The Man From La Mancha -- Episode 3 (part 3 of 3). The Broadway musical.

In the early 1970s and a writer for plays, movies, and television is holed up in Palm Springs at one of the most unusual restaurants in operation.  There was a sole proprietor, the menu has one dish, and there is no advertising or tourists because there are only 4 tables.  The topic of conversation is whether to turn a stage play into a musical, and the server, cook, owner, and sole employee is also a psychic.  

The cook is consulted about the project and predicts: “It will be extremely successful,” she says, “In fact, it will overwhelm your life.”

 Two years later, in 1972 the production would open as a musical.

The playwright was Dale Wasserman, the project was converting The Man From La Mancha into a musical, and it would go on to play over 2,000 shows

There was something mystical afoot: “Facts cannot explain the success of the Man from La Mancha.  Something more was at work…”

Part 1 looked at the significance of the book Don Quixote.  Part 2 looked at the life of Miguel de Cervantes.  This episode, part 3, looks at how the book was converted into a musical that went on to be one of the most successful musical  theater productions ever.  And the crazy coincidences that were necessary to bring it about...

Transcript

Early 1970s, and a writer is holed up in Palm Springs at, one of the most unusual restaurants in operation. The operation has the sole proprietor. The menu has one dish. There's no advertising or tourists because there are only four tables. The topic of conversation is whether to turn a stage play into a musical. And the person who is both the server, the cook, the owner and the sole employee is also a, psychic. It says, quote, it will be extremely successful. In fact, it will overwhelm your life. Two years later, in 1972, the production would open as a musical. Playwright was Dale Wasserman. The project was converting Don Quixote into the man from La Mancha and making it a musical. And it would go on to play to over 2000 shows and get translated into at least 30 different languages. According to Wasserman, quote, figures affirm that it is maybe the most popular play of the century. It may be eligible to become the most popular musical of all time. Something mystical was afoot. Wassermoud would also write this quote. Facts cannot explain the success of the man from La Mancha. Something more was at work. I'm John Brushke, and you are listening to Theater History and Mysteries, where I take musical theater production and go into a deep dive on the questions it raises and the answers it provides. I, ah, hope this approach will give a deeper understanding about the lessons the show has for theater and for life. And I will never miss an opportunity to pursue any mystery, bizarre coincidence, m improbable event, or supernatural suggestion along the way. Because in the words of Dirk Gently, it is all connected. Let's do a deep dive in a musical theater together. This is the third installment of the first musical that we're going to take a look at. In episode one, in part one, we talked about the book, which is the second greatest story ever told, at least in terms of total sales and the number of people who've read the book. It was the greatest story that was not the direct word of God. It was a big freaking deal. It created a new form of literature and was probably the most popular book ever. If nothing else. It was first published in 1605 and it has never gone out of print. In part two, we learned about, Cervantes, the human being, the person. We learned that he was brave, loyal, honest, optimistic, and maybe, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare, star crossed. He was repeatedly bankrupt, he was repeatedly imprisoned. He was repeatedly imprisoned for things that he didn't do or for just being a soldier. He really wanted to be a playwright and not a Novelist. His book came out in 1605 when he was 58 years old. And here's a new fact. Not only did it come out in 1605 but between 1596 and 1602 the plague had arrived in Santander by a ship from northern Europe, likely from the Netherlands. And Madrid in 1599 and Seville in 1600 were especially hard hit. This epidemic is estimated to have killed around 500 people in Castile from 1599 to 1600. Don Quixote was conceived on the ruins of the plague. The plague had swept through Europe, it swept through Spain and taken a massive toll. And that was the time at which Cervantes, the star crossed tax collector, soldier and would be playwright was writing Don Quixote. So we are finally at the musical theater part of this, part number three that is. How did that story get turned into a musical? And for this I will be leaning very heavily, if not exclusively on Dale Wasserman's own account which he titled the Impossible Musical. Wasserman himself had by his own account about a year of high school education. He bounced around for a lot of odd jobs, spent some time jumping trains but was in theater since the age of about 19. Now the reason I mentioned they had about a year of high school education is that is eerily similar to the amount of education that Cervantes had. Definitely. Neither of them had what we would call a diploma. Neither of them had a university level studying of literature. And yet Cervantes, the creator of the original narrative, would write the greatest novel of all time. And Wasserman, without more than a year of high school would write one of the most successful musicals of all time. Wasserman's account is that he was in