• Cyrano

6/24/26 (Wed), West End

This is one of my favorite plays of all time and features one of my favorite actors, Adrian Lester, so it was high on my list of shows to see on this trip. Sadly it fell victim to all the bad habits that London theater has fallen into. I had assumed when Lester was announced that Cyrano’s issue would be not with his nose but with his black skin. That is, I could imagine lily-white France being scandalized by a black soldier at the time à la Othello, and Cyrano, for all his bluster, being super self-conscious about his skin, convinced that Roxanne could never accept him as he is. That would have been a trenchant comment on our times and given the show an entirely new relevance. The scene where the rude man comments unwisely on Cyrano’s nose could have been transformed into something more shocking – and imagine the quips that Cyrano could have come up with. (Peter Dinklage did something similar in the role with his diminutive size.)

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