As you may have noticed, I allude a lot to musicals. I was exposed to an abundance of musicals from a young age, with both my mother and grandfather being huge fans. I grew up being intimately familiar with the classics of the genre, most notably the musicals of Rogers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Lowe, which is where my grandfather’s and mother’s interests mostly coincided. As I became a teenager, my favorite era of musicals became the 80s, mostly Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, the latter being one of my favorite things of all time. I continue to maintain an interest in newer musicals too, but I think my heart truly lies in the material from my childhood, since it has that connection to my sadly now deceased grandfather. He was also a big influence on my taking up writing, as he was a man keenly interested in art and culture, and incredibly talented in that regard.
My favorite musical of the classic era is My Fair Lady, hands down, which is a show I’ll write about another time since I fear people no longer appreciate nor understand it. I went to a production a few years back which ended with Eliza leaving Higgins in the final scene, which is the only time I’ve ever loudly booed a production that wasn’t a pantomime. But honestly, way to miss the point of the show! But for this week’s exploration, I’d like to focus on a lesser known musical of the 60s, and another of my favorites, Man of La Mancha.
This is a musical loosely based on Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The show is a play within a play – a fictionalized Cervantes is arrested for treason against the Inquisition and thrown into a prison. The prisoners put him on trial in order to be found guilty so they can take all his possessions, including the draft of his manuscript Don Quixote. For his defense, Cervantes dramatizes the story of Alonso Quijana, an old country squire who, because of reading too many books, goes mad and takes on the role of Don Quixote, a knight errant determined to right the wrongs of the world.
The show was revived in London a few years back with Kelsey Grammer in the title role, and I was so angry I’d left the UK then because I would have killed to see it. I think the reviews were pretty mixed, and the ones I read were critical of the show rather than anything specifically about the production. The reviewers didn’t like the framing of the story as a play within a play, or the “bastardization” of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. These are valid criticisms to have of the show, but not particularly useful when reviewing a specific production – it would be silly of me to review Wicked, for instance, and then complain how the source material isn’t faithful to the The Wizard of Oz. I don’t like Wicked because I think it’s bad Fanfiction, among other reasons, but me pointing that out wouldn’t say much about the particular production I attended, and would be more an opportunity to go on a rant about a pet peeve of mine, rather than imparting useful information to an audience.
But mixed and critical reviews are nothing new for Man of La Mancha – the film production from 1972, starring Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren, was also not well received critically at the time. I honestly can’t understand why though. I think the film is an absolute masterpiece, with both of the main actors giving the performances of their lives, despite O’Toole’s singing being dubbed. I’ve always been in favor of dubbing actors who can’t sing – if you’re going to cast for star power, that’s fine, but then dub the stars, rather than forcing the audience to suffer through the amateurish and painful attempts at singing, so you don’t end up with a Gerard Butler or Russell Crowe situation which can literally make ears bleed.
I rewatched the Man of La Mancha movie recently, and my opinion of it hasn’t changed – if anything, my love for it has become deeper. Not just for the songs, but for the script, which is incredibly clever and moving. One of my favorite movie scenes of all times is linked below, because it’s such a powerful performance and a powerful piece of writing:
I think Man of La Mancha fits in neatly with the previous entry about the differences between fiction and reality. It’s the story of a man who can’t tell the difference between the two, but it’s a more hopeful ending than Norma Desmond’s. This is because the result of Don Quixote’s madness is an inspiration to others – he is a man of idealism, rather than selfish self-preservation. Indeed, his whole attitude is that it doesn’t matter whether he lives or dies, only that he follows his ideals. This is exemplified in one of my favorite songs of all time, “The Impossible Dream,” because it perfectly describes the human condition. We always strive for things that, by the nature of reality, must be imperfect. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for them. We know we can’t reach these ideals, but we are compelled to try to live up to them all the same.