Spain, he was working on something when all of a sudden the statue of Cervantes caught his eye. And he did everything he could to learn about Cervantes the man and how the narrative Don Quixote came about. Now that's probably not untrue but his lack of education definitely was not a hindrance to his ability to understand the novel and to convert it into a fantastic musical. But it definitely superior to him knowing how to do research. I'm just going to pause here and here's my first side quest. Primary research is when there's a question that's out there and you want to know the answer to it. And so as a professional you read all the other peer reviewed published research on the subject and then you collect your own data. Secondary research is that you would read the stuff that other people have done and come to your own conclusion about it. If you were in college and you read a textbook, you were relying on a professor to go out there and read all the original research and then summarize for you in 20 to 25 pages what all the research had to do. That's very good, but that's secondary research. And then everything else after that, including, what I'm doing for this, is selective. You pick the stuff because it's interesting or because you want to pursue it, but you're not trying to be exhaustive. You're not trying to read everything that's out there and you're not trying to do original research. You're getting pieces of the puzzle, but not all of it. And, you know, if you're doing Googling or Wikipedia, then you're just sort of at the whims of what the worst that the Internet could throw up there. Anyway. Take all the research you get from the Internet with a grain of salt and try to figure it out. Which gets us back to the question they want to pursue. Now, Cervantes was definitely in prison and he definitely tried to escape. According to Wasserman, there were seven escape attempts, although he cites not a single source that says that. Malvina McKendrick of one of the Cambridge Universities lists and discusses in great detail, four escape attempts. Wasserman also claims Cervantes wrote 40 plays and the two survived. McAndrick of Girton College says there were two from an early period, but nine from the years 1580 through 1605. There was a book that Cervantes himself published in 1615, right before he published the second part of Don Quixote that was titled Eight Interludes in Eight Plays, and that still survives. And you can get a copy of it off of Amazon.com today, which makes it seem like at least eight of the plays survived, not the two that Wasserman claimed. As a side note, Scott Miller, who's the artistic director of the New line Theatre in St. Louis and loves writing about the man, from Lancia, and especially about the connection between that and the Inquisition, which we'll talk about later, it says that no play survived, and I'm not sure what period he's referring to, but since there's a book with eight of them in it, I think that it's greater than zero. He also thinks that Cervantes was excommunicated because he was Jewish, and he also thinks that there's no record of how he inexplicably escaped punishments. It must have been that Cervantes this brilliant master of the language, was able to talk himself out of it. But if you're in McKendrick, it was clear that he was imprisoned due to his service as a tax collector and that he was also excommunicated just because his job was to commandeer for the military the stuff they needed, collected the stuff from the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church didn't want to give it up, so they excommunicated Cervantes, which is true. So he was excommunicated, but it wasn't because he was Jewish. And it's very clear how he escaped punishment. He appealed both times and he was restored both times. So Wasserman is not necessarily the guy that I would trust with Cervantes research, but, I do think we can trust him talking about himself. The book that he wrote was published in 2003. It's called the Aposticle, the Man of La Mancha Story. And I think that since he is the, you know, in many cases the only person who would know is the author of the script that would become the musical. I think we can trust him about that. But here is an interesting footnote which does say much about research. Again, if you go to Wikipedia and you look up Wasserman and the man from La Mancha, it says that some of the most famous lines, including the phrase to dream the impossible dream, came from promotional material written for a, version of Don Quixote that had been made into a play that appeared in 1908. So if you believe Wikipedia and the Internet, you would say maybe Wasserman plagiarized some of his best lines to make this. And that would be a reason for us not to believe Wasserman. But that's Wikipedia. And so at the very bottom of it, whoever put that comment in there includes a reference. I can't actually find that reference, but the reference itself is in Spanish. So I'm not going to run all the way down this rabbit hole, other than to say this episode is about how Don Quixote went from being a novel written by Miguel Desfantes to a musical written by Dale Wasserman. And for that I'm relying on Wasserman. Wasserman, I think, is a very reliable narrator of his own life, although he is strangely not a great narrator of Cervantes, although he claims to be. And just the side note is there are those who would take shots at Wasserman. I can't find much credence to them, but it does h kind of what we're trying to do in this show, and that is