Man of La Mancha review – Kelsey Grammer a quixotic cast in logic-defying misfire

Coliseum, LondonEven Danielle de Niese’s fine voice can’t save ENO’s out-of-sync commercial collaboration – no matter how many times they play The Impossible DreamPrevious collaborations between commercial producers and English National Opera have given us memorable productions of Sweeney Todd and Sunset Boulevard. The luck runs out, however, with this revival of a long-neglected musical from 1965 based on Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The problem lies partly in the show itself and partly in the bizarre casting of Kelsey Grammer in the title role.Dale Wasserman’s book addresses the problem of boiling down a massive novel by showing an imprisoned Cervantes staging scenes from Don Quixote to save his manuscript from the flames. By making the context a modern fascist dictatorship – you can tell it is fascist because the guards wear dark glasses indoors – Lonny Price’s production defies logic: is Cervantes a historical figure or a contemporary emblem of suffering? The one gain is that the final song of protest by the prisoners acquires faint echoes of the chorus at the end of Fidelio. The crucial difference is that we are here listening, for the third time, to The Impossible Dream. Continue reading…
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