Walnut Creek Journal | EDGE Review | Pat Craig Review

It’s hard to say which aspect of "Man Of La Mancha," currently being performed by Diablo Light Opera Company in Walnut Creek, resonates more with 21st Century America: the farce and humor of Miguel Cervantes Saavedra used in his original novel "Don Quixote" to poke fun at the romanticized image in 17th Century literature of Spain’s long-gone days of aristocratic chivalry; or the modern, romanticized sense of nobility in the derivative musical brought to Broadway in the war-troubled 1960s. Whichever it is, decades later it remains a work capable of moving audiences to tears and laughter.

In the hands of director Dianna Shuster, the DLOC production captures and builds upon the modern, almost cynical, caricatures provided by Dale Wasserman’s play and and Joe Darion: the church as effete, destructive, parasitic, impotent protector of the people; women as primarily victims and self-centered harpies; academics as useless and insensitive.

They frame the world in which Don Quixote, carrying out a crusade based on a delusional belief that windmills are actually monsters of mass destruction, and his sidekick Pancho Sanchez sally forth.

Paul Myrvold’s voice is a bit light for the role of Don Quixote -- there is none of the heart-rending resolution Richard Kiley brought to his Tony-winning performance that made the muscial an icon of its generation -- but he controls his character well and we are given a very believable interpretation of Don Quixote as he really was: an elderly man of failing health but unfailing determination.

Robert Ponces is a delight, stealing every scene as Panza. His lisp kept me thinking of an old boyfriend of mine from Barttthhhhelona; when he sings "I Really Like Him" to explain why he follows around a man he knows to be made, you get the idea that he REALLY likes him. Clearly the bond with Sanchez is the one thing in which Quixote is not delusional.

And Melinda Meeng shines as Aldonza/Dulcinea in a performance reminiscent of Sophia Loren’s cleavage-and-claw characterization in the 1972 movie. Her rendition of "Aldonza" is chilling and gritty; her performance of "What Do You Want of Me" is passionate. There’s a good chemistry in the choral rendition of "Little Bird, Little Bird," and Robert Taylor as the Padre is spot on.

Cervantes was a colorful and controversial man in his own time, wounded in battle and losing the use of his left arm before a 5-year incarceration during which person after person testified to his inspirational courage and loyalty under torture, and his novel, begun during that prison stay, was an instant hit when first published in 1605. The retooling of the work first as a 1959 non-musical teleplay by Wasserman with Lee Cobb as Quixote, Colleen Dewhurst as Aldonza and Eli Wallach as Panza, and then as a musical in 1960 introduced an entirely new audience to the pasteurized version. W.H. Auden was originally chosen to write the lyrics, but his biting words were thought to be too offensive to too much of the audience, much as Cervantes’ work offended many of the literati of his time. Lyricist Joe Darion was paired up with Mitch Leigh and the classic was reborn.

More than 40 years later, the musical seems as fresh as ever. Perhaps its message of irrational loyalty to an ideal in the face of grim reality is naive. But if former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is right, and the challenges of our times make idealism the new realism, it is a message we could all learn from.

However impossible it seems.