picking and choosing from credible sources the things that we want to talk about. Dale Wasserman also wrote, interestingly, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was adapted from a book. Although he had no part of the movie both times. The lead character was somebody who was insane, or at least considered by those around him to be insane. Dale Waterman was a theater guy. He had almost no formal education, but he did have a life in theater. And he had a, ah, reputation as a grumpy old man. He describes himself as reclusive and antisocial. So Wasserman is now writing various things, and the very first production he writes of, the man from La Mancha, is produced for TV. Now the play was written in the 1950s and it was sold very quickly to television. So he wrote the script, he sent it to his agent, he gets the news, hey, it got bought, it's going to be produced, and it's going to air on television in November of 1959. Now, that year is important. 1960 is a critical year. That is the year of the Nixon Kennedy debate. It was the first televised presidential debate. And the reason it got televised was because television had emerged as enough of a media that that was the first time kind of the whole country could at the same time hear a presidential debate and watch the candidates in real time as it was happening. But there was television. It was there for sure, but no one had yet cracked the formula for what was this medium going to be. And it would become super prominent one year later in 1960. But in 1959, it was still not entirely known by anyone, including the TV producers. What is it we're going to put on tv? There is no formula. But the dupont show of the month picks up the script. So they're going to do a production of Don Quixote that's going to appear on television. Here are some of the key things that happened in that television production. The actress quit three days out, but was replaced by Colleen Dewhurst, who would of course, go on to have a hugely successful career. Don Quixote Rides a Horse. It was a live production that they were shooting out, so they used a real horse. And during the production, that horse threw the lead actor, who thankfully escape serious injury. But the hazards of new theater, on a new medium that is live, it was running about eight to 10 minutes long when they were doing it. Now, this was suddenly a problem because before television, if you were doing a stage play and it ran eight to 10 minutes long, it wasn't that big a deal. The audience had just stuck around another eight to 10 minutes. They do the curtain call and then everyone would leave. But with television there was something else that was scheduled to come on. You couldn't miss the end time. So they had to figure out what to cut. Wasserman decides he is going to cut the Impossible Dream soliloquy. At which point the lead actor, a guy named Lee Cobb, completely revolts. This is the guy who's been thrown off the horse by the way, comes storming up to the booth, which actors are definitely not supposed to do, and essentially hardlines and says, you can do a lot of things, we can cut in a lot of places. But you're not taking out that Impossible Dream soliloquy. Good call by Lee Cobb, I would say. The show airs, it has an audience of 20 million. You know, there's no Internet, there's no feedback. But there was television and telephones for the first time. So a lot of the initial feedback came from people who just watched the show. They'd pick up the phone, they'd tell the operator to connect them to the studio, which was how you made a phone call in 1959. And then they just say, hey, is Dale Wasserman there? Or I want to talk to the guy who did that Don Quixote production. And then they, you know, everything from praise to criticism but the early audience feedback and reaction, that is the way that they got it. Which is sort of interesting. So many twists and turns that made it kind of unlikely that that very first staging of the show would even happen. You know, had the horse injured, the lead actor, he might not, he might not have talked Wasserman out of cutting the dream. The Impossible Dream soliloquy and the musical might never have come into being. But all those things fell into place. It totally worked. There were an audience of 20 million people. There is some feedback and most of it is positive. So now Wasserman is gone, He's a full time professional writer, he's got a bunch of different projects going on and they gotta figure out okay, well what do we do with this thing, the man from La Mancha. Because if it had been a theatrical production then it would have a theatrical run. But what do you do with a one off TV showing? So the next thing that has to happen is that this play has to make it into a musical. It is not especially likely that this will happen. Wasserman opens this book by saying this was quote, a production nobody wanted booked into a theater. Nobody else would have and ignored by everyone except for the public. As they are developing this musical, they used a composer who they figured out halfway through, could not play an instrument. It is a musical made by a composer who could not play an instrument, written by an author who had never gone to college. The story itself is not an adaptation. Wasserman says, I was spending my time trying to figure out how to make Don Quixote. How could I adapt that into a stage play or a screenplay or whatever it was they were doing or musical. And he decided to give that up and decide this should be a story about Cervantes. So