The Impossible Musical: The "Man of La Mancha" Story Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is the story of how the now-classic Broadway musical "Man of La Mancha" came to be written, and of its various productions, including the much-maligned 1972 film version. Its 87 year old author, Dale Wasserman, not only wrote the script of the musical as well as the film's screenplay, but also wrote its source, the 1959 non-musical TV play, "I, Don Quixote", which was broadcast during the Golden Age of live TV drama and, as of now, still has never been repeated on television nor issued on video. It would make fascinating viewing--if a copy can be found on kinescope and restored.(Those curious about the play can actually read it; the entire text is included in this book, and despite a few changes, it strongly resembles its musical counterpart, right down to the dialogue.)
Wasserman is a highly opinionated, outspoken and entertaining writer who spares nothing and nobody, and he takes us through the various phases in the writing of the show. He is pointedly emphatic in declaring that it was never intended as a dramatic adaptation of "Don Quixote" ; he believes strongly that an attempt at adapting the episodic 1,000 page novel into a coherent and interesting play, much less a film, is as impossible as Don Quixote's own attempt to defeat that famous windmill. He was/is not interested in the actual novel as a potential play. Wasserman intended both "I, Don Quixote" and "Man of La Mancha" as a tribute to Miguel de Cervantes, author of the novel, and to demonstrate how, in all spiritual ways, Cervantes and his fictional creation were close kin. Perhaps critics who review "Man of La Mancha" should take closer notice of this.One fascinating aspect of the book is that though he is critical of the 1972 film version of "Man of La Mancha" starring Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren, both non-singing actors, he is by no means as hostile to it as those critics that howled that a great musical had been desecrated on its way to the screen. He compliments its stars on their performances, and his biggest beef with the production seems to lie in the necessity of the film's having to use realistic, literal scenery, something that the stage version deliberately avoided.
Where Wasserman may alienate some people, however, is in his very politically incorrect and scathing criticism of some of the countries that produced the foreign language productions. But one can hardly blame him; if his account is as accurate as it seems, the liberties some of them took are horrifying.
But to divulge any more of this book would be unfair. Theatre buffs should eagerly lap it up, and anyone else interested in knowing how a literate Broadway musical play was put together should enjoy it highly.


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Man of La Mancha is arguably the most popular musical drama of all time, most recently on Broadway starring Brian Stokes Mitchell. Dale Wasserman, however, had more trouble getting it on to a Broadway stage than Don Quixote ever had with those damn windmills. For centuries, writers all over the world had tried to stage Cervantes' comic masterpiece, and all had failed. On a sabbatical to Spain in the late 1950s, screenwriter-stage director Dale Wasserman had the insight to change that - Don Quixote the novel was too rambling to be dramatized, but the almost equally incredible story of the novel's creator wasn't. Wasserman wrote, first, a tv drama of Man of La Mancha (Cervantes is the Man, not Quixote, by the way), which David Susskind produced as "I, Don Quixote." What happened next, and for the next several decades, to this remarkable drama is an incredible drama in its own right. Many writers tried to get Wasserman to contribute to an "official" account of the making of Man of La Mancha, but Wasserman knew he was the only writer who both knew all the facts, all the facets, and would eventually get around to writing the story as it should be written, as both a "making of" and a "commentary on the state of" story. From the Costa Del Sol to Hollywood, Broadway and beyond, with a host of spectacular people, including Ava Gardner, Colleen Dewhurst (whom Wasserman discovered for La Mancha) and John Huston, this is the full story of Man of La Mancha, before Broadway and beyond. Included is the full script of the original TV version, "I, Don Quixote."

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