| 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 (tryout) 1965 Broadway 1968 West End 1972 Broadway 1972 Film 1977 Broadway 1992 Broadway 2002 Broadway 2019 West End Revival International productions |
| Awards | Tony Award for Best Musical Tony Award for Best Score |
Man of La Mancha is a 1965 musical with a book by Dale Wasserman, music by Mitch Leigh, and lyrics by Joe Darion. It is adapted from Wasserman's non-musical 1959 teleplay I, Don Quixote, which was in turn inspired by Miguel de Cervantes and his 17th-century novel 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.[1] The work is not and does not pretend to be a faithful rendition of either Cervantes' life or Don Quixote. Wasserman complained repeatedly about people taking the work as a musical version of Don Quixote.[2][3]
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.[4]
"The Impossible Dream", the principal song in the show, 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, Estonian, Japanese, Korean, Bengali, Gujarati, Uzbek, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swahili, Finnish, Chinese, Ukrainian, Turkish, and nine distinct dialects of the Spanish language.[5]
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.[6]
- ^ 'Man of La Mancha' synopsis guidetomusicaltheatre.com. Retrieved January 27, 2010
- ^ Don Quixote as Theatre", Cervantes (journal of the Cervantes Society of America), vol. 19, number 1, 1999, pp. 125-30 Archived March 3, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved September 25, 2014.
- ^ "A Diary for I, Don Quixote", Cervantes (journal of the Cervantes Society of America), vol. 21, no. 2, 2001, pp. 117-123, on page 123 Archived March 3, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved September 25, 2014.
- ^ 'Man of La Mancha' Broadway listings, 1965, 1972, 1977, 1992, and 2002 Internet Broadway Database. Retrieved January 26, 2010
- ^ "La Mancha" history Archived October 20, 2007, at the Wayback Machine theatre-musical.com. Retrieved January 27, 2010
- ^ Abbe A. Debolt: Encyclopedia of the Sixties: A Decade of Culture and Counterculture. ABC-CLIO, 2011, ISBN 9780313329449, pp. 389-390 (excerpt, p. 389, at Google Books)