Miguel de
Cervantes’ Don Quixote is one of
those books which, like its titular character, has assumed a life much larger
than anything its author could have dreamed of upon writing. It’s a sprawling
beast of a tome, written in two parts, and published ten years apart in the
early seventeenth century, and is very much about stories, telling stories,
living stories, and ultimately, becoming a story ourselves. It’s a mercurial
book, too, constantly shifting and changing, dropping in and out of layers of
metatextual conceit like Russian dolls or Chinese puzzle boxes; just when you
think you’ve got a handle on the narrative, it twists, disappears, and journeys
on to another adventure. In brief, it is the story of a man who believes he is
a knight errant by the name of Don Quixote, and along with his squire Sancho
Panza, journeys forth to right wrongs, and restore justice and order wherever
he goes. In one sense a satirical riposte to the proliferation of chivalric
stories at the time, it quickly becomes much more than just that, and becomes a
rhapsody upon life in all its complexities and contradictions. Ever since
reading the book two and a half years ago, I’ve had the impossible dream of wanting
to see it come alive, to watch the pasteboard knight gallivant across the Spanish
mountains with as much presence and life and aliveness as he has in the book.
Enter, then, Squabbalogic and their production of
Man of La Mancha.
Written by Dale Wasserman (originally as a one-act teleplay), with music by Mitch
Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion, and premiered in 1965, it is not so much a musical
of Don Quixote or a musical of the
life of its author Cervantes (though it certainly draws heavily on elements
from both), but rather a musical based on
the world of Don Quixote. Taking a
page from Cervantes’ own book and methods, the musical opens in a Spanish prison
some time in the late sixteenth century, with Cervantes and his manservant charged with foreclosing on a
monastery unable to pay debts. Accosted by the inmates, Cervantes pleads guilty
to the charges laid against him, and seeks the opportunity to offer his defense
in the only way he knows how: a story – a play – acted out by the inmates
themselves. The story of the man of La Mancha .
It’s a glorious
conceit, exploited with relish by director Jay James-Moody and designers Simon
Greer (set), Benjamin Brockman (lighting) and Brendan Hay (costumes). Like the simplest
acts of theatre, everything is cobbled together from what the inmates can find
in the prison, but instead of taking away from this production, it adds grit
and a raw edge which suits Cervantes’ story and this telling of it like a glove;
in many respects, it is a subtly suitable evocation of Quixote’s own way of
seeing things that aren’t really there. Taking a leaf out of the work of director
John Doyle, musical director and arranger Paul Geddes whittles Leigh’s rich
orchestrations down to a sparse orchestra played by the performers. While we
understandably lose some of the full-bloodedness of the sound of Spain’s Golden
Age, these new arrangements are still recognisable, and allow the voices to
come to the fore. And there’s a beautiful rawness here too, both to the sound
and the look of Squabbalogic’s production, which suits the story perfectly, and
gives it an edge over productions with more resources at their disposal.
The production, appropriately
enough for its title, centres around the character(s?) of Cervantes and Don Quixote;
played here by Tony Sheldon, there is a loose-limbed grace to his performance, a
kind of youthful vigour and panache which is perfectly suited to the pasteboard
knight and his maverick creator. While there is the temptation to push Quixote
to the cartoonish extreme of the deluded knight, James-Moody and Sheldon refrain,
and what we get instead is a poignant and memorable performance, shot through with
a harrowing sense of one’s limitations as a human, and yet sparkles with a capricious
wit and delight at our infinite capacity for dreaming and story. His
performance of the show’s standout song ‘The Impossible Dream’ is all the more
poignant and memorable for this downplaying, and he reclaims it from the real
of stand-alone showstopper and restores it to its place as an integral part of
the story. There’s a beautiful dignity too, to his death and exit – out of the prison
and story – that hints at the continuing nature of his story, both that of
Cervantes and Quixote, as both are barely able to be contained within a stage-play-cum-musical,
let alone in a book. Marika Aubrey’s Aldonza/Dulcinea, Quixote’s knightly
love-interest, is powerfully-voiced, and has a defiant poise which suits her
character’s firecracker role; her coaxing of a fading Quixote at the end is
beautiful (even if the script’s dialogue is slightly clunky), and there is a
powerful echo of a much larger juggernaut of a show as she leads the ensemble
in a final chorus of ‘The Impossible Dream’ at the end, the belief that no
matter who we are, stories can contain the seeds to a better life.
The ensemble James-Moody
has assembled is rough and raucous in appearance, but in action there is a
fiery spirit to their performances and singing which suits the staging, venue
and story well. Ross Chisari’s Sancho Panza is a knock-about foil to Sheldon’s
knight, and has a number of memorable moments; Stephen Anderson and Shondelle
Pratt’s horse and donkey (respectively) are a genius stroke of stagecraft; Glenn
Hill and Joanna Weinberg bring a human sense of authority and order to their
respective roles as the Padre and Duke, while Laurence Coy brings a welcome sense
of compassion to his roles as the Governor and innkeeper.
It’s a style of
playing which seems to come from the spirit of play-fullness within the story
itself, from the very fabric of Cervantes’ book, from the soil of Spain
Vladimir Nabokov,
in his Lectures
on Don Quixote, argues that “[both] parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopaedia of cruelty… it is one of
the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned [yet] its cruelty is artistic.”
And I think there’s something magical in seeing Man of La Mancha performed, that the comedy of the get-up-again
knight and his delusions, and the tragedy of a man who cannot see the world for
what it really is, can sit side by side each other in relative harmony, neither
cancelling the other out, but enriching and complementing the other to form a
near-sphere, a rounded story. Of course, the plot and structure of Wasserman’s
book is repetitive, though that is because it is largely faithful to Cervantes’
book, where repetition only gives the story more resonance as you shift between
layers of meta-stories. While Man of La
Mancha doesn’t quite have the same metatextual complexity as Cervantes (it
is but two hours’ traffic on a stage, after all), there is still enough clever shifting
from layer to layer, sometimes jumping layers in the process, to keep the story
bubbling along, keep the knight on his endless quest.
While Man of La Mancha might not be the most
perfectly formed musical, there is enough magic and charm and humanity in it to
satisfy the average theatre-goer, and enough darkness, whimsy and ingenuity in
Jay James-Moody’s production to satisfy even Cervantes himself. When Quixote –
or rather, Alonso Quixano – is revealed to be either the maddest sane man or
the sanest madman, there is a neat kind of symmetry to the story, a kind of
full-circle realisation that no matter how much we believe things to be real or
not, we are all capable of dreaming an impossible dream, no matter how far or
hopeless it is; we are all the white knight in our own way, tilting at
windmills and chasing an unreachable star
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