1897 - Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac premieres in Paris, on the night of Dec. 28, 1897, at the Théatre de la Porte Saint-Martin. The famous actor-manager Constant Coquelin plays Cyrano, as indeed Rostand wrote the part for him. The original text was dedicated thus, "It is to the soul of Cyrano that I intended to dedicate this pen, but since that soul is reborn in you, Coquelin, it is to you that I dedicate it." Though nearly everyone involved was convinced that the show would bomb, the evening stands with opening nights in 1636 (Corneille's Le Cid) and 1830 (Hugo's Hernani) as hallmarks in French theatrical legend, heralding enormous popular successes that would briefly take the dominant theatrical culture by storm. Cyrano plays for 400 performances until March 1899. Until his death in Jan. 1909, no actor other than Coquelin was permitted to play the role in Paris. Between 1897 and 1909, Coquelin gave almost a thousand performances of Cyrano, and he also performed the role in New York (1900) and London (1901), where he was extremely popular. In Paris, there are revivals at the Porte-Saint-Martin (1900, 1902, 1903); then, with new sets, at the Théâtre de la Gaîté (annually from 1904 to the beginning of 1907); then again at the Porte-Saint-Martin from 1907 until Dec. 1908. Cyrano reached its thousandth Paris performance in 1913, a year in which it was performed a reported 3,000 times throughout France.
1898 - It takes less than a year for Rostand's Cyrano to make the transatlantic voyage, in a translation by Howard Thayer Kingsbury. Richard Mansfield, a well-known Shakespearean actor who became famous in the stage adaptation of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, took the star turn. The show, which opened on October 3, ran at the Garden Theatre in Madison Square, on the site where New York's Life Insurance Building now stands.
1923 - Walter Hampden redefines Cyrano for the Jazz Age in the play's first major American revival. Hampden would play the role, off and on, until 1936, in five runs of the show (see table below). This production, which used instrumental music from Walter Damrosch's 1913 operatic adaptation, was also the first to use Brian Hooker's blank verse translation, which would remain the definitive English-language version for half a century.
1946 - José Ferrer makes his stage debut as Cyrano on October 8, using the Hooker translation. He would play the role for almost 30 years, across media from stage to screen to animated cel, and in the process win a Tony, an Oscar, and two Emmies. In 1975, Ferrer said farewell to the piece, directing the play in a production for the Chichester Festival Theatre which premiered Christopher Fry's "chiming" verse translation. It can still be read as the Oxford standard edition.
1973 - Anthony Burgess’ translation, in rhymed verse, provides the basis for the 1973 musical adaptation starring Christopher Plummer (Plummer won a Tony, but the production was a commercial failure)
1984 - Anthony Burgess’ translation, in rhymed verse, provides the the 1984 RSC production starring Derek Jacobi (successful runs on both sides of the Atlantic).
1987 - Steve Martin scripts and stars in Roxanne, a charming adaptation that sets the Cyrano story in modern-day small-town America. Martin sports an extremely exaggerated Pinocchio nose while playing swashbuckling fireman "Charlie" Bales, Darryl Hannah is the down-to-earth beauty Roxanne Kowalski, and Rick Rossovitch the bumbling hunk Chris O'Connell.
1990 - The bearlike Gerard Depardieu delivers a performance as Cyrano that is simultaneously naturalistic, classicist, and pop-friendly in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s award-winning film adaptation. Perhaps the definitive French-language Cyrano, this historical blockbuster, featuring a cast of thousands and on-location settings, won an Oscar for Costume Design, and Depardieu was nominated for Best Actor –an honor Depardieu shares with Charles Boyer and Maurive Chevalier among French actors; Cyrano had 29 more nominations and 17 wins.
1997 - Frank Langella stars in a minimalist six-actor adaptation of Brian Hooker's translation (perhaps for its lack of fancy rhyme). With what the New York Times as "a bare-boned approach," Langella removes all of the crowd scenes, changes the clothes to basic leather tunics, and scrapes away references to specific time and place in favor of an archetypal approach. The production ran, Oct. 29, 1997 – Jan. 18, 1998 at the Roundabout.
2004 - As part of the National Theatre's £10 season, yet another unexpected adaptation produces yet another unexpected Cyrano: the rumpled Stephen Rea as a truth-telling nonconformist, akin to Molière’s Alceste the Misanthrope. In an interview with The Guardian, director Howard Davies described the production's approach as "rough, touring theatre…The famous nose is like a reverse version of Pinocchio: the more Pinocchio lies the larger his nose grows, whereas the more Cyrano tells the truth, the more he becomes a carbuncle in the eyes of society. His tragedy is that he knows how to fight prejudice and people but not how to speak the truth to the woman he loves most. In that sense, he's a half-person who has never fully grown up." With a new translation by Derek Mahon.
Image: Domingo's operatc Cyrano, c. 2005 - Cyrano has also provided the inspiration for a number of operatic, concert, and balletic adaptations, which have been successful to varying degrees. In the first flush of the play's popularity, Victor Herbert composed an operetta version in 1899, with a Book by Stuart Reed and Lyrics by Harry B. Smith. Herbert's Cyrano ran for only 24 performances at the Knickerbocker Theatre in New York, one of his few failures. Meanwhile, Dutch composer Johan Wagenaar composed a concert overture inspired by Rostand's play in 1905 (music without words), and Walter Damrosch composed an opera in 1913 with a Book by W. J. Henderson. Running for 5 performances in 1913 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, Damrosch's work was advertised as "An Operatic Novelty," surely as much an oxymoronic descriptive as Rostand's subtitle for the original Cyrano ("A Heroic Comedy").
2007 - Kevin Kline stars in a neotraditionalist Cyrano, using Burgess' rhymed verse, at the Richard Rodgers Theatre (the same theater where Plummer played Cyrano, in Burgess' words, 34 years earlier). The show ran for 56 performances, from Nov. 1, 2007 - Jan. 6, 2008. Movie-star Jennifer Garner played Roxane, Daniel Sunjata was Christian, and the cast was rounded out by a few CENTERSTAGE regulars (including Euan Morton as Lignière and Tom Bloom as Montfleury.) Kline won the Drama Desk for Best Actor, and the production won a Tony for Costume Design.