The official blog of the Dramaturgy Department at Baltimore's Centerstage. Sometimes we post other things, too. If you're new around here, you can start from the beginning, and explore our posts in chronological order.
For posts related to our current and upcoming shows, click the following links: The Importance of Being Earnest, Around the World in 80 Days, Cyrano. Otherwise, browse around a bit and check out the tags for information on past and future shows, as well as whatever random contemplations and bits o' info might come to pass.
To the Moon - Cyrano de Bergerac
This is cool. Pierre Magnier is a masquerading Cyrano in this silent film from 1922. It wasn’t filmed in Technicolor, and it hasn’t been digitally colorized. It was hand-colored. Even though it was filmed in 1922, it took three years (!) for the final version to be completed.
Also love the Méliès influence evident.
- DL
Operatic Cyrano loses by more than a nose - Brattleboro Reformer
Geez, Frank Behrens of the Brattleboro Reformer sure doesn’t mince words.
The stuff you find on the internet. This archive of Missouri Valley theater history includes, among other things, a photo of an early ’50s production of Cyrano at the U of Kansas. Looks like the Act 1 scene set “in the theater” at Paris’ Hôtel de Bourgogne. Meaning we’re looking at a photographic reproduction of a show within a show.
- DL
I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a Cyrano program piece, touching on all the various historical, mythic, and theatrical aspects of the character. Here’s a rough sneak peek:
“Now … we encounter a 21st-century Cyrano, distilled and very much acknowledged, even celebrated, as a theatrical myth. We watch not only shadows of historic truth through the filter of Rostand, but our own awareness of the icon, refracted back at us.
T.S. Eliot, writing on Rostand and Rostand’s Cyrano, saw similar strains of self-consciousness, and in this piece he hints that Cyrano is a much more modern figure than we may think at first. And the formal result of this modern self-consciousness, Eliot implies, is tragicomedy, sadness leavened by irony:
Is not Cyrano exactly in the position of contemplating himself as a romantic, a dramatic figure? This dramatic sense on the part of the characters themselves is rare in modern drama… . Rostand had - whether he had anything else or not - this dramatic sense, and it is what gives life to Cyrano. It is a sense which is almost a sense of humour (for when any one is conscious of himself as acting, something like a sense of humour is present). It gives Rostand’s characters - Cyrano at least - a gusto which is not uncommon on the modern stage… . In the particular case of Cyrano on Noses, the character, the situation, the occasion were perfectly suited and combined. The tirade generated by this combination is not only genuinely and highly dramatic: it is possibly poetry also.
- T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917-1932
- Drew
Speaking of the Lookingglass adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, currently (until Dec. 20th, 2009) playing in the Pearlstone Theater (which we were speaking of in a previous post you’ll have to go look at now), here are some phonography snaps from back in tech, about 10 days ago now. Intrepid crew members put together the intricate and exquisite set, based on everything from elaborate Victorian machinery, toys, cabinetry, and camp furniture (which you can read more about in this interview with adaptor/director, Laura Eason—or, watch the trailer with more of her comments, live). The production basically recreates the overall scenic design from the Chicago production, but because the stage configuration is so different, and the scale so much larger, the husband & wife team of set designers had to reconceive what started out as an “el”-shaped and somewhat rudimentary construction into a more presentationally proscenium-oriented set with more elaborate working parts and a more sophisticated feel. The steps in particular, which evoke anything from library ladders to ship’s stairs, were works of ingenious artifice. And the map seen in the latter images, representing Phileas Fogg’s global circumnavigation, now has a lovely lighted track tracing the progress of that journey around the world. Quite an effort.
Irene contemplates the mystery of Xmas?
Is that your choo-choo, Tom?
Can I play too?
Maybe if I try this doohicky over here--
NOT a Jumping Cardinal…
No, this is not on par with Kristi’s marvelous tale of Richelieu’s leaping competition with the Comte de Guiche, related in an earlier post (re. the upcoming Cyrano)—but for amusement if not some slight edification, here are some VERY candid shots from tech of Sedaris’ wickedly hystericaly Santaland Diaries—now playing—of Irene directing (there she sits, musing on lighting cues and blocking and a myriad of other concerns), and then wandering over to offer her two cents as TD Tom Rupp and Production Manager Mike Schleifer (not shown in these shots) gravely set about…playing with toy trains. Yes, there is a real live toy (probably the wrong word) train in this production. Kindly donated by a local enthusiast. Which makes for a nifty little overlap with our heavily rail-oriented production down in the Pearlstone: Around the World in 80 Days. See how neatly I tied all that together? Must be a prize for a Trifecta there….
It’s that time again.
