ABOUT THE AUTHORS
DALE WASSERMAN has been in theatre since age nineteen, posting successes as director, producer, and lighting designer before turning to writing. To date he has authored more than sixty works in the fields of television, stage, and movies, garnering more than forty awards. Among his prize-winning TV plays are The Power and the Glory, Eichmann: Engineer of Death, Stranger, and I, Don Quixote, which was to become Man of La Mancha. His movies include The Vikings, Cleopatra, Mister Buddwing, and A Walk with Love and Death. He is the dramatist of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, making him one of America’s most-produced playwrights worldwide.
JOE DARION is the author of the operas Archy and Mehitabel, Galileo, and And David Wept. In addition to Man of La Mancha, he has written the lyrics for the Broadway musicals Illya Darling and Shinbone Alley. In addition to the Tony, he has received the Drama Critics Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Gabriel Award, the Ohio State Award, and the International Broadcasting Award.
MITCH LEIGH studied with Paul Hindemith at the Yale School of Music and has written both jazz and opera. Man of La Mancha was his first Broadway musical. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Contemporary Classics Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame for “The Impossible Dream,” and he is the first composer to receive the Yale Arts Award for Outstanding Achievement in Musical Composition.
Copyright © 1966 by Dale Wasserman
Copyright © 1965 by Andrew Scott, Inc., Helena Music Corp.,
& Sam Fox Publishing Company, Inc. By permission of Sam Fox
Publishing Company, Inc., Sole Agent.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade
Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that MAN OF LA MANCHA, being fully protected under Copyright Laws of the United States, the British Empire, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is laid on the question of readings, permission for which must be secured in writing from the author, c/o Tams-Witmark Music Library, Inc., 560 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10022, without whose permission in writing no amateur performance of it may be made.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78667-8
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
A Note on Miguel De Cervantes
Preface
Musical Numbers
Man of La Mancha
A NOTE ON
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Like his contemporary, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra lived a life only sparsely documented, many years of which are veiled in shadow. These things are known: he was born in 1547 to a proud but impoverished hidalgo family; he was a soldier, suffered serious wounds at the battle of Lepanto, was taken captive and spent five years as a slave in Africa. Above all he loved the theatre; in twenty years he wrote some forty plays, none of which were successful. In 1597 he was excommunicated for “offenses against His Majesty’s Most Catholic Church,” narrowly escaping more drastic punishment. He served at least three, and possibly five terms in prison on various charges. Aging, infirm, an utter failure, he undertook the writing of Don Quixote to make money. Volume I, published in 1605 when Cervantes was 58, brought him fame but little profit. Volume II, appearing ten years later, insured his immortality as author of the world’s greatest novel, but he was already broken in body if not in spirit. He died in 1616, within ten days of the death of Shakespeare. His burial place is unknown.
Preface
MAN OF LA MANCHA was born fortuitously and underwent several metamorphoses before it was exposed to a New York audience. It had its inception in Madrid in 1959 when I read in a newspaper that my purpose in Spain was research for a dramatization of Don Quixote. The item was laughing-matter, for like the great majority of people who know Don Quixote, I had never read it. Madrid seemed a place appropriate to repair of that omission, however, so I waded in, emerging from Volume Two with the conviction that this monument to human wit and folly could not, and should not, be dramatized.
What had snared my interest was not the book but its author. For one learns that the life of Miguel de Cervantes was a catalogue of catastrophe. What sort of man was this—soldier, playwright, actor, tax-collector and frequently jailbird—who could suffer unceasing failure and yet in his declining years produce the staggering testament which is Don Quixote? To catch him at the nadir of his career, to persuade him toward self-revelation which might imply something of significance concerning the human spirit—there, perhaps, was a play worth writing.
I wrote it first for television in a ninety-minute version. It was produced with considerable éclat and garnered a number of awards but left me profoundly dissatisfied, for the strictures of television and its assertive naturalism had defeated both my design and intentions. I thereupon rewrote it for the Broadway stage and it was promptly optioned. But I felt a sense of relief when the option period ran out without production, for I knew that while it might conceivably have been successful I still should have deemed it a failure. The play had not yet achieved the form which the material demanded; a form disciplined yet free, simple-seeming yet intricate, and above all bold enough to accomplish that ephemeral objective which is called “total theater.” My brooding on the matter had brought me to the edge of an inescapable conclusion when Albert Marre (whom I had never met) telephoned to say, “Your play is superb, but it must become some sort of a musical.”
Precisely.
The adventure began. I use the word advisedly, for the writing of Man of La Mancha was an adventure, in form, technique, and in philosophy. My collaborators, Joe Darion, Mitch Leigh, and Albert Marre made enormous contributions as we groped our way toward a kind of theater that was, at least within the boundaries of our experience, without precedent.
It would be heartening to say that the finished play immediately ensnared the interest of producers and backers. It didn’t. They regarded it as too radical, too “special” and, most crushing of all, too intellectual. Man of La Mancha floundered rather than marched toward production, sustained only by the tenacity of those among us who shared the Quixotic dream.
