The national tour of Man of La Mancha has been added to
the 2013-2014 Performing Arts Center Series at Kent State
University at Tuscarawas for April 4.

(Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg)

The national tour of Man of La Mancha has been added to the 2013-2014 Performing Arts Center Series at Kent State University at Tuscarawas for April 4 at 7:30 p.m. Man of La Mancha returns to the stage in an all-new production of the Tony Award-winning musical that has inspired audiences since the very first notes of “The Impossible Dream” were heard on opening night.

Tickets are on sale and range in price from $25 to $45. Tickets can be purchased at the Performing Arts Center Box Office, online at www.tusc.kent.edu/pac or by calling 330-308-6400. The box office is open Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Free parking is available for all shows. Kent State Tuscarawas is located at 330 University Dr. NE in New Philadelphia.

“We are always looking for new opportunities to entertain our patrons,” says Mike Morelli, general manager of the Performing Arts Center. “When the opportunity to present this Tony Award-winning musical came to us, we knew our answer had to be a resounding ‘Yes!’”

Man of La Mancha is a remarkable show and one of the great theatre successes of our time. This play-within-a-play is based on Cervantes's Don Quixote. It is a poignant story of a dying old man whose ‘impossible dream’ takes over his mind. Against all odds, a man sees good and innocence in a world filled with darkness and despair. Man of La Mancha won five Tony Awards including Best Musical, along with the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical and the Outer Critics Circle Award.

Enter the mind and the world of Don Quixote as he pursues his quest for the impossible dream: Miguel de Cervantes, aging and an utter failure, has been thrown into a dungeon in Seville to await trial by the inquisition for an offense against the church. But first he must face a kangaroo court of his fellow prisoners: thieves, cutthroats and trollops who propose to steal his meager possessions, including the unfinished manuscript of a novel called Don Quixote. Cervantes, seeking to save it, proposes a form of an entertainment. The ‘court’ agrees and before their eyes, Cervantes and his faithful manservant transform themselves into Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They proceed to play out the story with the participation of the prisoners as other characters; Quixote and Sancho taking to the road to restore the age of chivalry, to battle evil and right all wrongs.

Man of La Mancha played for 2,328 performances in New York at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre and on Broadway at the Martin Beck, Eden and Mark Hellinger Theatres starring Richard Kiley and Joan Diener. Kiley and Diener repeated the success at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1972, and the show has since been revived on Broadway several times, most recently at the Martin Beck Theatre with Brian Stokes Mitchell in the title role. The show played for 253 performances in London at the Piccadilly Theatre.