Cyrano de Bergerac: A Play in Five Acts (Forgotten Books) - Tapa blanda

Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand based on the life of the real Cyrano de Bergerac. The first four acts are set in 1640, while the fifth is set in 1655. An immediate triumph upon its release, the play is one of the most popular in the French language and has been filmed several times and even made into an opera and a ballet.

The entire play is written in verse, in rhyming couplets of 12 syllables per line, very close to the Alexandrine format, but the verses sometimes lack a caesura. It is also meticulously researched, down to the names of the members of the Academie Francaise and the dames precieuses glimpsed before the performance in the first scene.

The original Cyrano was Constant Coquelin, who played it over 400 times at Porte-Saint-Martin and later toured North America in the role. Richard Mansfield was the first actor to play Cyrano in the United States in an English translation. The longest-running Broadway production ran 232 performances in 1923 and starred Walter Hampden, who returned to the role on the Great White Way in 1926, 1928, 1932, and 1936. He passed the torch to Jose Ferrer, who won a Tony Award for playing Cyrano in a 1946 Broadway staging, the highlight of which was a special performance in which Ferrer played the title role for the first four acts and Hampden assumed it for the fifth. Other notable English-speaking Cyranos were Ralph Richardson, DeVeren Bookwalter, Derek Jacobi, Richard Chamberlain, and Christopher Plummer, who played the part in Rostand's original play and won a Tony Award for the 1973 musical adaptation. Kevin Kline played the role in a Broadway production in 2007, with Jennifer Garner playing Roxane and Daniel Sunjata as Christian. (Quote from wikipedia.org)

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