But there came a night when lights glowed on Howard Bay’s island-stage, and the audience responded to the performance with fervor that stunned even the most sanguine of us. It was a phenomenon we were to grow familiar with at each performance: a sort of electricity crackling randomly among the audience for a time, then polarizing toward a massive discharge of emotion. Or as Mr. Marre succinctly put it, “They’re not just watching a play, they’re having a religious experience.”
To me the most interesting aspect of the success of Man of La Mancha is the fact that it plows squarely upstream against the prevailing current of philosophy in the theater. That current is best identified by its catch-labels—Theater of the Absurd, Black Comedy, the Theater of Cruelty—which is to say the theater of alienation, of moral anarchy and despair. To the practitioners of those philosoph
ies Man of La Mancha must seem hopelessly naïve in its espousal of illusion as man’s strongest spiritual need, the most meaningful function of his imagination. But I’ve no unhappiness about that. “Facts are the enemy of truth,” says Cervantes-Don Quixote. And that is precisely what I felt and meant.
If there was a guiding precept for the whole endeavor it lay in a quotation I found long ago in Unamuno: “Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.” But on the simplest level, and philosophies aside, the play is my way of paying tribute to the tough and tender spirit of Miguel de Cervantes.
Dale Wasserman
MUSICAL NUMBERS
“Man of La Mancha”
(“I, Don Quixote”)
DON QUIXOTE, SANCHO AND HORSES
“It’s All the Same”
ALDONZA AND MULETEERS
“Dulcinea”
DON QUIXOTE
“I’m Only Thinking of Him”
THE PADRE, ANTONIA, HOUSEKEEPER, AND DR. CARRASCO
“I Really Like Him”
SANCHO
“Little Bird, Little Bird”
ANSELMO AND MULETEERS
“Barber’s Song”
THE BARBER
“Golden Helmet of Mambrino”
DON QUIXOTE, SANCHO, BARBER AND MULETEERS
“To Each His Dulcinea”
THE PADRE
“The Quest” (“The Impossible Dream”)
DON QUIXOTE
“The Combat”
DON QUIXOTE, ALDONZA, SANCHO AND MULETEERS
“The Dubbing”
INNKEEPER, ALDONZA, SANCHO
“The Abduction”
ALDONZA AND MULETEERS
“Moorish Dance”
ENSEMBLE
“Aldonza”
ALDONZA
“The Knight of the Mirrors”
ENSEMBLE
“A Little Gossip”
SANCHO
“Dulcinea” (reprise)
ALDONZA
“The Quest” (reprise)
ALDONZA AND DON QUIXOTE
“Man of La Mancha” (reprise)
DON QUIXOTE, ALDONZA AND SANCHO
“The Psalm”
THE PADRE
“The Quest” (reprise)
COMPANY
MAN OF LA MANCHA
Opened on December 5, 2002, at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City, with the following cast:
(IN ORDER OF SPEAKING)
CERVANTES/DON QUIXOTE Brian Stokes Mitchell
CAPTAIN OF THE INQUISITION Frederick B. Owens
SANCHO Ernie Sabella
GOVERNOR/INNKEEPER Don Mayo
DUKE/CARRASCO Stephen Bogardus
ALDONZA Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
QUITO Andy Blankenbuehler
TENORIO Timothy J. Alex
JUAN Thom Sesma
PACO Dennis Stowe
ANSELMO Bradley Dean
PEDRO Gregory Mitchell
JOSE Wilson Mendieta
MARIA Michelle Rios
FERMINA Lorin Latarro
ANTONIA Natascia Diaz
PADRE Mark Jacoby
HOUSEKEEPER Olga Merediz
BARBER Jamie Torcellini
GUARD John Herrera
GUARD Jimmy Smagula
GYPSY DANCER Lorin Latarro
GYPSY DANCER Andy Blankenbuehler
PRISONER Allyson Tucker
ONSTAGE GUITARIST Robin Polseno
Written by Dale Wasserman
Music by Mitch Leigh
Lyrics by Joe Darion
Directed by Jonathan Kent
Choreography by Luis Perez
Scenic and Costume Design by Paul Brown
Lighting Design by Paul Gallo
Sound Design by Tony Meola
Music Director: Robert Billig
Original Dance Music by Neil Warner
Original Orchestrations by Music Makers, Inc.
Music Coordinator: Michael Keller
New Dance Music by David Krane
New Dance Orchestrations by Brian Besterman
Casting by Bernard Telsey Casting
Associate Director: Peter Lawrence
Production Stage Manager: Mahlon Kruse
MAN OF LA MANCHA
Locale: Spain at the end of the sixteenth century. A prison in the city of Seville and various places in the imagination of MIGUEL DE CERVANTES.
Setting: The common room of a stone prison vault whose furthest reaches are lost in shadow. It has niches and crannies where the prisoners make their nests. It is below ground, reached by a stairway which may be raised and lowered, drawbridge-style, and is lighted by scant cold rays sifting through a grille overhead. A trap in the floor may be raised to permit access to a level still lower. Stage right there is a fire covered by a grille, and stage left an open well. Other scenic elements are placed and removed by the prisoners as indicated.
