"El manco de Lepanto" turns 458
Oct. 3rd, 2005 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra ("el manco de Lepanto") would have turned 458, last Thursday, and his ur-novel El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, (the first half of which was published in 1605) turns 400, this year. In honor of that anniversary, Seattle's Book-It repertory theater has produced the what has to be the best theatrical--or cinematic, for that matter--adaptation of the book I've seen.
(Granted, the competition is not stellar, here, as the best directors to have attempted an adaptation--Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam--failed to even complete their projects. And Man of La Mancha was pretty lame, if you ask me ...)
You could say (somewhat anachronistically) that Quixote is a sort of aging geek who gets lost in his escapist entertainment--More than that, Quixote sets out to impose his fantasies of chivalric derring-do on the crude, moneygrubbing, book-burning world of 16th-century Spain, persuading himself that windmills are fairytale giants, herds of sheep are contending armies, peasant girls are princesses, etc. Basically, Quixote's insanity stems from the tension between his hunger for real experience and his impatience with the way the world actually works.
The castmembers of Book-It's Don Quixote are energetic, charismatic, hilarious: Quixote is soulfully wrongheaded, Sancho Panza is sweetly simpleminded and loyal (if not quite blindly so), Samson Carrasco is nimble and shrewd (if shallow), Aldonza Lorenzo calls her piggies like a character out of Li'l Abner, and the play positively teems with loud, ignorant, greedy, hypocritical foils for Quixote's delusional highmindedness.
But the personality who perhaps stands out most is Cervantes himself, who hovers on the margins, whispering wickedly bad ideas in his characters' ears, making sarcastic asides and off-color jokes to the audience, and introducing each act with all the self-promotional gusto of a Mexican wrestling promoter. (At one point, he interrupts the action to explain that a certain fascinating character will appear onstage only briefly, but you can learn more about her if you just buy his book ...). During "The Inquisition in the Library," Cervantes can't contain himself as the priest and barber talk about using one of his books as kindling, and he looks physically wounded when his characters stop following his instructions and then--even worse--start dissing his writing. Book-It's Cervantes is absolutely the man who would have written this book, a former soldier, a man who spent years as a hostage and slave, a sometime debtor, a runaway husband, a poet, a satirist, a self-promoter who would be absolutely elated that people remember him, four centuries after the publication of Don Quixote.
If you're in Seattle, Book-It's Don Quixote is playing through October 16th. A bargain at the low, low price of $10!
(Granted, the competition is not stellar, here, as the best directors to have attempted an adaptation--Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam--failed to even complete their projects. And Man of La Mancha was pretty lame, if you ask me ...)
You could say (somewhat anachronistically) that Quixote is a sort of aging geek who gets lost in his escapist entertainment--More than that, Quixote sets out to impose his fantasies of chivalric derring-do on the crude, moneygrubbing, book-burning world of 16th-century Spain, persuading himself that windmills are fairytale giants, herds of sheep are contending armies, peasant girls are princesses, etc. Basically, Quixote's insanity stems from the tension between his hunger for real experience and his impatience with the way the world actually works.
The castmembers of Book-It's Don Quixote are energetic, charismatic, hilarious: Quixote is soulfully wrongheaded, Sancho Panza is sweetly simpleminded and loyal (if not quite blindly so), Samson Carrasco is nimble and shrewd (if shallow), Aldonza Lorenzo calls her piggies like a character out of Li'l Abner, and the play positively teems with loud, ignorant, greedy, hypocritical foils for Quixote's delusional highmindedness.
But the personality who perhaps stands out most is Cervantes himself, who hovers on the margins, whispering wickedly bad ideas in his characters' ears, making sarcastic asides and off-color jokes to the audience, and introducing each act with all the self-promotional gusto of a Mexican wrestling promoter. (At one point, he interrupts the action to explain that a certain fascinating character will appear onstage only briefly, but you can learn more about her if you just buy his book ...). During "The Inquisition in the Library," Cervantes can't contain himself as the priest and barber talk about using one of his books as kindling, and he looks physically wounded when his characters stop following his instructions and then--even worse--start dissing his writing. Book-It's Cervantes is absolutely the man who would have written this book, a former soldier, a man who spent years as a hostage and slave, a sometime debtor, a runaway husband, a poet, a satirist, a self-promoter who would be absolutely elated that people remember him, four centuries after the publication of Don Quixote.
If you're in Seattle, Book-It's Don Quixote is playing through October 16th. A bargain at the low, low price of $10!
