Quixote by Quixote

Man of La Mancha. Cervantes had the seer's vision and the toughness of mind 40 know what was dead about his time. The age of chivalry did not realize that it was finished until it read its inspired obituary, Don Quixote. Thus it is a travesty to pretend to honor Cervantes with Man of La Mancha, a romantic operetta that resembles nothing so much as Don Quixote as it might have been written by Don Quixote.

This "musical play" plants Cervantes in the dungeons of the Inquisition and pivots on the device of having him defend himself and his book in a mock trial by acting out the role of the knight of the woeful countenance. The indictment is modishly mock-cynical a la 1965; not the worst of the evening's sentimentalities is: "I charge you with being an idealist, a bad poet and an honest man. How plead you?" With this cue, the good grey don (Richard Kiley) whirls into his act. He tilts at windmills, mistakes an inn for a castle where he is to be knighted, swears that a barber's basin is a golden helmet, and with chivalric ardor vows devotion to a lusty serving-wench (Joan Diener), whom he views as his dream virgin, Dulcinea.

As Quixote-Cervantes, Richard Kiley is at least as good as Richard Burton in Camelot, and his singing voice is far better. He handles himself with grace and gallantry despite some crippling vulgarities in the Dale Wasserman script. Considering the pitch of her voice and the plunge of her neckline, Joan Diener is less an auditory than a visual treat. Irving Jacobson's Yiddish-accent Sancho Panza presents another problem for the ear.

A section of the stage at the arena-styled ANTA Washington Square Theater has been tilted up so that the playing area resembles a giant record turntable, and since the actors burst into song every few minutes, it sometimes seems as if an invisible disk jockey were directing the play. The best tune, The Impossible Dream, could be transferred intact to Skyscraper, which suggests the show's basic defect. It ought to be 31 centuries distant from Broadway instead of merely 40 blocks away.

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