MAN OF LA MANCHA
by Dale Wasserman
music by Mitch Leigh lyrics by Joe Darion
original production staged by Albert Marre
originally produced by Albert W. Selden and Hal James
directed by Antonio Ocampo-Guzman
music direction by David Reiffel movement direction by Judith Chaffee

An energetic revival of the Tony-award winning musical, Man of La Mancha features Boston-area favorite Maurice Emmanuel Parent (The Gift Horse, Ragtime, Cabaret) as the eponymous knight errant, Don Quixote, on his quest to dream the impossible dream. Journey along with us and experience this classic musical adventure this holiday season.

Running Time: 2 hours, plus 15-minute intermission

This performance uses haze and strobe effects.

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MAINSTAGE SEASON

Ideation | Oleanna | Man of La Mancha | The Bakelite Masterpiece | Two Jews Walk into a War…

STATEMENTS OF SURVIVAL SERIES
Unveiled | Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act | Lonely Planet | Ripe Frenzy

Seating Chart

Hearing Loop-Enabled

The mainstage theater is equipped with a Tele-Coil Loop System. Patrons with hearing aids and cochlear implants can set their devices to “T-Coil” to take advantage of the assistive listening system. Patrons wishing for assistive listening devices may pick up a headset from the Box Office upon arrival at the theater. Click here to learn more.

“A fresh interpretation does wonders for this stirring production of Man of La Mancha.” ArtsFuse on MAN OF LA MANCHA

“Man of La Mancha is making a broader argument for the transformative power of the imagination, especially in the face of oppression.” The Boston Globe on MAN OF LA MANCHA

“New Rep’s production of Man of La Mancha is excellent. Get your tickets right now!”

“You don’t want to miss this!” TheaterMirror on MAN OF LA MANCHA

“Lovingly-crafted…this New Rep production is a worthy revival.” On Boston Stages on MAN OF LA MANCHA

Man of La Mancha is “just the ticket…impossible to resist.” MetroWest Daily News on MAN OF LA MANCHA

“This old musical is dusted off with a very startling fresh view.” WGBH’s Jared Bowen on MAN OF LA MANCHA

Maurice Emmanuel Parent (left) and Ute Gfrerer (right)

Michael Levesque

Cast of Man of La Mancha

Clockwise from top: Ute Gfrerer, Ricardo D. Holguín, Christina English, Ivy Ryan

Cast of Man of La Mancha

Company

Prisoner (Father Pérez)

Stefan Barner *

Prisoner (María, the innkeeper’s wife)

Shonna Cirone *

Prisoner (Luisa, Quijana’s housekeeper

Christina English

Prisoner (Aldonza)

Ute Gfrerer

Prisoner (Paco), Monk

Brandon Grimes *

Prisoner (Pedro); Lead guitar

Nile Scott Hawver *

Prisoner (José); Guitar

Ricardo D. Holguín

Prisoner (Barber), Captain of the Inquisition; Trumpet

Paul James Lang *

Secretary (Sancho Panza); Guitar, ukelele

Michael Levesque

Prisoner (Juan)

Cristhian Mancinas-García

Prisoner “Duke” (Simón Carrasco/Knight of Mirrors)

Davron S. Monroe *

Cervantes (Alonso Quijana “Don Quixote”)

Maurice Emmanuel Parent *

Prisoner (Antonia, Quijana’s niece)

Ivy Ryan

Prisoner (Tenorio), Monk; Guitar

Nicole vander Laan

Prisoner “Governor” (Manuel, the innkeeper)

Todd Yard

Creative Team

Director

Antonio Ocampo-Guzman

Frances Nelson McSherry º

Production Stage Manager

Jaclyn Fulton *

Assistant Stage Manager

Becca Freifeld *

News + Media

Press Releases

High Resolution Production Photos: MAN OF LA MANCHA

December 4, 2017

News

Read the feature on MAN OF LA MANCHA in The Boston Globe

December 1, 2017

Press Releases

Press Release: Man of La Mancha

November 7, 2017

News

An In-Depth Look at MAN OF LA MANCHA

June 23, 2017

Event Information

Enhanced Talkback

Sunday 12/10, 2pm

Featuring

Dr. Alicia Borinsky, Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Boston University

