It is also meticulously researched, down to the names of the members of the Académie française and the dames précieuses glimpsed before the performance in the first scene.

Christian de Neuvillette, a handsome new cadet, arrives with Lignière, a drunkard who he hopes will identify the young woman with whom he has fallen in love.

Lignière recognizes her as Roxane, and he tells Christian about her and the Count de Guiche's scheme to marry her off to the compliant Viscount Valvert.

Meanwhile, Ragueneau and Le Bret are expecting Cyrano de Bergerac, who has, without any authority, banished the actor Montfleury from the stage for a month.

Cyrano disrupts the play, forces Montfleury off stage, and compensates the manager for the loss of admission fees.

The crowd is going to disperse when Cyrano lashes out at a pesky busybody, then is confronted by Valvert and duels with him while composing a ballade, wounding (and possibly killing) him as he ends the refrain (as promised, he ends each refrain with Qu'à la fin de l'envoi, je touche!

Cyrano, now emboldened, vows to take on the entire mob single-handed, and he leads a procession of officers, actors and musicians to the Porte de Nesle.

Cyrano thinks that she is talking about him at first, and is ecstatic, but Roxane describes her beloved as "handsome," and tells him that she is in love with Christian de Neuvillette.

Roxane fears for Christian's safety in the predominantly Gascon company of Cadets, and asks Cyrano to befriend and protect him.

The musketeer from before, now thinking it was safe to do so, teases Cyrano about his nose and receives a slap in the face, amusing the Cadets.

When Roxane implies that she would feel more for de Guiche if he went to war, he agrees to march on steadfastly, leaving Cyrano and his cadets behind.

The newly wed couple's happiness is short-lived: de Guiche, angry to have lost Roxane, declares that he is sending the Cadets of Gascony to the front lines of the war with Spain.

Roxane, afraid for Christian, urges Cyrano to promise to keep him safe, out of dangerous situations, dry and warm, and faithful.

After de Guiche departs, Roxane provides plenty of food and drink to the cadets with the assistance of the coach's driver, Ragueneau.

The battle ensues, a distraught Roxane collapses and is carried off by de Guiche and Ragueneau, and Cyrano rallies the Cadets to hold off the Spanish until relief arrives.

On 27 December 1897, the curtain rose at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin,[2] and the audience was pleasantly surprised.

The original Cyrano was Constant Coquelin, who played it over 410 times at said theatre and later toured North America in the role.

It was premiered in Monte Carlo on 29 March 1898, and subsequently presented in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Algeria, Tunisia and Spain.

... la troupe voyage avec tout un matériel de décors à appliques, charnières, pièces démontables qui, pouvant se planter sur n'importe quelle scène et se divisant en tous petits fragments, s'installe aisément dans des caisses, sans peser relativement trop lourd et dépasser les dimensions admises par les chemins de fer.

The costumes and decorations will be identical to those of the Porte Saint-Martin; the costumes, two hundred and fifty in number, made to measure, the weapons, cardboard boxes, all the material will be made by the suppliers of this theater; the sets will be painted by Dubosq who, in recent days, has been to Paris to get along with the touring entrepreneurs.

... the troupe travels with a whole set of sconces, hinges, removable parts which, being able to be planted on any stage and being divided into very small fragments, can be easily installed in crates, without weighing relatively too much heavy and exceed the dimensions permitted by railways.

The longest-running Broadway production ran 232 performances in 1923 and starred Walter Hampden, who returned to the role on the Great White Way in 1926, 1928, 1932, and 1936.

In 1946 Hampden passed the torch to José Ferrer, who won a Tony Award for playing Cyrano in a much-praised Broadway staging, the highlight of which was a special benefit performance in which Ferrer played the title role for the first four acts and Hampden (then in his mid-sixties) assumed it for the fifth.

Ferrer reprised the role on live television in 1949 and 1955, and in a 1950 film version for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Other notable English-speaking Cyranos were Ralph Richardson, DeVeren Bookwalter, Derek Jacobi, Michael Kanarek, Richard Chamberlain, and Christopher Plummer, who played the part in Rostand's original play and won a Tony Award for the 1973 musical adaptation.

Inspired by the balcony scene in which Cyrano provides Christian with words to speak to Roxane, Stanley Milgram developed an experimental technique that used covert speech shadowing to construct hybrid personae in social psychological experiments, wherein subjects would interact with a "Cyranoid" whose words emanated from a remote, unseen "source".