Review of Red Theater Chicago's Little Red Cyrano

Once upon a time I went to a show and it was called Little Red Cyrano. It was by Aaron Sawyer and it was directed by Michael J. Stark and Aaron Sawyer. It was about a man named Cyrano (Benjamin Ponce) who fell in love with Little Red Riding Hood (Dari Simone), but she was in love with a man named Christian (Dave Honigman) who was not very poetic, but he wanted to gain the heart of Little Red, so he asked Cyrano to write for him. And Cyrano complied. This is a mashup of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood and Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. It is about love, poetry, and when being courteous has gone too far. I think this is a really fun show. It had some cool audience participation and I liked the use of sign language in it.

I don't really understand why this couldn't have been just an adaptation of Cyrano with the same cast. At first I thought they were trying to make it accessible to kids but putting in a character they already knew, but that didn't make a lot of sense to me either. Why couldn't kids be interested in a show with characters they weren't already familiar with? I enjoyed Red's performance a lot, but I thought she could have played Roxane very well as well. The story of Cyrano is already adaptable to a story with sign language. It is all about poetry and words, and using words in sign language is a different way to show the poetry and is beautiful to watch. Adding Little Red Riding Hood didn't make a lot of sense to me because she didn't need to be Red Riding Hood for the story to make sense. I didn't feel like these stories had enough in common to justify putting them into a mash up.

I was rooting for Cyrano and Little Red's relationship. It was pretty hard to take when she kept not realizing how much Cyrano loved her. But I liked the reciprocity of their relationship and it seemed really healthy except she didn't understand the depth of Cyrano's feelings. They seemed to talk to each other and respect each other. In Cyrano it is a little harder to decide whether Cyrano and Roxane together is better than Christian and Roxane together. But in this version, it was pretty obvious who you should be rooting for because Christian seemed like such a jerk. In the play Cyrano, Christian seemed like a sweet guy who didn't know how to express himself. But here he seemed like a selfish, self-obsessed guy who didn't realize how much Cyrano was helping him and took him for granted. And he ends up being the villain of the story too. It makes the story a lot less complicated; there's a clear decision you make at the start of the show, which is that Christian is a terrible person for Little Red, and it doesn't really change through the play.

I thought it was really cool how the actors asked the audience to sign and to be part of some of the scenes. One time they asked you to be trees. Sometimes people asked you to hold on to a letter that they had signed, as if it were a paper letter. They would make the sign for a letter, like a or g, and then they would give you the invisible letter, have you make the sign and hold on to it for later. I also really liked a lot of the performances. I really loved Cyrano; he made the character really lovable and you wanted the best for him, but you could still see the character's mistakes. I felt like his signing was very poetic and he really took time with each word and it was really beautiful to watch. Raganeau (Stark) was a baker whose wife, Lise (Christopher Paul Mueller), leaves him because he has not been charging soldiers pretending to be poets for their food. I found their relationship kind of sad but hilarious. She was like, "I wanted to go to Paris and we can't because you won't make these people pay. So bye." I thought Raganeau was able to convey a lot of emotion even without spoken words, and even if you didn't understand sign language you could understand his story. I also loved the woodsman character (Mueller). He had this moose hat and no one knew for a while that it was not a hat but that he was really growing antlers. It was really funny to see him try and explain that.

People who would like this show are people who like signed poetry, tragic love stories, and mysterious moose hats. I think that people should go see this shows. It uses sign language in such a beautiful way and I think a lot of the performers did an amazing job.


Photos: M. Freer Photography