the play. Now the musical starts in prison where a mock trial is held. The prisoners get together, hold a mock trial, and Cervantes is accused of being a bad poet and whatnot. He pleads guilty, but then he asks if he can perform Don Quixote to the other prisoners. All of this narrative becomes part of the multiple identities. The character who is Don Cervantes is going to perform Don Quixote. He takes on the role, who then goes insane and says that he's Don Quixote. And then he comes back to being himself again. It's a, play about sanity and madness that has not often been done. And it's got a polyvocal nature. Multiple voices, multiple perspectives and multiple statements about reality. In fact, Philip K. Dick was a science fiction author. His house was two blocks from where I am currently living. In my house. He became famous for the whole idea of asking the question of what is reality. He wrote the short story called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? That idea of his exploded into becoming, you know, the famous Harrison Ford movie. And Philip K. Dick is now revered as one of the first people to think about this notion of what is the difference between reality and one's perception of reality. Those are all, indeed important themes. And all of them you can find in Don Quixote. Both the book and the music. It's set in the Inquisition, which is weird because as I mentioned before, Scott Miller, who is creative director of A Fairly Important Theater, has written about this extensively. And he always talks a lot about the Inquisition and not, as it pertains to the play, which is like, here was the Inquisition at the time in Spain. And that's the backdrop for helping us understand Don Quixote. And it is also a little unusual that Wasserman set the play in the Inquisition as if Miguel de Cervantes was being held for the Inquisition. The only reference I can find in my shoddy research that mentions that Cervantes was ever called by the Inquisition was as a soldier who'd been captured by the Ottomans and then he'd been a slave and was held in a prison and was going to get ransom back to his family. At one of those times he attempted to escape. There's this guy named Depaz who had sold out the escape attempt. He was going to be part of it. And then he told the captors that the captors stopped the escape attempt but then they were all ransomed. So now Depazes realized, oh wow, M man, I ratted out. These guys were going to escape. Now we're all going in the free, they're going to come after me. So he posed as a member of the Inquisition and then attempted to hold a trial where he holds Cervantes accountable. And there was a friar, in fact the guy who had ransomed Cervantes, who called him out, was able to prove that he actually had no authority for the Inquisition or anything else. Now I went all over all this in episode 1.2. So I'm sorry if you heard that repeating, if not that you want to hear the whole story, it's back there. but the reason I'm mentioning it now is that's the closest that Cervantes ever came to being held by the Inquisition. There have been many, many attempts to put the Don Quixote story into historical context. It is weird to me that it is circled around to the Inquisition when I don't really think that was a big part of Cervantes motivation. But be that as May, that's where the musical is set. The big song is of course called the Impossible Dream, which is actually named the Quest. Wasserman includes this stanza, and it is quote, to dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe. This is man's privilege and the only life worth living. Wasserman himself says he put it in. He kept taking it out and then based on his account of trying to take it out of that first stage production, makes it seem like he was kind of waffling back and forth on it. But I do think it is now understood correctly as the main theme that is being put forward. And while I think Wasserman is nobody's historical researcher, I do think he's definitely right about what it is about his musical that resonates with the audience towards the end of his book. This is what Wasserman writes. And please note the baseball reference quote. The impossible dream is constantly applied to ventures that might be somewhat difficult but Perfectly possible. A pennant for the Mets, for example. When I see these references, my impulse is to holler, pay attention, dammit. The operative word is not dream. The operative word is impossible. And then he goes on to the next paragraph to say, of course no one listens, but impossible is exactly what I meant. The dream, to be valid, must be impossible, not difficult, impossible, which implies an ideal never attainable, but nevertheless stubbornly to be pursued. A striving for what cannot be achieved but still is worth the effort. As for instance, peace on Earth, or the gentleness for all who breathe and breathing suffer. Or a hope that we might mitigate the horrors paraded for us on the news every hour of every day of every week, that we might reduce the tidal surge of wars, crimes, cruelties to humans and to animals, and the orgies of atrocities that sicken the earth. These are impossible dreams. Still, quixotically, they must be dreamed. This play that is set with the Inquisition is about an insane human who's following these chivalrous ideals. And what Wasserman takes from that is all these impossible dreams, these noble actions must be pursued not because they are possible, precisely because they're impossible. And what matters primarily is the motivation