Winner of the Biennale College competition organized by Venice Biennale Teatro in 2018, Cirano deve morire [Cyrano must die] is a concert-show oscillating between romantic poetry and ferocious rap, poised between musicals and DJ sets, period costumes and stroboscopic lights: an original and unprecedented way to tell the story of love and deception of Cyrano de Bergerac.

The young Roman director Leonardo Manzan, twice winner of the Venice Biennale Teatro Award, brings to the stage a rewriting for three voices of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac: a show-concert with original live lyrics and music that transforms the poetry of the late nineteenth century into powerful rap verses. Sharp rhymes and frenzied rhythms deal relentlessly with the theme of fiction through this story of deceit and death, of loyalty to others and of self-betrayal, of words that seduce and of silences that kill. It is an extraordinary story of love and friendship, one of the most famous "triangles" of the modern theatre: the protagonists are two friends and a woman they both love. The show focuses on the showdown between the three young people, the two dead men and the only survivor, Roxane, who is unable to free herself from the ghosts that have destroyed her life with the deception of an impossible love, but who at the same time have also given her, her only moments of true happiness, through the power of the imagination.

Cyrano must Die recovers the poetic strength of the original text through the use of rap music, a necessary choice – according to Manzan – not only to express the heroism and polemical verve of the protagonist, but also to make the word of love contemporary and authentic, and therefore faithful to Rostand.

“It will be a good thing to start from the beginning, that is, from the title. Cyrano must Die is a declaration of intent and, at the same time, a prayer that I address to you in the form of an exclamation: forget about Cyrano as you thought you knew him.”
– Leonardo Manzan