I, Don Quixote

I, Don Quixote is a non-musical play written for television, and broadcast on the CBS anthology series DuPont Show of the Month on the evening of November 9, 1959. Written by Dale Wasserman, the play was converted by him ca. 1964 into the libretto for the stage musical Man of La Mancha, with songs by Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion. After a tryout at Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut,Man of La Mancha opened in New York on November 22, 1965, at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre.

The title of the 1959 teleplay was originally Man of La Mancha, but sponsor DuPont Corp. objected and producer David Susskind changed it to the more specific I, Don Quixote, fearing that the TV audience would not know who Wasserman was referring to if the original title was used. Wasserman reported that he disliked this title "to this very day". When the teleplay was made into the famous stage musical, the original title Man of La Mancha was restored.

I, Don Quixote has almost exactly the same plot and even much of the same dialogue as Man of La Mancha. Even the famous opening two lines of La Mancha's hit song The Impossible Dream appeared in this teleplay. According to a recently published academic book chapter by Cervantes scholar Howard Mancing, these lines and a few others were originally written as part of a preface for the now-forgotten 1908 play "Don Quixote" by Paul Kester.

Wasserman, however, always claimed that the lines were his own, despite the allegation that they appeared in print six years before he was born. Wasserman himself noted that he had tried to cut the impossible dream speech from the teleplay due to a need to fit the performance into the 90 minute slot, but that Lee J. Cobb, who played both Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote (despite the fact that Cobb was rather beefy and Don Quixote is supposed to be thin), had insisted it go back in. The famous apocryphal portrait of Cervantes, the Pseudo-Jáuregui, bears somewhat of a resemblance to Cobb; perhaps this is one of the reasons that he was chosen for the role.

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