of the person pursuing them. If you listen to episode 1.1, we talk more about the text and the way it's been interpreted over times. And this is definitely a modern interpretation. I don't know that Cervantes would have recognized that meaning in his book. Certainly Cervantes audiences would not have. There's a good argument that for all its brilliance, that book primarily succeeded because it was funny and the audiences at the time were definitely laughing at Don Quixote, not crying with him because of his impossible dream. But it is that new modern reference that Wasserman put in his musical and that totally clicked. The musical first was performed in Connecticut. It had two runs of a couple weeks each. They tinkered with it to get it to the final version. When the producer, who, according to Wasserman's account, they had never met, showed up, one of their performances announced that he was taking it to New York. So now they are moving their production to New York, but it is not going to Broadway. It's going to this place, the Antitheater in New York in 1965. It's in Greenwich Village and it is strongly associated for what we think about with 60s experimentation of all sorts. A little bit of lechery, but definitely an openness to new things and new ideas. Which helps because the Anthra Theater is no great facility. It has no orchestra pit. So they split the musicians behind and put them off to the side in the wings. This has the effect of creating a stereo sound coming out of it, which some of the critics actually liked. It was definitely accidental, but it was one of the things that they had to do. They had no means of crossing over. So if the actor left the stage on the left, they had no way of ever coming back on the right. So to counter this, they decided they were going to dig a tunnel under the theater, quote, only to find ourselves encountering uncoffined skeletons wrapped in moldering cerements. Okay, let me just pause and say, wasserman, this dude can't write. Only to find ourselves encountering an uncoffined skeletons wrapped in mouldering cerements. If that's what you get out of a year high school, we should all do so well. And then he goes on to say, quote, authorities were called in. They ascertained that we had, in fact, collided with a potter's field dating from the plague of 1798. And there is one of the impossible connections. Just like Don Quixote, the musical was born on the ashes of the plague. As, Cervantes was writing his novel, he was doing so in the cities that had been ravaged by the plagues, where scores of dead bodies were disposed of in open potter fields. And how ironic that when the musical would first be performed in New York City, it too would sit on the remains of a, plague field. At the very first dress rehearsal, the power went out. It stayed out for 16 hours. And in fact, this was the power outage that knocked out the entire eastern seaboard. So with no dress rehearsal at all, the preview performance opened up, and there were only about 50 people there. It ran a bunch of preview performances, before they ever tried it for real. But that is not an auspicious beginning. At our last dress rehearsal, when we're trying to get it done, There's a power outage which knocks out not only the city of New York, but the entire eastern seaboard. And, you know, is that maybe a sign when you're fighting plague bodies underneath the theater that there's some evil spirit attempting to stop you from production from succeeding? They eventually got past their preview performances and they got to opening night. They got to their first review, which was on NBC. It's a televised review by a guy named Edward Newman. According to Wasserman, here's what he has to say. Quote, he reviewed the leading lady's bust, which he found admirable as for the show. He simply dismissed it, suggesting, quote, don't bother. After Saturday, it won't be there. That was the first review they got, according to Wasserman's tale. It was so bad he was going to go off and drink himself unconscious in an alley somewhere, but one of his friends convinced him to stay in the bar that they were all at. The other reviews then came in and almost all of them were enormously positive, as you might expect. And, run at the Anti theater was incredibly successful. It was doing well enough that three years later it got moved to Broadway. So in 1968, it hit Broadway, it launched, and it took off. It had 2,328 performances. It was then revived a year after it closed. It had four total revivals. And this is the most delicious of all of them. There was a revival where the two leads were Raul Julia and Sheena Easton. Okay, now, Raul Julia is probably an accomplished guy that has a bunch of very impressive accomplishments that he could put on his resume and his vita. But to be frank, in my pedestrian understanding of the world, I only knew him, the guy as the guy who played Daddy Munster in the Munster movie remakes. And Sheena Easton, man. Sheena Easton, she is the one who sang for your eyes only from the James Bond film. But her big hit was the morning train. It was, you know, the. Not the, nine to five, not the Dolly Parton version, but I take the morning train, I work from 9 to 5 and then I take another home. Again, lyrical genius. She did that. And also she performed the duet with We've got tonight with Kenny Rogers. If you are in your late 1950s, as am I, say you're 58 years old. As was Dale Wasserman when he wrote the man from Lansha. As was Miguel Desantis when he wrote Duncan. As I am when I do this. And