Today, we’re going to take a quick glance at Capuchin monks. Very basic information says that the Capuchins are a branch of the Franciscans (followers of the animal-loving Saint Francis of Assisi, who made due with the barest of essentials and elected to live in poverty). The Capuchins broke into their own branch during the early 16th Century, wishing to go back to the same essentials as Saint Francis; apparently, the main branch had become rather too lax for their liking. So they broke off, congregated here and there… And, yes, there was a Capuchin monastary in Paris.
But. But. Today, it seems that Capuchins are most often recognized in connection with their admittedly macabre crypt (and the fact that their name seems to be subjected to that ol’ caffeine-filled drink, the cappuccino). Seriously, take a look… Then try working that image into Cyrano and the monk that sort of wanders in.
Okay, okay, the crypt really isn’t (or isn’t likely to be) relevant to the production. The monk isn’t likely to rush on with a skull in hand, or to be glimpsed at odd moments trucking corpses across the stage. Just an interesting little detail to note by the way.
Oh, and have I passed along the jumping contest story? No? Then shame, shame, shame on my head. Legend* has it that one day, Antoine de Guiche was sort of strolling around when he happened upon Richelieu, who seemed to be engaged in jumping, of all things. Richelieu was quite proud of his jumping prowess, and somehow or other, he and de Guiche ended up having a little jumping competition. The savvy de Guiche was careful NOT to win this particular contest, and in return for allowing Richelieu to show off his mad skills, de Guiche was made a Marshal of France.
Hey, I never said it was a true story. Just goes to show you, perils of the internet, and all….
-Kristi
*Where “legend” is equal to “some story I heard on the internet somewhere.” Look, I’m not claiming any accuracy, here. This is for amusement purposes. I’m not sure that there’s much can beat the image of a jumping Richelieu.
Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano De Bergerac (1897, the first play to translate the historical Cyrano’s life into the stuff of theatrical history), is often credited with reviving Romanticism on the late 19th-century French stage. But for a greater sense of what exactly Rostand was reviving, we need to talk about the legacy of Romanticism on the French stage.
France, traditionally the most artistically rigid of European countries, didn’t adopt Romanticism until the early 19th Century, when Victor Hugo’s Hernani caused theater riots in 1830, and sparked the first serious wave of artistic introspection in the Académie Française since the controversy over Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid in 1636, during the real Cyrano’s lifetime. Over the interceding 200 years, the Académie had strictly regulated and censored the content of all dramas appearing on French stages, in accordance with aristocratic and “Aristotelian” dramaturgical rules of conduct: no plays could set their action for longer than the span of 24 hours, no subplots were allowed, and absolutely no violence or supernatural effects were to interfere with the unfolding of the plot. It should come as little surprise that the greatest French dramatists - Molière, Racine, Marivaux, et al. - were expert at compressing the extremes of emotion into tightly disciplined and artificial forms. Working under restrictive rules, the great artists of the day were forced to adapt their natural talents to accord with convention.
By contrast, the French Romantics were artistic revolutionaries, demanding an overthrow of the presiding rules of the day. Inspired by their heroes in Shakespeare and the Spanish Golden Age Dramatists such as Calderón and Lope de Vega, writers such as the ambitious Victor Hugo lauded the infinity of the artistic (and hence theatrical) imagination. Gone were most of the French rules of stage decorum, and in their place such cardinal sins as unseemly spectacle (copious swordfights, ghosts, and thunderbolts of lightning), as well as unmodulated bursts of feeling rather than carefully composed couplets. (Hugo’s controversial play caused a stir in part because he left a line of poetic meter incomplete by a syllable, an act of artistic blasphemy parallel to Stravinsky’s violation of western musical harmonies in Sacre du Printemps, another theater event in Paris that caused riots.)
Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, an enormous popular success, may seem like a prime candidate for the so-called Romantic Revival of the late 19th Century. But the play — with its love triangles and intrigues, flamboyant moments of spectacle, and sudden turns from enthusiastic comedy to impassioned pathos — owes a great deal to another genre born in the 1800s: Melodrama. Indeed, the theater where Cyrano premiered — the Théatre de la Porte Sainte-Martin, which had presented some of the finest works of 1st-wave French Romanticism by Hugo and Alexandre Dumas — had become a so-called “boulevard” theater over the last 70 years, and frequently presented melodramas until Rostand’s play returned it to leading stature in Parisian theater.
Rostand’s play, rather than revivifying a specific legacy of French Romanticism, actually looks back to a golden, neoclassical age in French culture, the Louis XIII-era France of Cyrano’s life and times. And, in its evident commedia dell’ arte influences (that nose looks suspiciously like the grotesque mask of a stock character’s mask), its rhyming couplets composed in perfect neoclassical diction, and its evident romantic and melodramatic influences, Rostand’s play synthesizes the best of the past 200 years of French drama for a popular audience.
