It’s pride and not panache that drives this overly spare and gloomy musical adaptation of that classic tale of unrequited love and honor, “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Despite a mesmerizing performance by Peter Dinklage, hot off “Game of Thrones,” and a haunting score by members of the band The National, this “Cyrano” is so reductive — the musical runs just two hours — that instead of an epic narrative poem of yearning, brio and noble sacrifice, there’s just a haiku of rue.

That may be the point that adapter/director Erica Schmidt intends to make by stripping Edmond Rostand’s long, populous 1893 play down to its core story points and tone. But in reducing its flourishes and joy — not to mention the details that enrich characters, color the world they live in and vary the storytelling — it also diminishes the audience’s emotional connection, even in its usually surefire, heart-tugging end.

Making Cyrano sing has been a challenge in the past, too. A large-scale 1973 musical, choreographed and directed by Michael Kidd with a book by Anthony Burgess, earned Christopher Plummer a Tony but was short-lived. Another sumptuous version by a Dutch creative team came and went on Broadway in 1993.

In this adaptation, the outline of the narrative remains more or less the same as the 1893 play but cut dramatically. Schmidt makes many smart edits and rewrites to move the story along and reduce its period preciousness; though ostensibly set in 17th century France, the attitude is deliberately contemporary.

Though poet-soldier Cyrano (Dinklage) has extraordinary skills with the sword (performed offstage) and with words, his physical insecurities — it’s not about the nose — and his high sense of honor prevent him from declaring his love for Roxanne, played with unsettling and unsubtle fierceness by Jasmine Cephas Jones.

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