Any Cyrano worth the name has to be able to turn a phrase. Cyrano improvises a poem about stabbing a guy to death while he’s in the process of stabbing a guy to death, a man whose epistolary skill wins the heart of the most beautiful woman in the land. Wit: This is the play that introduced the word “panache” to the English language.The best of these performances fit certain attributes, detailed in the following scoring system: Even leaving out any TV shows and movies that steal one gag from the play (the execrable 2009 rom-com The Ugly Truth, for instance) and skewing toward more modern adaptations–mostly from the past 40 years, plus José Ferrer’s iconic performance in the 1950 adaptation–that leaves 13 Cyranos with whom Dinklage has to contend.
So let’s lay out Dinklage’s competition for the best on-screen version of Cyrano. More than once, it’s been reenacted by space aliens. We’ve seen this classic love story adapted for high schools (three times in the past four years) and a fire station in the Pacific Northwest. Just as it became fashionable at the turn of the century to adapt Shakespeare to a high school context, over the past 35 years Cyrano de Bergerac has nosed his (or increasingly her) way into settings far from the original 17th century France. It’s been adapted for the screen nearly as frequently. Over the past 125 years, Cyrano de Bergerac has been staged on Broadway and the West End countless times, with actors from John Gielgud to Kevin Kline to James McAvoy in the title role. If you think it’s a bit much that we get a new Batman every five years, you ain’t seen nothing yet. But in the case of Cyrano, there’s a truly astonishing amount of competition. After all, he won international acclaim for portraying Tyrion Lannister, the most beloved character on one of the most successful TV shows of the 21st century. Such a beloved and accomplished actor as Dinklage would ordinarily have no trouble making the role his own. Peter Dinklage stars as the title character in Cyrano, Joe Wright’s musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 classic, with music by the National. This weekend, one of the most celebrated characters in the Western literary canon returns to the big screen.
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