Peter Din­klage and a few musi­cal num­bers liv­en up a clas­sic in the Cyra­no trailer

Though it only dates back to 1897, the sto­ry of Cyra­no de Berg­er­ac already feels like a tale as old as time. Adapt­ed in every set­ting from feu­dal Japan to present-day high school, Edmond Rostand’s play sees the less-than-ladykiller Cyra­no help­ing the dash­ing Chris­t­ian, his rival for the affec­tions of fair Rox­anne, win her hand despite his own interest.

As the pub­lic can see in the first trail­er uploaded just this morn­ing, Joe Wright​’s new big-screen mount­ing of the old text stays faith­ful to its sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry set­ting, while mak­ing a hand­ful of key changes. For one, putting Peter Din­klage in the lead role alters the details of plot, if not its mechan­ics; where Cyrano’s over­sized schnoz orig­i­nal­ly made him an unde­sir­able quan­ti­ty inse­cure about his pur­suit of Rox­anne (Haley Ben­nett), this time around, Dinklage’s actu­al achon­dropla­sia con­vinces him that he can nev­er be with the apple of his eye and that she’d be bet­ter off with Chris­t­ian (Kelvin Har­ri­son Jr).

But the most notice­able lib­er­ty tak­en has to be the musi­cal num­bers, in keep­ing with the same genre mashup Wright pre­vi­ous­ly explored with the wide­ly-panned Pan. Rather than adapt­ing the play direct­ly, the film works from a 2018 musi­cal penned by Eri­ca Schmidt, who has a screen­play cred­it on Wright’s lat­est project and also hap­pens to be Dinklage’s wife. (The music and lyrics for Schmidt’s stage show were writ­ten by the mem­bers of the Nation­al, who lend their tal­ents again here.)

The film pre­miered ear­li­er this year at Tel­luride, where notices were on the more pos­i­tive side of mixed, prais­ing Dinklage’s lead­ing per­for­mance while acknowl­edg­ing the awk­ward fric­tion of graft­ing show tunes onto Rostand’s nar­ra­tive. Indiewire’s review paid spe­cial atten­tion to the unique cir­cum­stances of the film’s pro­duc­tion, shot in the thick of the pan­dem­ic on a closed set in Sicily.

For Wright, this rep­re­sents a return to his wheel­house, much clos­er to the gussied-up the­atrics of his Anna Karen­i­na than the under­done psy­chothriller sus­pense of his more recent The Woman in the Win­dow. With this par­tic­u­lar tal­ent, more is always more, and it looks like his Cyra­no will do it all – sing, dance, and pine.

Cyra­no comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 25 Decem­ber, and then the UK on 14 January.