Cast

Synopsis

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Directors Notes

Man of La Mancha is a telling of the Don Quixote story by Miguel de Cervantes who has been imprisoned by the Inquisition. His fellow prisoners help him to play out the story to amuse themselves as they wait, ‘some an hour, some a lifetime’ for their respective trials. Their imagination and ingenuity furnish the settings as Cervantes’ story moves far beyond the confines of the prison.

In 1966 one of my favourite amateur actors exhorted me to see the London production; I missed it, and last year heard friends who had seen the Broadway production enthuse about the show. They spoke of a giant staircase from the pit to the flies, of a huge raked platform with acting levels above and below. They expatiated on the acting, the music, the dancing, the lighting and then one of them murmured reflectively, ‘You know, you could do it at BLT’.

Now I have a built in resistance to musical versions of literary classics; too seldom do either the music or the version justify the magnificent foundation on which they are reared. But this undertaking was so immediately and so obviously impossible that I was fascinated and asked to see a copy. One third of the way through I was hooked, so eventually were others and hence this production.

One other small point. We play the performance without an interval for two reasons; first that, that is the way it was originally done, and second, that I have found it impossible to break the thread anywhere without damaging what comes after.