Man of La Mancha

Man of La Mancha opens in a stone prison where Miguel de Cervantes, arrested by the Inquisition, is put on trial by his fellow inmates. They intend to burn his manuscript. To defend it he proposes an entertainment, casts the prisoners in the parts, and becomes an ageing country gentleman who has read too many books about knights.

As Alonso Quijana he renames himself Don Quixote, presses his servant into service as a squire, mistakes a windmill for a giant and an inn for a castle, and fixes on a kitchen maid named Aldonza as the lady he has sworn to serve. Aldonza wants nothing to do with it. The other prisoners play the world that keeps correcting him, and the question the play-within-the-play keeps circling is whether a man who insists on seeing better than what is there is a fool or the only sane person in the room.

Dale Wasserman wrote the book, expanding his own television play, with music by Mitch Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion. The musical reached the stage in 1965 and won the Tony Award for Best Musical. Its source is Cervantes's novel, but the frame story is Wasserman's invention, and the show is closer to a dramatisation of the novelist's predicament than a straight adaptation of the book.

The score is built on Spanish rhythms and blunt, declarative melodies. "The Impossible Dream" became the standard, though the show's harder music belongs to Aldonza, whose songs push back against the fantasy with a violence the rest of the score does not soften.

The prisoners become characters in full view of the audience, and the story returns at the end to the cell it began in, where the trial is still waiting and the manuscript is still on the fire.