Actor Jeroen Spitzenberger has his first ‘music theater adventure’. Can he dance? Can he sing?

Much is a gamble to Jeroen Spitzenberger as the title roller of a musical version of Cyrano. Spitzenberger has become loved as an actor in films like Everything is love (2007), Male hearts (2013) and the series Whimper (since 2019) – and in the theater, in The stone bridal bed,,  » Midsomern night dream and Venus Among other things. But the leading role in an almost three -hour musical – or, as Bos Theater Productions calls it itself, a ‘music theater adventure’ – is new. Can he dance? Can he sing?

Cyrano de Bergerac was a real poet in the 17th century, where playwright Edmond Rostand made a romantic figure with a huge nose at the end of the 19th century. Cyrano, with his big nose, finds himself so ugly that he does not dare to confess his love for Roxane. Not even when she tells him hopelessly in love with the handsome Christian. But Roxane needs more than looks: She craves eloquent love. Christian is an empty head, Cyrano knows. And so the poet decides to make Roxane happy by writing meters of beautiful love letters, with the warm greetings of Christian.

Can Spitzenberger dance, sing? We don’t find out. Director Jasper delighted has not given him cards or nuts. And so Spitzenberger gets plenty of time to do what he can do: a great comic, brave, doubting, eloquent, reckless, grand, shy, true Cyrano, in a way as if he was improvising together tonight. Monologues, such as the famous in the first deed where an opponent calls Cyrano’s nose ‘ugly’ and Cyrano gives him a long (strikingly modernized) list of poetic ways to insult him, it seems that it seems.

Only real person

Advantage: this romanticized Cyrano is actually quite a tangible figure. Disadvantage: Spitzenberger is so credible at times that he seems to be the only real person among lifelike dolls – an effect strengthened because the show is largely in rhyme, or is jokingly pronounced as an old theater text. The movements, texts, jokes of the other, few layered characters are perfectly programmed. In between, walks, swirles, bumps, Cyrano hits like a truly tormented person. Only Roxane, played by Shelley Bos, is partly an exception: her role is not very laminated either, but the depth that forest gets (ping -poning between the outdoors smart and independent, and on the inside the top words horny) she plays out completely. Trainee Julie-Anne Sikkens also deserves a mention; At the last minute, she naturally replaced a sick Rian Gerritsen to forget the script in her hands after a few seconds.

This music theater version of Cyrano makes you wonder what the lower limit is of the term ‘music theater’. There is hardly any music in it. What sounds there is short, meaningless and so far passed through the computer that the text is hardly to be understood. There is a lot of singing, but most seems to be on the band. That the actors sometimes come up with a guitar, cello or trombone for three extra doubting tones in a totally slick soundtrack is downright drowsy. The music feels with the Haren dragged to please a musical audience. And so there are a few elements that come across as check marks on the checklist. Suddenly dramatically bright red light in Christian’s death scene, while the rest of the evening looked so honest in his unchanging backdrop of a crumbling theater. Or the gay stereotype that was missing in the story and, it feels that, then only put in a small supporting role; Little sincere, functional gay. The abundance of jokes that do not quasi-terluns from Spitzenbergers will be mouth dancing in a division.

But does that give? Hardly. Jeroen Spitzenberger is Cyrano. That appears worth a lot.

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