SOME actors were born to play Cyrano – which is why Ed mond Rostand’s creaky melo drama, “Cyrano de Bergerac,” has kept a toehold in the classic repertory for 110 years.
This saga of 1640 war-torn Paris – with its crazy kind of poetry, energy and a flamboyant title role to die for – has been the source of an opera, a ballet, a Broadway musical and more than a few movies (the best with Gerard Depardieu).
The latest actor to claim his Cyrano birthright is Kevin Kline, whose particular birth certificate had been clear ever since he played his Errol Flynn-style Pirate King in Joe Papp’s “The Pirates of Penzance.”
In the “Cyrano” that opened last night, Kline dishes out panache, clashes swords, flashes wicked grins and, finally, dampens hankies with the best of them. But there is more to Cyrano than braggadocio and sentimentality, as the great Sir Ralph Richardson first demonstrated more years ago than I care to calculate, and now Kline helps confirm.
The play has a smart concept at its verbose heart: It’s a variation on “Beauty and the Beast,” where the frog, instead of changing into a handsome prince, obtains a princelike stand-in and becomes a noble voyeur.
The homely soldier-poet Cyrano – whose nose would make Jimmy Durante’s schnoz seem retroussé – is in love with his cousin, the beautiful Roxane, but fears his physical appearance disqualifies him.
Roxane, in turn, falls madly in love with the decent but mindless hunk Christian, a young officer in Cyrano’s own Gascon regiment.
Cyrano aids and abets the love affair, in a vicarious wooing – composing pretty speeches and even prettier battlefield letters for his inarticulate friend, which win Roxane’s heart.
Of course, it is Cyrano’s soul she really loves, but life – no friend of the poetic – manages to cheat all three of them. And all of us clever but ugly theatergoers can in sympathy wipe our hearts on its capacious sleeve.
The adaptation is by the same Anthony Burgess who wrote (book and lyrics) the musical “Cyrano” for which Christopher Plummer won a Tony, and virtually every critic, myself included, wished Burgess had left it as the play he started off with.
Unfortunately, David Leveaux’s staging this time around misses Rostand’s fun and ebullient high spirits and lets the play move like a reluctant snail, with Kline desperately trying to jolly everyone along.
The rest of the cast semaphores the occasionally rhyming text as if in an ambitious high school costume drama where the wigs give the best performances.
Both Jennifer Garner as Roxane and Daniel Sunjata as Christian are knee-deep in film and TV credits, but, despite Garner’s promising opening scenes, they wade in onstage projecting little or nothing. The rest, including Chris Sarandon’s dour Comte de Guiche, the play’s aristocratic villain, range from fair to awful.
But if you just go to see Kline, battling against all odds – and, even while looking far too handsome, acting his good-natured heart out – you will certainly get your money’s worth.
A great play, it isn’t – and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more casually enervated production of it. But while actors like Kline want to add the plume of Cyrano to their histrionic history, Rostand’s heroic tear-jerker will somehow survive.
Richard Rodgers Theater, 226 W. 46th St.; (212) 221-1211.