Impossible Musical The The Man Of La Mancha" Story" Book

Man of La Mancha is arguably the most popular musical drama of all time most recently on Broadway starring Brian Stokes Mitchell. Dale Wasserman however had more trouble getting it on to a Broadway stage than Don Quixote ever had with those windmills. For centuries writers all over the world had tried to stage Cervantes' comic masterpiece and all had failed. On a sabbatical to Spain in the late Fifties screenwriter-stage director Dale Wasserman had the insight to change that--Don Quixote the novel was too rambling to be dramatized but the almost equally incredible story of the novel's creator wasn't. Wasserman wrote first a TV drama of Man of La Mancha (Cervantes is the Man not Quixote by the way) that David Susskind got produced as "I Don Quixote." What happened next and for the next several decades to this remarkable drama is an incredible drama in its own right. Many writers tried to get Wasserman to contribute to an "official" account of the making of Man of La Mancha but Wasserman knew he was the only writer who both knew all the facts all the facets and would eventually get around to writing the story as it should be written as both a "making of" and a "commentary on the state of" story. From the Costa Del Sol to Hollywood Broadway and beyond with a host of spectacular people including A va Gardner Geraldine Page (whom Dale Wasserman discovered for La Mancha) and John Houston.  In addition to creating Man of La Mancha playwright Dale Wasserman has written the play of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest both Tony winners. He has authored some fifteen plays and musicals for the stage forty plays or movies for television and a dozen feature films among them The Vikings.