Maurice Emmanuel Parent* (Cervantes/Don Quixote)

Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, Director

Talkbacks

Sunday 12/17, 2pm
Thursday 12/14, 2pm

Learn More

Adapting Don Quixote

Dale Wasserman’s Quest

How does one set out to adapt one of the most widely-read and highly-regarded classics of Western literature? Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, published in two parts between 1605 and 1615, is regarded as the first modern novel, and its author is frequently ranked alongside his contemporary William Shakespeare as one of the greatest writers in history.

Below is an excerpt from a 1997 interview with the show’s book writer, Dale Wasserman.

What attracted you about the figure of Don Quixote?

It happened by pure accident, actually. I was in Spain writing a movie when I read in a newspaper that I was there for the purpose of researching a dramatization of Don Quixote. That was a laughing matter because, like most people on earth, I had not read Don Quixote, but Spain seemed just the right place to repair that omission. So I waded into the novel and came out on the other side of a half-million words convinced that it could not be dramatized.

And why was that?

It’s simply that it covers too great a spectrum of possibilities. One could take a section of it, perhaps, but it’s a protean work. It is all things to all people and I thought it is a little like trying to pour a lake into a bucket. It’s simply too massive to compress.

And how did you proceed at that point?

I got interested in its author, Miguel de Cervantes. I ran across one fact which immediately attracted me and set up a possible affinity. That is, he was first and preeminently a man of the theater—he was a playwright, he was an actor, he was a man who went on the road with his shabby little performing troupe. He wrote thirty to forty plays, perhaps more, none of which were considered to be very good. But, in his love for the theater, his passion for it actually, he never really wavered. And this is what gave me the idea—write a play about Miguel de Cervantes, and blend or cross-fertilize his creation, Don Quixote with his own personality, his own life. Just possibly, then, one could have something approaching a dramatization.

Read the full interview with Dale Wasserman

The Impossible Dream

And the world will be better for this
That one man scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To fight the unbeatable foe, to reach the unreachable star!

Even if you’ve never seen Man of La Mancha, you’ve probably heard the song The Impossible Dream.

Recorded on the original Broadway cast album by Richard Kiley, the song has since been covered by countless artists, including Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Cher. Screen legend Christopher Lee even recorded a heavy metal version for his 2014 album Metal Knight!

What’s your favorite version of The Impossible Dream? Head over to our Facebook or Twitter to let us know!

Watch Richard Kiley’s 1972 Tonys performance

Notes on Man of La Mancha

by Ruth Spack

Man of La Mancha was conceived in error and grew by reason of curiosity.

– Dale Wasserman

INSPIRATION FOR MAN OF LA MANCHA

Sitting at an outdoor table in a Madrid plaza in 1958, playwright Dale Wasserman was surprised to read in the International Herald Tribune that “Dale Wasserman [is] in Madrid while researching Don Quixote for motion picture adaptation.” Wasserman had never read Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, nor had he ever had any interest in adapting it. Virtually every movie or opera adaptation of Don Quixote had suffered a cruel fate. Yet Wasserman felt challenged by that lack of success, asking himself, “if Don Quixote . . . was so famously seminal, so rich in character and idea, why should it be so difficult to dramatize? Why had no one captured its essence?”

Returning to his New York apartment after researching Cervantes’ life in Spain, Wasserman lay on his back for hours searching for an answer. It came to him in a moment of illumination: “I’d write a play about Miguel de Cervantes in which his creation, Don Quixote, would be played by Cervantes himself. The two would progressively blend in spirit until the creator and his creation would be understood as one and the same.”

I, DON QUIXOTE: LIVE TELEVISION DRAMA

Man of La Mancha began as a non-musical television play for CBS’s DuPont Show of the Month. Reasoning that viewers would be unfamiliar with La Mancha, a region in Spain, the DuPont Corporation changed the title to I, Don Quixote. Wasserman accepted the rationale, chalking it up to “the exigencies of live television.” But he disliked the change because, as he put it, “My man of La Mancha is not Don Quixote; he is Miguel de Cervantes.”

