According to Dale Wasserman, while he was in Madrid in 1959, to his surprise, he read in the paper that he was there to research a dramatization of the Cervantes novel Don Quixote. While he knew of it, he had not yet read the whole book. Curious, he bought it and, after finishing, thought it too massive to condense successfully. Instead he decided to write his work, not about the book directly, but about Cervantes and his dramatic life. He felt Don Quixote was an alter-ego for Cervantes himself.

Almost everything in his life was a failure, but he wrote one of the most important books in the history of literature. ... If there was a guiding precept for the whole endeavor it lay in a quotation I found long ago in Unamano: 'Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible'. ... The play is my way of paying tribute to the tough and tender spirit of Miguel de Cervantes. ... 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 watching.

He decided to depict Cervantes as a strolling player-playwright (autor) and submitted a proposal to the television producer David Susskind who accepted it and sent a check as a retainer. The draft was accepted and a production date (1959) chosen. The first version was a ninety minute play for television and included some material from Exemplary Tales. The sponsor, the DuPont Corporation, disliked the title Man of La Mancha because they thought people would not known what La Mancha meant. It was changed to I, Don Quixote. The cast included Lee J. Cobb, Eli Wallach and Colleen Dewhurst. While the play won awards, it did not satisfy the author. Although he revised it for Broadway, the revised version was never produced. Then Albert Marre, later the director, contacted him and said the play must become a musical. Originally, the famous poet W. H. Auden was chosen as the lyricist, but his work was discarded and the task given to Joe Darion. Mitch Leigh was chosen as the composer.

At first, producers thought it too different and too intellectual, and the hero died on stage. However, Wasserman, Leigh, Darion and Marre persisted, driven by their own Quixotic dream. It opened at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut in 1964, then moved to Greenwich Village. The response of the audience was amazing; word of mouth drew the crowds, and Man of La Mancha finally opened on Broadway on November 22, 1965. The production itself went against all the contemporary trends: Theater of the Absurd, Black Comedy etc., yet it won multiple Tony Awards.

Man of La Mancha played on Broadway for five years, one of longest runs of all time (2,328 performances). Soon it appeared all over world in about forty languages. It was even sung by famous opera stars such as Plácido Domingo, José van Dam and Julia Migenes.

In 1972 Man of La Mancha was adapted as a film starring Peter O'Toole and Sofia Loren. All of the actors except for O'Toole did their own singing. As well as studio scenes such as those in the prison, the film had the advantage of location scenes to show episodes such as the fight with the windmills and that with the Knight of the Mirrors. It also added an opening scene showing Cervantes as a strolling player. Two songs were omitted, and scenes were switched around. Thus, while viewing the film is a good introduction to the staged play, there are some differences.

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Revised September 2007
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