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The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project.

\"Man of La Mancha\" When * 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday Where * Peabody Opera House, 1400 Market Street How much * $27-$92 More info * 800-745-3000; Ticketmaster.com Credit: Judith Newmark; jnewmark@post-dispatch.com; 314-340-8243

[...]Moss points out, World War II and McCarthyism were recent memories; the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam were current events. What \"Man of La Mancha\" * When 7 p.m. Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday * Where Peabody Opera House, 1400 Market Street * How much $27-$92 * More info 1-800-745-3000; Ticketmaster.com Credit: Judith Newmark; jnewmark@post-dispatch.\\n

[...]James Harms, the star of the very striking Light Opera Works production of the much-loved 1965 title (which contains such stirring numbers as \"The Impossible Dream\" and \"To Each His Dulcinea\") is not of that ilk.

Music director Ross Bell leads a lovely, nine-man orchestra through the Spanish-inflected score with care. Add it up and this production is all of a piece - a serious, dramatic story that insists on idealism as a vital component of civilized life, even if it seems pointless.

The kangaroo court that ensues nearly ends \"La Mancha\" before it starts, with Cervantes' manuscript about an addled knight-errant almost burned by his fellow inmates. [...] Cervantes proposes that he enact his \"defense\" by dramatizing his literary creation, pulling the prisoners into his charade.

Since its unheralded arrival at a Greenwich Village theater in 1965, ''Man of La Mancha'' has become something of a warhorse, to put it mildly. So it's easy to forget that back then it was the very antithesis of what people expected musicals to be. Its central character, Miguel de Cervantes, was in jail. And his central character, Don Quixote, was on his deathbed before long. Written by Dale Wasserman, the show was dark, it was spare, it had no jaunty production numbers. In fact, it had no chorus. You couldn't cheer up with a drink at intermission -- it didn't have an intermission, either. And there was certainly no way to know that Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion's sappiest song would become the show's most famous. As it happens, there were other musicals that season that shared Mr. Wasserman's penchant for out-of-the-ordinary heroes: ''Oliver!'' had its urban unfortunates; ''Sweet Charity'' had its sex workers; and ''Mame'' had an indefatigable windmill-tilter at its center. But these shows tackled their non-traditional heroes in completely traditional ways. Even though ''Man of La Mancha'' moved to Broadway, was nominated for seven Tony Awards and won five, including best musical, it was different. It was a harbinger of the concept musical -- ''Cabaret'' would open the following year -- and a pioneering effort in what could perhaps be called the musical-theater counterculture.

At the top of the Court Theatre's startling revival of the well- loved 1965 musical \"Man of La Mancha,\" you think you've wandered into \"Marat/Sade\" by mistake. Charles Newell's radically revisionist take doesn't so much evoke impossible Broadway dreams as the post- nuclear aftermath of a war of Trojan force. If you can imagine the great auteur director Peter Brook staging life inside Abu Ghraib, you'd get a sense of the ambience on John Culbert's hellish cauldron of a set.

One fine-dining option is La Petite Folie, 1504 E. 55th St. This French restaurant's name translates to \"the little madness\" which is something the romantically deluded Don Quixote might relate to in his noble adventuring to win a lady's love. The restaurant's chef attended the Cordon Bleu cooking school before bringing pan-seared foie gras, roasted rack of lamb and rabbit to Chicago. For dessert, sample some French fromage (better known in the Midwest as cheese) or satisfy a sweet tooth with freshly made apple tart.

The song, also known as \"The Quest,\" provides a forthright statement of the themes behind the musical, an adaptation of the Spanish masterpiece \"Don Quixote\" by Miguel de Cervantes. Written by Dale Wasserman with songs by composer Mitch Leigh and lyricist Joe Darion, \"Man of La Mancha\" explores questions of reality versus imagination and materialism versus idealism. Director Michael Hamilton, costumer Dorothy Marshall Englis, set designer Thomas C. Umfrid and lighting designer Matthew McCarthy invest \"Man of La Mancha\" with a chiaroscuro elegance. Beautiful and more than marginally intellectual, their combined efforts endow Stages' \"Man of La Mancha\" with polish and precision. Besides, a traditional distance between audience and performers reinforces every effect. PHOTO; PHOTO - [Edward Juvier] plays Sancho Panza and [Gary Lindemann] is Don Quixote in \"The Man of La Mancha,\" presented by Stages St. Louis through July 3 at the Robert G. Reim Theatre in Kirkwood.