Man of La Mancha is a 1964
musical with a book by
Dale Wasserman, lyrics by
Joe Darion, and music by
Mitch Leigh. It is adapted from Wasserman's non-musical 1959
teleplay I, Don Quixote, which was in turn inspired by
Miguel de Cervantes and his seventeenth-century masterpiece
Don Quixote. It tells the story of the "mad" knight, Don Quixote, as a play within a play, performed by Cervantes and his fellow prisoners as he awaits a hearing with the
Spanish Inquisition. The work is not, and does not pretend to be, a faithful rendition of either Cervantes' life or of
Don Quixote. Wasserman complained repeatedly about taking the work as a musical version of
Don Quixote.