your children look at you and say, what? What was it like in the 1980s? Just google Sheena Easton, put that as a search term in YouTube and watch those videos and you will know. What were the 1980s like? Anyway, according to Wasserman, that was a terrible thing. Julia, I guess, can't sing. That is what Wasserman has to say. And he said Sheena Easton kept getting sick. So that production did not go very well. Sad. Anyway, it's been now it's on Broadway. It starts in 1968. It has a bunch of revivals. It wins five Tonys in 2015. Ironically, the Shakespeare Theater Company performed it. If you were in episode 1.2, there are many who see a connection between Shakespeare and Cervantes, who were reputed to have died on the same day, but they actually didn't because they were using a different character. But they definitely did die within a week of each other. So that is some strange connection between those two. And then a little more ironic still that the Shakespeare Theater Company would perform it. It has a creeping increase in the number of productions and the number of languages that it's being performed in. Wasserman says that it may be the most successful of all time given the number of places that it's been played in. It definitely has a, long and very successful run in Japan. Wasserman has a very bitter description of how it had played in France. Wasserman's conclusion is there are 300 to 400 productions of it each year, every year. And that Broadway one was incredible. It's up there with the longest Broadway runs of all time. This success, though, was crushing on Wasserman personally. It was very demanding of his time. And once you have a Broadway smash hit, a lot of people want to talk to you, get free tickets, talk to you about movie rights and whatnot. But, he was trying to juggle his other projects, which he kept working on it by his own account. He had what I'm going to call a nervous breakdown, but he said he was paralyzed, that he couldn't actually get out of bed. This, of course, fulfills the second part of Olga's prophecy that, it would come to overwhelm his life and that his future would not go well. Which leads us to the last question that it is, I have to, answer for this episode. And that is why, why did this musical work and what lesson can we draw from it? And I just want to say part of what I want to do with this podcast is I want to do some quality second research. I'm not going to try to be exhaustive and cover everything that's ever been written, but I do want to find the parts of it that are interesting and take a deep dive. And as I do so, I'm going to look at every crazy coincidence, every possible supernatural connection, everything weird, mysterious and fun about that. And then I just want to see, is there something about this production that will give us a lesson about life, theater and everything? Whereas Dirk Gently has to say, it is all connected. What connections can we see here and what lessons do they have for all, of us all? Well, now, here is the very first thing to know. The first thing, and Wasserman himself is very clear about this, is that the facts can't explain it. I'm going to quote from his book for a little bit. Life magazine had called the man from La Mancha a quote, metaphysical smasheroo. And here's what he has to write. Facts in their guise as, statistics might explain the smash roo part of the equation, but they are surely impotent in dealing with a metaphysical aspect which I believe contains the secret. Just think of all the impossible things that had to happen for this musical to work in the first place. It had to get out of Connecticut. It had to be successful enough in its first stage play on television with a horse that it was worth thinking about making into a musical. That musical had to get from Connecticut to New York. It had to be performed on a plague burial ground. And it had to have enough of a positive reaction that we'd get from that burial ground through the power outages to Broadway. And then it had to stick once it got to Broadway. And all of this was predicted accurately by the psychic from the Palm Springs restaurant. All that suggests larger forces are at play. Maybe not exactly the supernatural forces I wish it were, but definitely something Wasserman himself means. Two things about this success, about the metaphysical nature. What is it about the metaphysics of this story that has made it resonate so powerfully for so many audiences? Here is his first explanation. He says it's because it's accessible. I think there's a little more than that going on. Listen to this. This is a quote from page 193. Quote, I believe that what keeps man of La Mancha alive is not only its philosophy, but its accessibility. It can be performed in a myriad of ways, in all sorts of spaces and at many levels of professionalism. It's almost immune to indifferent actors. It works even in the hands of amateurs and arty directors. I've seen it performed in a tent adjacent to a thundering freeway, on a stage bare of all scenery but projection screens in the midst of a, war with interruptions of exploding grenades in almost every conceivable environment in California. It is being played to the musical accompaniment not of an orchestra, but of a single guitar in the hands of a lone musician who wanders on a bare stage as I write a production now in the 20th week of an open ended run. So it is not an impossible musical after all, merely improbable. Okay, I got you, Dale. That is kind of means that it's accessible. But what you are saying, there