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

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(More customer reviews)I saw "Man of La Mancha" in, probably, its second night of previews in New York. I had cajoled a group of friends into coming based on my fandom for its star, Richard Kiley. I was a bit worried that they, or indeed I, might not like the show. What was a big musical like this doing opening in a rickety, "temporary" theater W-A-A-y off-broadway? I couldn't get any reading on my friends' reactions during the show (which was performed without intermission) but, as the lights came up at the end, I saw that I had done good. There wasn't a dry eye along the row we had commandeered. We stood by our seats and raved as the audience filed out. It turned out to be a damn good thing that we did, too, as we were just one row in front of Kiley's wife! All of which is to say that I pride myself on having loved the show longer than most. Thus, I was thrilled to hear that this book was coming out. Then I got worried. What if it didn't live up to its subject? What if it told me things I didn't want to know? Sure, Dale Wasserman is a superior playwright/screenwriter, but that's not a BOOK (and if you think writing is writing, try some of David Mamet's novels... not his essays, which are brilliant, his novels). Anyway, I needn't have worried. This is the book "...La Mancha" deserves, and the one any lover of the play or the theater will cherish.

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Product Description:
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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