celebrated of non-musical Cyranos.

This spring, Placido Domingo will star at the Metropolitan Opera in Alfano's opera Cyrano de Bergerac. My shelves contain CDs of one Canadian and two Australian Cyrano musicals. Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse are the authors of another, announced for London next year, with Douglas Sills the possible hero. And Jeff Calhoun and Deaf West, the team that came up with the recent Big River revival, have mentioned yet another musical Cyrano.

Broadway has had Cyrano musicals three times. In 1899 and with a Victor Herbert score, the result ran only twenty-eight performances. In 1993, a Dutch musical version, called Cyrano, was unwisely imported to Broadway. With the original Dutch leading man, a handsome physical production, and lyrics translated by Sheldon Harnick, the production had a forced run of 137 performances at the Neil Simon Theatre. This version has Dutch and German cast CDs, as well as a symphonic CD, but no Broadway cast recording was made.

Twenty years earlier, there was another Cyrano, a musical version that opened at the Palace Theatre on May 13, 1973. This one had a fairly convoluted history. In 1964, producer David Merrick announced his intention to present Christopher Plummer in a musical Cyrano, with music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, adapted and directed by Michael Langham. Plummer had already played young hero Christian to Jose Ferrer's Cyrano on television 1951 and had played Rostand's non-musical Cyrano at Stratford, Ontario 1962.

In 1967, the show was announced as a musical Cyrano by Bricusse and Anthony Newley, to star Plummer, who around the same time was announced to star in a Jule Styne-Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical version of The Ghost Goes West that never happened.

Ultimately, Plummer's Cyrano musical would not be a Merrick production, and would have music by film composer Michael J. Lewis and a book and lyrics by Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange, who had already translated and adapted Rostand's Cyrano for a non-musical production at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Featured in the musical's cast as Christian was young actor Mark Lamos, who would go on to win acclaim as artistic director of Hartford Stage and as director of numerous plays and operas.

The '73 musical began life at the Guthrie, where it was staged by Langham, who had directed Burgess's non-musical Cyrano at the same venue. But following the musical's preliminary run, Langham was replaced by Broadway regular Michael Kidd, whose recent directorial efforts included Subways Are for Sleeping, Ben Franklin in Paris, and The Rothschilds.

With Plummer as star and Kidd as director-choreographer, the musical Cyrano moved on to Toronto and Boston, where it received favorable reviews. An interesting change of credit occurred between Boston and Broadway: The billing line "book and lyrics by Anthony Burgess, based on Rostand's play," became, for New York, "lyrics by Anthony Burgess, book based upon Anthony Burgess's adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac." There was no specific credit for authorship of the book on Broadway, indicating that Burgess's script underwent revision by other hands.

Upon its Broadway opening at the Palace, Plummer won great acclaim, with some describing him as the best Cyrano they'd ever seen, musical or non-musical. The print reviews were evenly divided, the broadcast notices mostly favorable. In his favorable New York Times review, Clive Barnes felt that "the music is the weakest part of this particular musical," adding that "Mr. Plummer is simply magnificent." In Women's Wear Daily, Martin Gottfried called the show "a halfway Cyrano with the music superfluous rather than complementary...occasionally and unnoticeably stopped at arbitrary points for unnecessary songs."

Gottfried was getting at the problem of all Cyrano musicals, a problem that was spelled out even more succintly by other critics. In The Herald-Tribune, Walter Kerr stated that "Cyrano de Bergerac is virtually a musical to begin with." In The Daily News, Douglas Watt wrote, "It is precisely the fact that Cyrano de Bergerac soars so beautifully all by itself that makes music, even were it good music with a dash and spirit and inventiveness that Lewis' score entirely lacks, an unnecessary burden for the play to bear."

Does Cyrano de Bergerac, one of the most romantic and lyrical plays ever written, really need songs? Could those songs ever hope to compete with Rostand's poetry? Perhaps a major composer could have made it work, but, as usually happens in such situations, the most distinguished composers would probably realize the futility of even trying. To match the play's musicality, a great score would have been necessary, and Cyrano did not possess one. Then too, the play is perfectly plotted, and the songs tended to slow up the action and get in the way.

In Cyrano, Burgess's script stuck very close to the original, so the musical essentially was the original play, cut down to make room for songs. The score does have its charms, notably in the songs for Roxana the musical's renamed Roxane. As Roxana, the lovely soprano of Leigh Beery got one knockout aria, "You Have Made Me Love," along with the attractive "Bergerac" and "Love Is Not Love."

But the Cyrano score, particularly in songs like "No Thank You" and the catchy "From Now Till Forever," bore more than a trace of Man of La Mancha's stylistic flourishes. Which wasn't surprising, as La Mancha featured another larger-than-life, public-domain romantic hero who was also doing battle with convention.

Plummer won a Tony Award as best musical actor. But Cyrano closed at the Palace after only forty-nine performances, losing its entire investment of $500,000. Unusually enough, the show received an elaborate, two-LP cast album on A&M Records that preserved the entire score plus a good deal of the show's dialogue. A&M had put up half the show's investment, and went ahead with releasing the recording after the show closed. When Rostand's original Cyrano de Bergerac played Broadway again in 1984 the Royal Shakespeare Company, starring Derek Jacobi, it was translated and adapted by Burgess.

Decca Broadway has now given the Cyrano cast album its first CD release, with the original four LP sides now a single disc that runs seventy-one minutes. Because Plummer's vocal range was limited he was dubbed in the film of The Sound of Music, the inclusion of dialogue helps one to appreciate how strong his performance was. Still, it's good to see that the CD tracking allows one to program out the dialogue and get right to the songs if one so desires.

If the Cyrano cast recording doesn't manage to convince one that Cyrano de Bergerac ever needed to be a musical, it contains enough attractive material to make it worth a listen.