Three Woofs for Cyrano (Throughout the Ages)!

A few minutes after packing the hand-cart to take the props to today's opening night show, fellow Production Assistant David Martin and I heard a loud thud from the hallway. We rushed to the scene to find the leg of a chair—an important set-piece for the show—irreparably shattered.

Luckily, our mistake did not set the mood of the show. By its end, our actors had made the audience (over 50 strong!) cackle, coo and cry. Much of our audience even barked, including a couple dogs who began yapping loudly away, also apparently in awe of the performance, during the final ovation.

It's remarkable how much our premiere was like the first ever Cyrano show. Just before the curtain first went up on June 28, 1897, the show's playwright Edmund Rostand "fell at the feet of leading actor Constant Coquelin and exclaimed: 'Forgive me! Oh, forgive me, my friend, for having dragged you into this disastrous adventure!'...he then donned a costume and slipped onstage during the first act, causing surprise and confusing among the actors"* I wonder what Coquelin's reaction could have been to this outburst, other than "You tell me this now...?"

Obviously, Rostand's panic attack proved wholly unjustified. And, as with our show, the cast plowed through the unexpected. Although there were no barking dogs in the Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin that night, "The first act was greeted with bravos, the following ones with standing ovations, and the final scene with forty-two curtain calls, so many that at two o'clock in the morning the exhausted stage manager simply left the curtain open and went home to bed."*

We have another show to put on tomorrow, so our wonderful Stage Manager Anna Demenkoff was unable to accommodate forty-two curtain calls. Not that the audience wasn't begging, on hands, knees and paws, to give them.

*Courtesy of Peter Connor, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University. Written for Barnes & Nobles Classics edition of Cyrano.