I really wanted to like this. I love Kelsey Grammer’s film and television work, and have always wanted to see him on stage. But not in a production as horrible as this. This evening at the London Coliseum, watching “Man Of La Mancha” as co-produced by Michael Linnit and Michael Grade with English National Opera, I was ready to leave by the interval, and only just managed to stay to the end. The only highlight was seeing Grammer’s genuine joy at the applause from his fans during the curtain call. I’m glad he enjoyed himself: I certainly didn’t.
Written in the 1960s, “Man Of La Mancha” started off as an Off-Broadway musical that reimagined the “Don Quixote” story. It became a big success, leading to Broadway and West End productions and a feature film. Mitch Leigh’s score is warm, charming in places, has some rather amusing lyrics from Joe Darion, is a little hokey, and filled with a lot of cod Spanish guitar sounds, including a big flamenco dance routine with some sensually writhing gypsies. A bit package holiday Spain, but listenable enough; and coupled with a gently poignant story about the nature of truth and illusion drawn from Cervantes’ famous novel – with a few sharp underlays about how it can lead to people getting hurt - it potentially could have been a very effective production, and a good star vehicle for Grammer who solidly played both Cervantes and Don Quixote with the air of a good gentleman.
So why director Lonny Price was put onto it, I do not know. His approach was to fight against the music, try to be as cold and violent and coolly urban as possible in the name of “updating”, and basically miss the point completely of what the inherent magic of the piece is. So far, so much director’s arrogance. But the handling of the scenes of the heroine Aldonza (passionately played by Danielle de Niese) were so excessively gratuitous and misogynistically handled, the Don Quixote story was absolutely upstaged into theatrical irrelevance, and finally at a part where Aldonza had just been headbutted unconscious so she could be gang-raped by a tavernful of yobs, a woman in the audience called out “I protest!” I don’t blame her.
Dale Wasserman’s script imagines that in sixteenth century Spain, failed actor-writer Cervantes and his manservant (who doubled as Sancho – played with liveliness by Peter Polycarpou) are tossed into prison by the Spanish Inquisition to await their fate. The prisoners already there seize on the box of costumes and the manuscript that have come down into the dungeon with the pair, and “the Governor” of the prisoners (played with cool detail by Nicholas Lyndhurst, who also doubled as an affably drunken Innkeeper) wants to burn the manuscript. He relents, by holding a mock trial, and Cervantes presents his case by getting the prisoners to don the costumes and act out the story of “Don Quixote” that he is writing. The Spanish Inquisition also operated in “truth” and “illusion”, in a very bent way, and this is a dark metaphor that director Price overlooked.
In this production, though the “Don Quixote” costumes mercifully still stayed period Spanish, the framing device became a futuristic dystopia, with soldiers in dark glasses, and prisoners in modern hoodies. I felt Price’s real reasoning (other than his desire to be Tarantino) was to awkwardly justify having a multi-racial cast. It’s 2019. Audiences can cope with a multi-racial cast in period dress. It also contributed nothing to the stakes of the story, which the real Inquisition does. Even with the vague dystopia as a frame, the production still could have possibly have worked, if from Aldonza’s first entrance onwards the story didn’t become overwhelmingly the Aldonza Revenge Porn Tale. Poor Kelsey Grammar, amiably tilting his floppy staff at a ceiling fan/windmill, didn’t stand a chance.
Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 3/5/19
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