Man of La Mancha: History and Key Facts

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.

The work is not and does not pretend to be a faithful rendition of either Cervantes's life or Don Quixote. Wasserman complained repeatedly about people taking the work as a musical version of Don Quixote.

The original 1965 Broadway production ran for 2,328 performances and won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. It has been revived four times on Broadway, becoming one of the most enduring works of musical theatre.

"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 Croatian, Dutch, French (translation by Jacques Brel), German, Hebrew, Irish, Estonian, Japanese, Korean, Bengali, Gujarati, Uzbek, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swahili, Swedish, Finnish, Chinese, Ukrainian, Turkish, and nine distinct dialects of the Spanish language.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Man of La Mancha by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.