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Cyrano de bergerac martin crimp6/1/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() The Big Mac is backed up by a chorus of massively talented actors and beatboxers who look and feel like modern London: brown, black, white, queer, wised up-with easy quick banter and a mad flow. And it all happens around a mic on a stage that’s mostly blank and white like an unwritten page.ĭirector Lloyd and designer Soutra Gilmour have had the sense to get out of the way and strip everything back, to let the words and actors shine. Duels, like the one where Cyrano massacres a crap actor for massacring Hamlet, are fought as rap battles or slam contests. ![]() The rapiers, intrigue and censorship of Cardinal Richelieu’s Paris, circa 1640, are modernized as razor-sharp banter about love, sex, and (nudge, wink) cultural appropriation. Writers are fighters and the word is everything in this firecracker show about passion, rejection, and the crazy genius of the spoken word. Writer Martin Crimp and director Jamie Lloyd have pulled off something improbably brilliant to get him here: taking Edmond Rostand’s frilly old French verse drama about a mournful musketeer with a massive nose and reinventing it as, basically, Hamilton for Europeans. ![]() McAvoy is Cyrano: winner in words, loser in love-and he’s hot as hell. For nearly three hours he spits fire, spraying lyrical pearls at his enemies, nailing rap battles and chucking his battered heart beneath the feet of the woman he loves, Roxane. That man is James McAvoy: booted and buzzcut like a Glaswegian squaddie and stripped to the waist. New York’s hottest ticket is a middle-aged white man rapping. ![]()
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