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Friday, March 21, 2014

Mitch Leigh, Who Composed ‘Man of La Mancha,’ Dies at 86

The show, “Man of La Mancha,” opened in New York in 1965 and ran until 1971, a total of 2,328 performances. It won five Tony Awards, including best composer and lyricist (Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion) and best musical. Richard Kiley originated the dual role of Don Quixote, a doddering gentleman knight with a grand imagination, and Quixote’s creator, the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. The principal song, "The Impossible Dream", became a standard. The musical has played in many other countries around the world, with productions in Dutch, French (translation by Jacques Brel), German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Icelandic, Gujarati, Uzbek, Hungarian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swahili, Finnish, Ukrainian and nine distinctly different dialects of the Spanish language... NYTimes Obit

Mitch Leigh (born Irwin Michnick; January 30, 1928 – March 16, 2014) was an American musical theatre composer and theatrical producer best known for the musical Man of La Mancha. Leigh also composed the jingle: "Nobody Doesn't Like Sara Lee". He established Music Makers, Inc., in 1957 as a radio and television commercial production house and was its creative director....
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