Three American Players Theatre shows explore the ways of the French this summer

By Paul Kosidowski, Milwaukee Magazine

July 7, 2017

The French are not exactly strangers to American Players Theatre. Over the years it has produced plays by Moliere, Marivaux, Racine, and Jean Anouilh. But you have to wonder if something in the stars led the theater to program four French plays this season? A longing for U.S. election results more like the recent victory of Emmanuel Macron? The sense that the European continent is newly ascendant? Or perhaps just an intense longing for a good baguette?

I’ve yet to see APT’s production of Georges Feydeau’s farce, A Flea in Her Ear. But each of the three French plays I did see this weekend seemed to reflect a different quality of the French spirit.

If you’re looking for the France of Alexander Dumas or Victor Hugo, you couldn’t do better than APT’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which will swash your buckle as well as tug on your heartstrings. Cyrano, of course, is the embodiment of the independent French spirit, caring less about propriety and success than living a life of flawless integrity. Edmund Rostand’s 1896 play is both spectacular and intimate, and like the musicals that started parading down Broadway in the 1980s (many based on French romantic stories, as well) it makes no apology for its theatrical extravagance.

Yet there is still blood and sinew in this confection—not to mention plenty of testosterone. Rostand makes the point from the first scene, when Cyrano issues new salvos in his battle with the actor Montfleury (played with rosy-cheeked pomp by Brian Mani). We hear Cyrano before we see him. He insults Montfleury from the back of the theater (“This blister, this swollen abscess”). He threatens him, and finally swaggers into view in an entrance almost dramatic as his final exit three hours later. The foppish playgoers (costumed with delicious extravagance by Matthew LeFebvre) are miffed as well, and Cyrano appeases them by refunding their money from his own purse.

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