Omaha Community Playhouse Presents THE MAN OF LA MANCHA

Man of La Mancha runs Sept. 18-Oct. 18, 2015 at the Omaha Community Playhouse.

Winner of five Tony Awards, Man of La Mancha is a tale of hope and inspiration. When Miguel de Cervantes is imprisoned during the Spanish Inquisition, he is able to keep only one possession: a manuscript of a play he has written. As Cervantes sets the stage with his words in a bleak prison cell, he transports the inmates to another world-the world of Don Quixote. The inmates become characters in his story as he sings about "The Impossible Dream" in this theatrical celebration of the power of imagination.

Man of La Mancha is adapted from a 1959 teleplay I, Don Quixote, by Dale Wasserman, which is based on the life of Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote the novel Don Quixote.

Miguel de Cervantes created a very clever meta-fictional trick by claiming that the first several chapters of Don Quixote were taken from a manuscript titled "The Archive of La Mancha" and that the rest of it had been translated by the Moorish author Cid Hamet Bengeli. Both claims were completely false, as Cervantes wrote the entire work himself. This trick was designed to make it seem as if Don Quixote is a real person and that the story actually had happened. Novels were frowned upon at this time, so it was a method to get around that disapproval.

400 years after Cervantes' death, his remains were found earlier this year in Madrid. Learn more here.