Man Of La Mancha
| Man of La Mancha | |
|---|---|
Original Playbill
|
|
| Music | Mitch Leigh |
| Lyrics | Joe Darion |
| Book | Dale Wasserman |
| Basis | I, Don Quixote (teleplay) by Dale Wasserman and Don Quixote (novel) by Miguel de Cervantes |
| Productions | 1965 Goodspeed Opera House 1965 Broadway International productions 1968 West End 1972 Broadway revival 1972 Film 1977 Broadway revival 1992 Broadway revival 2002 Broadway revival |
| Awards |
Tony Award for Best Musical Tony Award for Best Score |
Man of La Mancha is a 1964 musical with a book by Dale Wasserman, lyrics by Joe Darion, and music by Mitch Leigh. It is adapted from Wasserman's non-musical 1959 teleplay I, Don Quixote, which was in turn inspired by Miguel de Cervantes and his seventeenth-century masterpiece Don Quixote. It tells the story of the "mad" knight, Don Quixote, as a play within a play, performed by Cervantes and his fellow prisoners as he awaits a hearing with the Spanish Inquisition. The work is not, and does not pretend to be, a faithful rendition of either Cervantes' life or of Don Quixote. Wasserman complained repeatedly about taking the work as a musical version of Don Quixote.
The original 1965 Broadway production ran for 2,328 performances and won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The musical has been revived four times on Broadway, becoming one of the most enduring works of musical theatre.
The principal song, "The Impossible Dream", became a standard. The musical has played in many other countries around the world, with productions in Dutch, French (translation by Jacques Brel), German, Hebrew, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Icelandic, Gujarati, Uzbek, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swahili, Finnish, Ukrainian and nine distinctly different dialects of the Spanish language.
Man of La Mancha was first performed at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut in 1965, and had its New York premiere on the thrust stage of the ANTA Washington Square Theatre in 1965.
Man of La Mancha started as a non-musical teleplay written by Dale Wasserman for CBS's DuPont Show of the Month program. This original telecast starred Lee J. Cobb, Colleen Dewhurst (who replaced Viveca Lindfors), and Eli Wallach, and was not performed on a thrust stage, but on a television sound stage. The DuPont Corporation disliked the title Man of La Mancha, thinking that its viewing audience would not know what La Mancha actually meant, so a new title, I, Don Quixote, was chosen. The play was broadcast live on November 9, 1959, with an estimated audience of 20 million. Unfortunately, due to the production being staged in the early days of videotape, and due to the inferiority of kinescopes, no footage of this production survives.
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