Seeing Cyrano de Bergerac and Hadestown in NYC!
This past weekend a friend from college and I travelled to Brooklyn, New York with one goal in mind-seeing James Mcavoy. We had both seen the proshot of the production of Cyrano De Bergerac he had performed in with the Jamie Lloyd Company and shared an insufferable obsession with it. When I saw a tweet from playbill that the same production was to be performing in the states in New York, I messaged them mainly with the energy of “hey isn’t it crazy and cool that the show we’re obsessed with is coming to America?” but was met with the response of “so like if I got tickets would you come with?” I’m personally not a spontaneous trip planner myself but I decided my anxiety would be worth it in the end and said “yeah sure!”
Flash forward months later to this past weekend and the way my heart leapt out of my chest just walking in and seeing that minimalist brown wooden set in person! I mean no actors, no James Mcavoy, yet, and I was already emotional. Unsurprisingly the show was just stellar in concept, in direction, in performance. Just the most beautiful piece of theatre which just felt like a love letter to the concept of language and the ways it can be used to build us up and break us down.
I mean, we had seen the exact production before. Aside from Roxanne, which was now being portrayed by Evelyn Miller (a brilliantly different take on the character compared to the NT Lives’s Roxanne), the cast was predominantly the same as the cast me and Colleen had seen on screen already. I mean I can go on record and state that my one critique of the NT Live’s proshot of Cyrano was that I wasn’t there in person. So, here we are! What do I do with my life now?
Why, see Hadestown of course! I’m going to out myself right now as a person who is not as obsessed with musicals as the rest of the american theatre community. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a rocking good time with a musical, and if one recent musical could get me hype, it would be Hadestown! Does that make me basic? I don’t know but who cares, it slaps. I mean I think everyone knows Hadestown by now, right? What more can I say that hasn’t already? The style of music is so fun, the set design created such a fun atmosphere and allowed for some creative directing choices, the performances were lovely. I have no notes as my scale for rating my musical experience is “did I have fun?” which I did!
I genuinely think Hadestown exhibited a lot of qualities I love in theatre as a whole: mainly in its directing and design choices since the more “musical” aspects are not things I have enough knowledge to comment on confidently.
Anywho, that’s my time seeing theatre in New York! Thanks for coming to my ted talk!
-RJM
