"To Dream the Impossible Dream"

A song for heroes and seekers

Sometimes a Song waits “in the wings” for just the right moment to put in its appearance at Word & Song. “To Dream the Impossible Dream” is a masterful composition about what heroism is. Most folks reading this post will already know this song as the musical highlight of the Broadway play, Man of La Mancha, first produced in 1965. If you haven’t seen the play or the later film, Man of La Mancha is not a musical version of the Cervantes novel. It is a musical production of a television play written by Dale Wasserman about Cervantes himself. To Wasserman’s annoyance the TV producers insisted on billing his play, I, Don Quixote, fearful that their viewers would not know who the man of la Mancha was.

The play is set in prison, where Cervantes is awaiting trial near the end of the notorious Spanish Inquisition. While there, Cervantes directs his fellow prisoners in a performance of his masterpiece, conveniently stashed away in his trunk. So the work that Dale Wasserman created, first for television and later for Broadway, was a play within a play — following in a time-honored stage tradition of the sort that Tony wrote about in his post on Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Wasserman exercised a good deal of poetic license in bringing the life of Cervantes, what is known of it, to his modern audience in an imagined look at how the author might have portrayed his own creation, one of the most beloved characters in the history of literature.

Broadway loved the Man of La Mancha, which ran for over 2,300 performances and eliminated any lingering concern that American audiences might not know who that particular man mentioned in the title was. And as the man who played that man —at age 43 and after twenty years as an actor in film, on television, and on stage — Richard Kiley became “an overnight sensation” in what he considered the role of a lifetime. The play nearly swept the Tony Awards in 1966, taking Best Musical, Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical for Richard Kiley, and Best Best Original Score, for Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion. After a tremendous first run, Man of La Mancha had five successful revivals in the United States alone. The play has been translated into well over a dozen languages and performed around the world.

And at the very moment that Man of La Mancha opened on Broadway, “To Dream the Impossible Dream” assumed a rightful place in the Great American Songbook. Since then the song has been recorded by about every male singer you can think of, and a good handful of famous female singers, as well. To date, the song has been covered by 269 professional releases. But of all those recordings you won’t be too surprised, I suspect, that I’ve chosen for today our song today as performed by the the actor who first brought Don Quixote to life on Broadway, Richard Kiley. My favorite of his several recordings of “The Impossible Dream” is the one I’ve posted below, recorded on The Ed Sullivan Show to a wildly enthusiastic audience during the play’s first run on Broadway.

I do want to add a note about Richard Kiley’s singing. His amazing vocal performance in Man of La Mancha didn’t just happen. Kiley caught the acting bug early in life, and left college after one year to study acting at the Barnum Dramatic School in his hometown of Chicago. After serving in WWII, Kiley moved to New York to pursue his acting career. But he did not neglect his vocal training, and he sought out an excellent voice teacher, Itzchok "Ray" Smolover, who had studied music at Columbia and Carnegie Melon and was a highly respected tenor, opera librettist, composer, and cantor. Ray considered Richard Kiley one of his star pupils, and his influence on Kiley’s rich baritone voice is obvious in the actor’s deeply emotive singing style, plaintively reminiscent of the sound of sung Jewish prayers. Listen for that, but most of all listen to the beauty and depth of Richard Kiley’s performance — in character as Don Quixote — of this moving song.

Listen to Richard Kiley singing “To Dream the Impossible Dream” on The Ed Sullivan Show.

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