“CYRANO”: Small of stature, big of heart

Hayley Bennett, Peter Dinklage

The essential “Cyrano” story remains as seductive as ever, and the performances are spot on.

Dinklage may have the greatest hangdog eyes in movie history, and he perfectly captures the character’s conflicting emotions (a cocksure cavalier when it comes to battle, a swooning romantic who is fearful of announcing his love). He’s less a singer than a Rex Harrison-styled reciter of lyrics…but it works.

Bennet nicely captures both Roxanne’s beauty and her childlike superficiality, while offering the production’s best singing voice; Harrison walks a fine line between Christian’s sincerity and his, er, intellectual limitations.

As a musical “Cyrano” is a tad half-hearted. There are only a half dozen numbers, and many of them feel more like fragments of songs than full-blown compositions.

At its best the score has a sweeping pop feel that reminds of early Kate Bush with a dash of Andrew Lloyd Webber. The highlight is the late-in-the-show “Heaven Is Wherever I Fall” in which three soldiers (one played by “Once’s” Glen Hansard) prepare for a fatal charge by writing letters to faraway loved ones. The tune’s throat-stopping blend of heroic fatalism, yearning, and lost possibilities is simply drop-dead gorgeous.

There’s relatively little real dancing here; Wright opts mostly for carefully staged crowd and camera movement. An exception is a number unfolding in a fortress where a regiment of sword-wielding soldiers perform a grand waltz (there’s even some break dancing dropped in).

| Robert W. Butler