Cyrano de Bergerac (The Modern Library of the World's Best Books ML 154)

xix, [1], 300 pp. Translated from the original French by Brian Hooker, with a preface by Clayton Hamilton. "Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand based on the life of the real Cyrano de Bergerac. 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 Académie française and the dames précieuses glimpsed before the performance in the first scene. The original Cyrano was Constant Coquelin, who played it over 410 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[2]. He passed the torch to José Ferrer, who won a Tony Award (and a subsequent Academy Award four years later) for playing Cyrano in a 1946 Broadway staging, the highlight of which was a special benefit performance in which Ferrer played the title role for the first four acts and Hampden (then in his mid-sixties) 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. A taped version of the production was broadcast on PBS in 2009. The play has been translated and performed many times, and is responsible for introducing the word 'panache' into the English language."