Man of the house cast
I suspect this is a musical, initially staged off-Broadway, that might gain from a chamber revival.
Peter Polycarpou has little to do as an underwritten Sancho Panza and Nicholas Lyndhurst spins out his equally tenuous role as a drunken innkeeper. We know De Niese has a fine voice but she also acts and dances with spirit even when she is being aggressively mauled by rapacious muleteers. The one consolation is Danielle de Niese as Aldonza, the tavern-girl mistaken by the Don for a heroine of romance (at some performances the role is played by Cassidy Janson). There is an irrevocable sanity about him that makes his casting seem oddly quixotic. More seriously, Grammer has neither the haggard mien nor the sense of otherworldliness to make a plausible hero. Here, as the Don’s fake chin hair suddenly came off, he seemed like a man who couldn’t make up his beard.
MAN OF THE HOUSE CAST TV
In the TV show Frasier, he played a man who couldn’t make up his mind.
MAN OF THE HOUSE CAST MOVIE
Inspired casting, such as Peter O’Toole in the movie version, can still rescue the show. One can only speculate what might have happened if the show’s creators had persisted with WH Auden as their lyricist: probably not a Broadway smash but a musical truer to Cervantes’ purpose. You can’t pin a single meaning on a magnificently elusive book, but it is clear at the end that Don Quixote is a tragic figure who realises his vision of chivalric heroism was a ludicrous illusion. In the fuzzy idealism of Joe Darion’s lyrics – urging us “to fight the unbeatable foe” – it is also at odds with Cervantes’ novel. It is entirely out of sync with the rest of Mitch Leigh’s pseudo-Hispanic score. That song is both the show’s one durable hit and its ultimate curse. The one consolation … Danielle de Niese as Aldonza. The crucial difference is that we are here listening, for the third time, to The Impossible Dream.
By making the context a modern fascist dictatorship – you can tell it is fascist because the guards wear dark glasses indoors – Lonny Price’s production defies logic: is Cervantes a historical figure or a contemporary emblem of suffering? The one gain is that the final song of protest by the prisoners acquires faint echoes of the chorus at the end of Fidelio. The problem lies partly in the show itself and partly in the bizarre casting of Kelsey Grammer in the title role.ĭale Wasserman’s book addresses the problem of boiling down a massive novel by showing an imprisoned Cervantes staging scenes from Don Quixote to save his manuscript from the flames. The luck runs out, however, with this revival of a long-neglected musical from 1965 based on Cervantes’ Don Quixote. P revious collaborations between commercial producers and English National Opera have given us memorable productions of Sweeney Todd and Sunset Boulevard.