The prison vault is actually a single basic setting within whose architecture the DON QUIXOTE scenes devised by CERVANTES play. In nature it is an abstract platform whose elements are fluid and adaptable. The primary effect is that of improvisation; it must seem as though all scenic, prop and costume items are adapted from materials already on stage, augmented by effects from CERVANTES’ theatrical trunk.
Only in the inner play—as devised by CERVANTES—is there musical style and form. The prison scenes framing the inner play are not “musicalized” in the sense that there is no singing or dancing in these except as may be motivated realistically. The play is performed without intermission.
There is an overture, then the orchestra is lost to sight as lights fade in on the common room of a prison vault. Some of the PRISONERS lie huddled in the shadows. One strums a guitar; another dances a jaded, sensual seguiria gitana to its rhythm.
Sound and motion cease as the door at the head of the stairway opens and light streams down into the vault. The stairs are lowered and a little procession descends: first a uniformed CAPTAIN OF THE INQUISITION; then a SOLDIER or two assisting a chubby MANSERVANT with a sizable but shabby straw trunk; then CERVANTES himself.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES is tall and thin, a man of gentle courtliness leavened by humor. He is in his late forties but his dominant qualities are childlike—ingenuousness, a grave and endless curiosity about human behavior, candor which is very nearly self-destructive. He has, too, the child’s delight in play-acting, but since he is in actuality a trained actor, when called upon to perform he translates this delight into stylish verve and gusto. On his entrance he is carrying a wrapped oblong package under one arm. It is heavy.
CERVANTES’ MANSERVANT is as old or older than his master, short, rotund, suspicious and pragmatic. The relationship between the two is obviously of long standing; indeed, they are rather like husband and wife who bicker yet are deeply devoted.
Now the SOLDIERS go back up the stairs. CERVANTES peers about, uncertainly.
CAPTAIN (Watching CERVANTES; sardonically) Anything wrong? The accommodations?
CERVANTES No, no, they appear quite … interesting.
CAPTAIN The cells are below. This is the common room, for those who wait.
CERVANTES How long do they wait?
CAPTAIN Some an hour … some a lifetime …
CERVANTES Do they all await the Inquisition?
CAPTAIN Ah, no, these are merely thieves and murderers. (Starting to leave) If you need anything, just shout. (An afterthought) If you’re able.
(He goes and the stairway is withdrawn)
MANSERVANT (Apprehensively) What did he mean by that?
CERVANTES Calm yourself. There is a remedy for everything but death.
MANSERVANT That could be the very one we need!
(The PRISONERS are moving, circling, approaching like animals who scent prey)
CERVANTES (With great courtliness) Good morning, gentlemen … ladies. I regret being thrust upon you in this manner, and hope you will not find my company objectionable. In any case I shall not be am
ong you very long. The Inquisition—
(With a yell, the PRISONERS attack. CERVANTES and the MANSERVANT are seized, tripped up, pinned to the floor. The PRISONERS are busily rifling their pockets as THE GOVERNOR, a big man of obvious authority, awakens from sleep)
THE GOVERNOR (In a roar) Enough! Noise, trouble, fights … kill each other if you must but for God’s sake, do it quietly! (To CERVANTES) Who are you? Eh? Speak up!
CERVANTES (Gasping as his throat is freed) Cervantes. Don Miguel de Cervantes.
THE GOVERNOR (With mock respect) A gentleman!
CERVANTES (Painfully getting to his feet) It has never saved me from going to bed hungry.
THE GOVERNOR (Indicating the MANSERVANT) And that?
CERVANTES My servant. May I have the honor—?
THE GOVERNOR They call me The Governor. What’s your game?
CERVANTES My game …?
THE GOVERNOR (Impatiently) Your specialty, man. Cut-purse? Highwayman?
CERVANTES Oh, nothing so interesting! I am a poet.
THE DUKE (A prisoner of draggle-tail elegance) They’re putting men in prison for that?
CERVANTES No, no, not for that.
THE DUKE (Sardonically) Too bad!
THE GOVERNOR (Clapping his hands) Well, let’s get on with the trial!
CERVANTES (As he is seized by two of the more villainous-looking PRISONERS) Excuse me, sir. What trial?
THE GOVERNOR Yours, of course.
CERVANTES But what have I done?
THE GOVERNOR We’ll find something.
CERVANTES You don’t seem to understand. I’ll only be here a few—
THE GOVERNOR (Patient but firm) My dear sir, no one enters or leaves this prison without being tried by his fellow prisoners.
CERVANTES And if I’m found guilty?
THE GOVERNOR Oh, you will be.
CERVANTES What sort of a sentence …?
THE GOVERNOR We generally fine a prisoner all his possessions.
CERVANTES (Hard-hit) All of them …
THE GOVERNOR Well, it’s not practical to take more.
Man of La Mancha Page 1
