You can watch the ABC News report here.Here's The Denver Post's review of the production:
Talk about leaving it all on the floor.
Regan Linton (pictured), playing the medieval whore Aldonza in "Man of La Mancha," crawls back onto the stage after having been ravaged by a gang of brutes. Raging with spite and vulnerability, she berates the delusional old fool Don Quixote for filling her head with the fantasy of civility in the world.
It's in the script.
But this actress is paralyzed below the chest. Her character's wheelchair having been stolen during the staged assault, Linton is now writhing across the floor in the only way she physically can. As she sings the bitter lament "Aldonza," it takes every ounce of restraint not to leap from your seat and help her up.
It's just the kind of stage moment that makes Denver's professional handicapped theater company different from all others.
PHAMALY, and director Steve Wilson, have done it again.
Any musical takes on greater depth when performed by the Physically Handicapped Actors and Musical Artists League, an ensemble of actors with physical or mental challenges. Like when they turned into circus freaks for "Side Show," daring audiences to see them for what they really are: Abnormal, titillating, frightening curiosities.
And with "Man of La Mancha" they ask you to look further. At what they - and you - truly can be.
You can't open in a 16th century Spanish dungeon prison populated only by cripples and miss the intentional visual commentary on how the disabled community is also often cast aside in 21st century America. Once again, this creative endeavor is personal.
It's no accident that "La Mancha," as close to pure poetry as the book to any musical will ever get, was written by Dale Wasserman, who also wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which PHAMALy staged in 2008. The message is the same.
PHAMALy turns 20 with "La Mancha," and by conquering its most substantive and disturbing challenge to date, it's clearly coming of age.
But staging "La Mancha" is just an impossible dream unless you have actors the caliber of Linton, Jeremy Palmer (as Sancho) and the incomparable Leonard Barrett as Miguel de Cervantes, the novelist who, when captured by the Spanish Inquisition, uses his stories to fight for his life. He becomes the "defender of the different" - and could it get more PHAMALy than that?
Not that this is the easiest story to follow. Cervantes introduces - and plays - our delusional idealist Don Quixote, a noble knight born 300 years after knights have gone the way of dinosaurs. When he sees a shaving basin, he sees instead a golden helmet. When he meets the gutter wench Aldonza, he sees instead his beautiful lady, Dulcinea.
Though PHAMALy is an impassioned, imperfect ensemble of 32, this evening
Regan Linton brings PHAMALy into new dramatic territory when the actress, paralyzed in her legs, crawls across the floor in "Man of La Mancha." (Todd Debreceni )belongs to the soulful Barrett, who personifies the inherent goodness of Quixote while knocking out one rousing song after the other, notably the signature "The Impossible Dream." Opposite Linton as the cynic who slowly succumbs to his naïve vision and so dearly pays for it, these two scarcely give your goosebumps a second to recede.
That said, Barrett is no Peter O'Toole. He's a much better singer, but he's also more of a showman, which means he lacks the haplessness and humility that are so intrinsic to his character's character. The most precisely staged scene is a fight in which Quixote, Sancho and Aldonza almost accidentally take out an entire gang of toughs. But Barrett is simply too young, too strong and too vital to be taken for a geriatric bumbler - and that takes away from the comedy.
As the line continues to blur between reality and fantasy; between dreams and awake, our hero must also be losing himself inside his own fantasy. Barrett is our present narrator to the end.
That will seem a treasonable suggestion from the hundreds who have already lept to their feet at the conclusion of Barrett's exhaustive performance, one complemented by strong supporting work from Don Mauck as the Padre ("To Each His Dulcinea") and Donna Debreceni's sweetly Spanish-tinged live band.
But there are nagging curiosities. Why does Palmer, such a charming Dauntless in "Once Upon a Mattress," play sweet Sancho so acerbically? The climactic scene is when "the enchanter" surrounds Quixote by his reflection, to force him to see him for the ragged fool he is. So why are the mirrors so far away that Barrett must repeatedly run toward his truth rather than be swallowed by it?
And PHAMALY can get a little insidery. When Palmer clasps his heart, then shifts his hands from the left to the right side of his chest, you have to know that's where this particular actor's heart really is in his body to get the joke.
Trivialities. PHAMALy's goal is, like Quixote's, to add some measure of grace to the world. Linton may never walk again and Mauck likely won't ever see. Yet PHAMALy once again proves that no star is unreachable.
And the world will be better for this.