isn't so much that it is accessible, but there is something transcendent enough about the story that it's not really the production value of the man of La Macho which grips the audience. I think maybe you had a little bit more of what was going on when you were writing way back at the beginning of the book instead of the end of the book. And here's what Wasserman has to say on page nine. And this is right after he says that numbers cannot explain the metaphysical part of it. Quote, I believed in this play. It was written from the gut. Initially I didn't believe it. That is, initially I had challenged myself to solve a problem of adaptation which a legion of writers had failed on the unlikely assumption that I might succeed somewhere en route. That motive changed. What replaced it was a, quest burning no less hotly than the Dons, a quest to discover personal values through a defined and clearly articulated credo. Whatever motive commenced the process, quite another completed it. There is more to that metaphysical side. It was evidenced in the flood of mail I began receiving at the opening of the show and that, though diminished, continues to this very day. The wild variety of interpretations of a text I had thought to be simplistically clear astonished me. There were many who identified Quixote with Jesus Christ, which I found puzzling since neither I nor my M play have any interest in religion whatsoever. Others found various spiritual interpretations. Most of them represented not interpretations of the play so much as verification of the letter writer's own beliefs. But there was one theme that coursed through almost all of the communications. In one way or another, they said the play changed my life. But this I understood. Not so much that the play had actually changed anyone's life, but that it had reawakened the ideas of adolescence, ideals that had died of the attrition of living. It was less change than restoration. That is the final lesson. And this is what I take from the man of La Mancha. I do think between both of Wasserman's explanations, this is what comes out. The final lesson is that if you can find a core truth so deep and so powerful, it can literally alter reality. It can survive all attempts to kill it, no matter what. It was that Lope de Vega hated about Don Quixote at the time that Cervantes wrote it, there was something in there that was going to survive. And no matter how many times it would be interpreted, reinterpreted, misinterpreted, reinterpreted, misunderstood, there was a core truth. It was deep enough and powerful enough. It was, as Wasserman was saying, a credo that could be articulated that could take your individual values and explain what they were. It's almost more the story of Job in Wasserman's telling that you have to pursue the impossible dream because it is the right thing to pursue and not because you think it's going to work. As I think about that, it rings true to me in at least three different ways. I had mentioned earlier Philip K. Dick. He was one of the great science fiction writers of all time. His work that made it big in Hollywood was not his first work. His first work was a book in 1960 called the man in the High Castle. And the idea behind that was that he retold a narrative of North America based on the assumption that the Axis had won World War II. So as the narrative starts, the Japanese are occupying California, and they are, of course, now acting as the oppressors. So, and in a weird way, that's. That's something for 1960, because essentially all the white people are getting treated by Asians and black people in the same way that white, people were in reality treating black, people and Asian people. But in the narrative, what changes everything is that the lead character comes across an item that contains what he calls woo wu, I believe it's a Chinese word, and it means a kernel of truth. It's a little artifact that he can hold. And when he holds this one artifact of truth, the false reality of the Axis victory melts away, and the true reality of the Allied victory comes through literally. The book is about a kernel of truth that can uncover and rewrite a reality and change the world for the better. That is such a poignant fit with Don Quixote, a human who sees the world in the wrong way. But the only way to survive in a world as unfair and unpleasant as the one that we are in is to cling to that core kernel of truth and beauty that can change and unravel the reality and make you see it in a completely different way, even if that leads to your own tragic hand. I believe in this because I have seen this happen, that I had been a high school and college debate coach for the majority of my life. If you're unfamiliar with a high school and college scene, just think about college football, right? Imagine you're Appalachian State and you're competing against Ohio State or Michigan. You go into that game, what makes you think you can win it? They have every advantage. They've got recruiters you don't have. They got coaching you don't have. They have facilities, practice areas that you don't have. They got scouting that you don't have. They've got all the four SCAR recruits and you don't have any of that. What makes, makes you think you could win? That exact same thing happens at the high school and college debate level. You're going into debate. Northwestern or Harvard or Texas or USC or Berkeley, they all had better test scores than you did coming out of high school. They were recruited, they're getting scholarships. You're freaking