Celebrity Series Welcomes Weston Playhouse Tour of Cyrano Oct. 24
 
The award-winning Weston Playhouse Theatre Company, whose productions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Fences and Of Mice and Men have been annual highlights of the fall theatre season, will bring Jo Roets’ acclaimed adaptation of Cyrano to the UNH Johnson Theatre Oct. 24, at 8 p.m. A pre-show talk is planned. 

Swordsman, poet, musician and philosopher Cyrano de Bergerac loves Roxane, but his larger-than-life nose prevents him from telling her. When Roxane falls in love with a handsome cadet, Cyrano helps his tongue-tied rival win her hand, all the while longing for a love he cannot have. Roets takes a fresh look at Edmond Rostand’s much-loved classic in this lively 90-minute adaptation, with three actors playing all the roles. 
 
The Weston Playhouse performances mark the New England Equity premiere of the Roets adaptation. At the helm will be director Stephanie Gilman, whose work, seen often at New York’s Ohio Theatre and HERE Arts Center, has won the New York International Fringe Festival Award for Overall Excellence. Co-founder and co-artistic director of the theatrical ensemble Collision Theory, Gilman is known for her highly physical, comically inspired productions. Admittedly drawn to the epic nature of classics, she admires the “playful theatricality” of Roets’ Cyrano. Trained by the famed San Francisco Mime Troupe and Paul Sills (the originator of Second City and Story Theatre), Gilman is a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect and a Drama League Directing Fellow.
 
Andrew McGinn will play the title role of Cyrano. A graduate of Juilliard, his credits include Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love on Broadway and various classics with The Acting Company, the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the Old Globe Theatre. Amanda Cobb will play Roxane and the Duenna. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, her credits include the title role in Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice at Williamstown and new plays at Yale Rep and Long Wharf Theater. Noel Velez, seen in Weston’s 2004 tour of David Copperfield, will play Christian, De Guiche and others. Trained at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival where his credits include Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, he has been seen in A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie and The School for Wives at PlayMakers Rep.
 
Gilman has set Cyrano in a “ragtag carnival” world designed by Wilson Chin, assistant designer for the recent Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, whose design credits include Playwrights Horizons and Berkeley Opera. Chin will be joined by costume designer Daniel Urlie, lighting designer S. Ryan Schmidt and composer/sound designer Daniel Baker, whose collective credits include Atlantic Theatre and Second Stage in New York, and such top regional companies as Dallas Theater Center, the Huntington, and Yale Rep. The team is further graced with the skills of fight coaches Michael Burnet and Stephen Anderson of Shakespeare and Company, and production stage Manager Danny Kuenzel.           
 
The only professional theatre in New England that tours its region annually, the Weston Playhouse was also the only theatre in the country to have its touring program featured last year on the website of the National Endowment for the Arts. The WPTC Cyrano Tour is block booked in cooperation with the Arts Presenters of Northern New England and New England Presenters, with assistance from the Vermont Arts Council and New England Foundation for the Arts NEST Program. The tour is supported in part by the NEA with lead sponsorship from Lyman Orton and The Vermont Country Store and a generous contribution from Paul Newman.
 
Tickets for the Celebrity Series performance of Cyrano are available now by contacting the MUB box office (10 a.m.-4 p.m, M-F) at 2-2290 or visit the web at http://www.unh.edu/celebrity to download a brochure. Tickets are: General admission $30; UNH ID/Seniors, $27; UNH students and youth 18 and under, $10.