In rehearsal, the play ran eight minutes over—unacceptable for television’s rigid schedule. To save time, Wasserman cut a monologue that began, “To dream the impossible dream . . . to fight the unbeatable foe.” Upon reading the revised scene, lead actor Lee J. Cobb stormed off the set, insisting the cut be restored to highlight the play’s affirmative message, which, he said, “flies in the face of the news, the mood . . . of all the crud that’s a blight on living here and now.” Agreeing with Cobb, the director sped up the pace in Act One, enabling Wasserman to reinstate the speech. On November 9, 1959, the play was broadcast live to an audience estimated at twenty million. Years later, after an unsuccessful attempt to option the teleplay for Broadway, Wasserman turned his story into a musical.

BECOMING THE MAN: A QUADRUPLE FEAT

The lead in Man of La Mancha, considered a plum role in musical theater, is a complex undertaking. As Wasserman explains in The Impossible Musical, the actor must transform himself into four characters: Cervantes the prisoner, Cervantes the playwright, Don Quixote, and Alonso Quijana. Richard Kiley was the seventh or eighth choice for the part, after Rex Harrison and other famous actors were unavailable or declined the offer. Kiley won the Tony for best actor in a musical. Jose Ferrer replaced Kiley in the original Broadway run, followed by operatic baritone David Atkinson. Kiley returned to the lead role in the 1972 and 1977 Broadway revivals. Later revivals starred Raúl Juliá (1992) and Brian Stokes Mitchell (2002).

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES: Soldier, Slave, Playwright, Prisoner

Man of La Mancha is not, as most people believe, an adaptation of Don Quixote, but a play about a few hours in the life of the playwright, Miguel de Cervantes.

– Dale Wasserman

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), the most celebrated figure in Spanish literature, was born in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He studied poetry in Madrid but left for Italy at age nineteen, possibly to escape imprisonment for injuring an upper-class gentleman in a fight. At twenty, Cervantes enlisted in the infantry to fight the advance of Islam. He almost died of malaria, was wounded twice in the chest, and lost the use of his left hand when a musket ball pierced through it. “I gave my left hand for the greater glory of my right,” he would later boast. After being rewarded at the end of his military service in 1575, Cervantes was captured by pirates and sold into slavery in Algiers, where he remained for five years. He attempted escape multiple times but ultimately was saved by his family, who went bankrupt to pay his ransom.

A civilian again but unable to secure a meaningful job, Cervantes turned to writing poetry and drama. He wrote approximately forty plays, almost none of which survive, directing and performing in many of them. Although Cervantes wrote during Spain’s theatrical Golden Age, he failed to achieve a reasonable standard of living, as other playwrights had done, in part because a jealous colleague’s vicious criticism of his work blocked his access to royal sponsorship.

Suffering massive debt from the obligation to support his family and his wife’s, Cervantes was twice imprisoned for owing back taxes. (Ironically, one of the many jobs he took to pay the bills was tax collector.) He wrote Don Quixote later in life to generate income but, unfortunately, did not benefit financially from the novel’s success. Although Cervantes died a poor man, Wasserman does not view him as an object of pity:

He lived a life of deprivation and of danger, and struggled endlessly for a place in the sun. But he never lost hope nor his underlying optimism, a fundamental faith that tomorrow would be better. The author of “the world’s greatest novel” was often angry, but he never surrendered to despair.

PRODUCTION HISTORY

Man of La Mancha premiered in 1964 at the Goodspeed Opera House in Haddam, Connecticut. The next year it opened at the ANTA Theater in New York City. The ANTA was forty blocks from Broadway, but it qualified for the Tony Awards on the basis of its seating capacity, and Man of La Mancha went on to win five Tonys, including best musical and best original score. In 1972, Dale Wasserman adapted the musical into a major motion picture starring Peter O’Toole. Translated into more than forty languages, Man of La Mancha is performed around the world in three hundred to four hundred venues every year.