That’s why I love the framing of the play, particularly in the movie version – Cervantes is arrested for mocking the Inquisition, and is sent to an oubliette to await his trial along with a group of other villains and murderers. One of them, known only as “The Duke,” is the cynical foil to Cervantes. When Cervantes asks why he’s in prison, the Duke replies:
“I invent false information about a country and sell it to others stupid enough to believe it.”
Cervantes: “Seems a sound proposition. What brought you here?
Duke: “A lapse of judgment. I told the truth.”
As well as being amusing, this exchange tells us something about the character of the Duke – telling the truth has landed him in prison, and he realizes he would probably have been better off if he kept lying. Nevertheless, he tells Cervantes that people must come to terms with life as it is, that the lies of fiction are harmful, and it is his character in Cervantes’s story that is determined to cure Quixote’s madness. His character is a doctor, a learned and educated man, who believes only in the reality provable by science, and the only truth to be scientific truth. His vast intellect is flattered by the thought that he can cure Quixote, but in doing so, he devises a scheme to play along with his madness – he believes he can cure his delusions if he can only outthink them, and that with the evidence of facts and logic, Quixote can no longer deny reality. His ally in this scheme, the town priest, sympathizes more with Quixote’s state of mind, attesting, “One might say Jesus was mad…or Saint Francis.” This implies that Quixote, despite his appearance of madness, follows some higher truth, as the religious prophets before him did.
This is the difference between the “reality” the Duke favors, and the “truth,” that Cervantes writes in his manuscript, a truth worth facing the wrath of the Inquisition for. That Quixote, despite his obvious break with material reality, nevertheless possesses some higher truth about the nature of reality and mankind. Similarly, Quixote’s interaction with Aldonza, the servant girl and prostitute, whom he calls his virtuous lady Dulcinea, is objectively untrue. Aldonza is not a high born lady nor a chaste maiden, but he sees her as such, much to her annoyance. Nevertheless, through her interaction with him, and seeing herself through his eyes as a woman with inherent worth and value, she begins to think of herself as a human being worthy of respect. She tells him: “You have shown me the sky, but what good is the sky / To a creature who'll never do better than crawl?” and she refers to herself and everyone else in similar language throughout the play – “maggots” who crawl on a “dung heap.” She hates herself and everyone else in her objectively terrible life. But through Quixote’s idealism, she begins to see herself as a human being, a divine creature, as he sees her, and that is what gives the play its hopeful message. The show ends with Quixote’s death, but he dies in his belief of himself as a knight of valor, and Aldonza his lady. She carries that belief with her to the end of the story.
So the setting of the play, in the depths of a prison in the bowels of the earth, with the worst kinds of humanity, is incredibly important, because it’s a metaphor. Cervantes is placed in hell, awaiting the torments of hell practiced so masterfully by the Inquisition. But among the lowest of the low, his story of a mad knight who sees the world in hope and goodness, who vows to fight for that goodness no matter the cost, gives them hope and courage. Don Quixote doesn’t live under the delusion that the world is a perfect place – he knows it’s an imperfect place beset by monsters and evil. He just makes it his role to fight against that evil, even though he knows he can never defeat it. I believe this is the role we all have to play in life – to see the world in all its pain and darkness, and fight against it in hope and light, even though we know individually we can never win. But there is no alternative other than surrendering to the darkness, and as Cervantes says in the play, “I have never had the courage to believe in nothing.”
The final scene of the musical and of the movie is the Inquisition coming for Cervantes (and I’ve linked it below, because it’s such a powerful scene, particularly O’Toole’s line, “I have no intention of burning.”) He has his manuscript under his arm, and begins to climb the stairs. The woman who plays Aldonza begins to sing “The Impossible Dream,” and is joined by the other prisoners, a final chorus of the worst of humanity raised and united in song, as Cervantes faces his fate. It always reminds me of the Oscar Wilde quote: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” That is the power of stories (and musicals!) – they can help us face the direst circumstances, including “life as it is.”