Composed by Mitch Leigh

Lyrics by Joe Darion

Scenery by Matthew Smucker

Lights by L. B. Morse

Costumes by Harmony Arnold

Sound by Chris Walker

It is a striking visual that greets theatergoers filing into the 5th Avenue Theatre for its current production of Man of La Mancha. An impassable, impossibly tall fence stretches across the width of the proscenium, lined at the top with concertina wire, backed by concrete walls that reach for the ceiling. It is a brutal, cold, and dark setting for the theater’s reimagining of the 1964 musical inspired by the 1605 novel Don Quixote de La Manche and its author Miguel de Cervantes—one that invites contemplation in a moment when prison reform is a hot topic, as is President Obama’s failure to shutter the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

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His story is indeed a dream in the midst of a nightmare, brought to vivid, invigorating life at the hands of director Allison Narver. Once Cervantes’ play within a play begins, brutal reality recedes into the background and gives way to an imaginative staging.

Seattle Weekly

Man of La Mancha at the 5th Avenue offers a surprisingly trenchant social critique … the 5th Avenue Theatre's production of this musical is different. Sad-different, but good sad. Or at least challenging-sad.

Director Allison Narver sets her Man of La Mancha in what looks like a contemporary black site crossed with a dungeon. A stories-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire reaches up to the rafters, recalling maximum-security prisons. Tall slabs of cement resembling the West Bank barrier form a wall across the stage. There's also medieval-looking, solitary jail cells the inmates wheel around, and every so often a guard disappears one of the prisoners.

The Stranger