Dale Wasserman (book)


Dale Wasserman was born in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and has worked in various aspects of theatre since the age of nineteen. His formal education ended after one year of high school in Los Angeles. It was there that he started as a self-taught lighting designer, director and producer, starting with musical impresario Sol Hurok as stage managerr and lighting design and for the Katherine Dunham Company, where he invented lighting patterns imitated later in other dance companies. In addition to U.S. cities, he has produced and directed abroad in places such as London and Paris. It was in the middle of directing a Broadway musical—which, out of persistent revulsion, Mr. Wasserman refuses to name—that he abruptly walked out, feeling he "couldn't possibly write worse than the stuff [he] was directing" and left his previous occupations to become a writer. "Every other function was interpretive; only the writer was primary." In this he has succeeded enormously.

Matinee Theatre, the television anthology which presented his first play, Elisha and the Long Knives, received a collective Emmy for the plays it produced in 1955, the year that Elisha and the Long Knives was telecast on that series (it had originally been shown in 1954, on Kraft Television Theatre, another anthology. Wasserman wrote some thirty more television dramas, making him one of the better known writers in the Golden Age of Television. Two of his stage plays predominate: Man of La Mancha and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, whose stagings place him among the most produced American playwrights worldwide. Man of La Mancha ran for five years on Broadway and continues worldwide in more than thirty languages. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ran for six years in San Francisco and has had extensive engagements in Chicago, New York, Boston and other U.S. cities. Foreign productions have appeared in Paris, Mexico, Sweden, Argentina, Belgium, and Japan.

Some insight into Wasserman's inner workings may be found in his work Man of La Mancha. "I wrote Man of La Mancha because I believed in it. It is my most personal play," he said in an interview. [2] He felt drawn to the author of the original novel Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, who led a life that Wasserman calls a "catalogue of catastrophe", but was able to produce one of the world's most memorable stories. Perhaps he holds with the words of his Don Quixote: "I hope to add some measure of grace to the world. . . . Whether I win or lose does not matter, only that I follow the quest".

Reclusive by nature, he and his wife, Martha Nelly Garza, make their home in Arizona ("because it's the one State which refuses to adopt Daylight Saving Time.").

Mitch Leigh (music)

Won a 1966 Tony Award for his music for the Broadway musical "Man of La Mancha", which was filmed in 1972.

In 2001, the Yale University School of Music building was renamed Leigh Hall in honor of Mitch Leigh and his wife Abby.

In 1957, he founded Music Makers, Inc., a radio and television commercial music publishing house, of which Leigh is artistic director. It was Music Makers, Inc., who, under Leigh's supervision, orchestrated the music for the stage production of "Man of La Mancha".

Won two 1966 Tony Awards for "Man of La Mancha": for his music as part of the Best Musical win and as Best Composer and Lyricist with collaborator Joe Darion. Nineteen years later, in 1985, he was Tony-nominated as Best Director (Musical) for a revival of "The King and I" that was Yul Brynner's farewell appearance in his signature role as the King of Siam.

Joe Darion (lyrics)

Though known primarily for his Tony-winning work on Broadway's Man of La Mancha, lyricist Joe Darion's considerable range covered more than just Broadway tunes; the versatile lyricist also penned three Top Ten hits in the 1950s and a slew of popular children's songs.
Winning a variety of awards for his contributions to La Mancha (later made into a film), Darion's other Broadway work included Illya, Darling (adapted from the 1960 film Never on Sunday), Shinbone Alley, and Better Than Wine. Darion also penned such memorable librettos as the jazz opera Archy and Mehitabel, in addition to making the English-language contributions to the bilingual musical The Megilla. Frequently collaborating with Ezra Laderman, the duo teamed for such oratorio operas as Galileo Galilei and a series of cantatas including A Mass for Cain and A Handful of Souls.

Joe Darion died on June 16, 2001, of natural causes in Lebanon, NH. He was 90.