Day 2 of Camp Shakespeare at the Utah Shakespearean Festival
This week flies by! The days are full of activities, one right after the other, and they’re so good I can’t get myself to skip any of them. These entries are just sketches to give you an idea of what goes on at Camp Shakespeare.
This day consisted of a great breakfast, literary seminars, an actor's panel, a set design workshop, a voice workshop, a massive lunch in the beautiful Great Room of SUU, a costume design seminar, a barbecue picnic in the mountains above Cedar City, and one fantastic play—Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand.
What a powerful play! Cyrano is a super human, lager than life Romantic hero with a tragic flaw—his inability to believe that the woman he loves could see past his physical deformity and love him for his soul.
So far for me and for many of the other campers, this play has been the highlight of the season. The performance is directed by David Ivers and uses the Anthony Burgess translation. It is a powerful story of selfless love and fidelity and courage of spirit. Burgess’ translation is wonderful in capturing the poetry and clarity of Edmond Rostand’s lines. This, the best of Rostand’s work, in many ways rivals some of Shakespeare’s best work—definitely a top tier play. Brian Vaughn played a wonderful Cyrano and brought the full weight of this sensitive, self-conscious lover to bear on stage. Vaughn deftly handled the longest death scene I’ve ever seen. A moving performance.
2 comments:
I used to watch to old black'n'white Cyrano DeBergerac when I was a little kid!
Was it written as a book or play originally?....I would be interested in reading it.
It is a play first and foremost--the most successful French play of all time, I believe. It's great to read but much much better to see a great performance of it in the theater.
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