“Big Fish” on Broadway: So Much Promise, Not Enough Spark

It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the return of Jimmy Mac in Cyrano de Bergerac, which was hiatused for the pandemic.

You know in season 2 of The Good Place (spoiler alert) when Eleanor is seated at a jazz club and her ‘soulmate’ Sebastian announces to her, his ‘sweet dewdrop’, that he has written her a three-hour spoken word jazz opera and Eleanor stands up and goes “okay no….no version of heaven for anyone would ever include three hours of this…we’re in the bad place, aren’t we?” I thought of that scene 11 times during this production of Cyrano de Bergerac. Except the glimpse we got of Sebastian’s jazz opera, like him scatting “my dewdrop/cream of the crop/top to the bop to the bop to the top” was super entertaining, while this play was not. It was a real trip for biscuits and now we’re all wet, daddy-o.

This version of the classic play is rewritten (by Martin Crimp; sorry Martin but it does seem that I’m alone in hating this, so, no worries for you) to be entirely in hard-rhyming ‘modern rap’, which could be cool but unfortunately it is incredibly cringeworthy. It is an interesting idea, I will give it that, and there are a good 15 minutes or so, but overall it is…annoying. While the first act does have some wonderful lines, mainly delivered by James McAvoy in the title role, the script largely loses its focus, cramming in endless words that don’t accomplish anything (and unnecessary beatboxing, omg, so unnecessary), and feels forking exhausting. James is fine, great even at times (especially in his accent work/impression of Christian, lolz), but underserved by the script. There’s a lot of heavy-handed emphasis of simple rhymes, geared in a way that clearly wanted to impress but wasn’t impressive, like assuming that the fact that it’s rapped or rhyming is enough in and of itself, when of course that cannot be the case. So so much of the endless hours in this theatre reminded me, actually, heavily, 100%, of Inigo and Fezzik’s whole schtick: “probably he means no…HARM’; ‘he’s very very short on…CHARM!” Except not adorable and funny. The skillful lines, few and far between, are entirely in McAvoy’s hands in the first section of the play. He performs them well, but it was not enough to lift the heavy fog sense of being tortured.

In addition, Roxanne is the worst. Not the actress, who from my nosebleed seat and bad eyes looked like Zendaya and is also fine. But how the character is written and presented. She makes a big fucking to do about how she needs her men to write her long love letters that prove their eloquence and elegance with words and she’s like ‘no, make it longer! more WORDS! GREAT WORDS! 18 PAGES, FRONT AND BACK’ but then when she speaks, she makes no sense. The writer uses her to shoehorn in bits about progressive issues like gender neutrality and womens rights when they have absolutely no shoring up, just like they wanted to tick the boxes of ‘oh did we mention this? let’s just mention it here’. It feels cheap that way, and completely undercuts a character who professes to care deeply about intelligence. Like when she enters the war camp and everyone is like ‘what tf are you doing here omg leave!’ and she is like ‘oh how dare you say that I shouldn’t be here because I’m a woman, and how dare you question how I made it here because I’m a woman’ and it’s like, jfc, they’re questioning you being there and getting in there because it’s A WAR ZONE. Her words continually fail any sensible character development. The most egregious example is at the end, when she has clearly been miserable for 15 years and pining over her husband and adrift, but in talking about him to Cyrano she says detached vulgarities about ‘fucking’ and stuff like ‘we didn’t even fuck!’ which was so jarring to hear in a scene that was supposed to be emotional, and so impossible to buy from this character at this point in her life. An absolute mess of writing. I do not understand the intent of using such ill-fitting language to try to represent a mourning, broken woman. It instead made her seem a still immature young person with no depth, not a woman 15 years later who has suffered so much. Again, this made NO SENSE.

I was a little confused by the portrayal of the famously good-looking Christian, who I thought was usually nice but dumb (Phoebe voice: “oh I’m sorry that’s ‘pretty dumb'”) but he was a full-on ass in most of this. Because Cyrano promised Roxanne he’d protect Christian for her, Cyrano responds to his assery like ‘hey you’re brave being a total shithead to me, let’s be best friends’ which I guess shows Cyrano can be the bigger person but whew. No thx. Other reviews liked to point out the homoeroticism in this version, which is a really generous interpretation of 5 seconds worth of play at the end when — the two men kiss, a shocking addition to this story but one that did NOTHING. By all means explore that relationship, please, that could be so interesting. But don’t just have them kiss for the hell of it (another box to tick off??) once and do nothing else with it. It was so random and was forgotten as quickly as it began. It’s such an unsophisticated way to do something different without actually committing to it having meaning.

The whole thing was so bloated, at least an hour too long. Act II is entirely long pauses. In fact, the second act is only one hour, but it felt like days. DAYS. So much indulgent and ineffective quiet and delay and I really almost screamed. Also, the blackouts – how is it legal to also blackout the emergency exit signs??? does this country have laws?

At times I truly thought I would scream. I almost left several times but I didn’t want husbo to worry/come after me if he wanted to stay (turns out: he was also flabbergasted). I mean, in theory this is an interesting idea for a modern rapping adaptation, but in execution and writing it was such a cringey disaster to such an extent that I would definitely believe you if y’all dropped the facade and some all-powerful being confirmed that I was indeed being tortured and my skin melted off without my noticing. Could you even believe that? Watch this: I BELIEVE IT.

INFORMATION

It runs 2 hours 50 minutes as stated on the website, but it feels longer, like maybe 9 hours and also you’re on fire.

There are signs asking audience members to wear masks but honestly, this was the worst showing YET for mask-wearing. Truly for shame. (At least they do check vaccine passports on entry.) Additionally, there were several groups of people talking throughout the show, and I don’t mean whispering. Honestly the worst audience I’ve experienced in a long time on all counts, which seems to be an upsetting trend.

The bar didn’t have pitchers of water out; you have to wait in the long line and ask for a cup of water, which is crap.