Cal State Fullerton. What makes you think you can go in there and take on these teams that have every advantage? They have tuition, they have tutors, they have personalized coaches, they have faculty who have no other job but to help them get good at debate. And you or competing at Cal State Fullerton where your coach is teaching for other classes. What makes you think that? And the belief has always been if you had one argument that was good enough, that was true enough, you could unravel all of those disadvantages. You could speak the truth and it would change everything about the debate you were in and all the technical skills, all the amounts of evidence that the other team had that you don't. You could defeat it if you had a core kernel of truth. And I watched my students do that. It was the most, it was like living a Hollywood movie every day. And I, you know, I was, I was a part of that. There were certainly other non Cal State Fullerton places that something similar. It's an entire movement of black students that banded together and decided they were going to change the game. And they functionally have done so. I guess part of the reason that I think Wasserman is correct about find a credo that articulates your values and stick with it. That is a powerful, resonant, transcendent messages. I have seen it happened in some of the most inspiring students that anyone would ever have. And finally, because as Wasserman himself notes, it's like the Mets winning a penny. Now Wasserman's writing his book in 2003 so he could have been talking about the 2000 New York Met victory or ah, trip to the World Series, but I don't really think he was doing that. I think. And he could have been talking about the 1986 year when the Mets actually won the World Series, but I think he's talking about 1969, the year of the Miracle Mets, when they went from the worst team in baseball, in fact in modern history, depending on what the White Sox do in the year 2024, worst team in baseball history in the modern era from 1962 to in 1969, slogging through what looked like an airborne. Another terrible season. Ten games out just after the All Star break and impossibly, unbelievably coming through not only to topple the Cubs. Speaking of cosmic history, when a black cat ran in front of the Cubs on deck circle, potentially cursing them, but beating the Cubs and winning the World Series and overcoming impossible odds, the Mets did it in 1969. And they're not the only sports team that has done something that impossible. The Appalachian State did beat the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in front of 110,000 fans, which I think is bigger than the entire city that the Appalachian State football team comes from. All yelling horrible things at them as they were playing. But what, what made it all work? What worked for the 1969 Mets? I think for sports teams you can tell there's a, ah, woo. There's a kernel of truth, there's some magic that you have tapped into. For the 1969 Mets, it was when Tug McGraw started saying, you gotta believe. For the Anaheim Angels, it was the rally monkey. The San Francisco Giants had a year where a guy named Leonard would hit a home run run around the bases with an arm dangling and they called it one flap down. They'd win the World Series later when they had a reliever named Romo who came up with the first photobombing and would call it Romo bombing. Or it could be the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates who adopted the song We Are Family. Or you could have Tommy Trumpet coming out and performing before your closer came out as the 2023 Mets did. Or it could be like the 1986 Chicago Bears super bowl winning team that did the Super Bowl Shuffle or the Icky Shuffle or the Dirty Bird, whatever it is. In the world of sports, if you find the thing, be it a dance or a song or a motto, if you can find the thing that everyone relays around, you just feel it, it just resonates, it feels good. You can find that kernel of the woo. That's what the Mets had. That's what the Chicago Bears had. That's what the man from La Mancha has. That's what a musical needs. So that is my take on point. A Dirk Gently moment is what can make a narrative, what can make a story, we can make a musical work. And what Wasserman was talking about, something that can overcome in different actors or artsy directors or a, myriad of other problems, are if in that show there's a kernel of truth. There's something so powerful that can resonate for enough audience. If you can find that you gotta believe thing, if you can find that song like we are Family that unites people behind you, then it is possible to do completely unexpected things to make reality being transformed from an impossible monolith that you can't overcome to a series of windmills that you might be able to defeat with your sword if only you were a brave enough knight. And that'll do it for the man from La Mancha and Don Quixote. Just remember the life of Sheena Easton as you go forth into the world today. In our next episode, we'll switch from the man from La Mancha to the Phantom of the Opera. What inspired that book? Were there real events? When an intrepid researcher scoured the French National Archives and came across what might have been the original manuscript for the book, what did that manuscript reveal? Was there really a chandelier accident in the Paris Opera House? Does the opera house really sit on a catacombs that contain skeletons? We'll find out together on the next episode of Theater History and Mysteries.