This is what The New York Times has to say about Brian Stokes Mitchell:
"No other actor can match his singing voice. No other singer can claim his acting range or experience. No other man -— at least, no one who works in the theater regularly -— can say, "I want to play Don Quixote in 'Man of La Mancha'" and bring it about..."
This is what fan Linda Angelic of Providence, Rhode Island, says about him:
"I love you, Brian!" She says this standing in a downpour outside New York's Al Hirschfeld Theatre, having just learned the "unacceptable" news that she won't be seeing her favorite Broadway star perform, despite driving through the rain to the Big Apple. She had already seen Mitchell perform the timeless role of a self-made knight errant twice in the past eight months, and was back for a third fix.
"The fans who were there that night said they couldn't get enough of his deep baritone voice," NPR's Jacki Lyden reports. "He definitely has reached heartthrob status among a lot of the women we talked to."
La Mancha is Mitchell's sixth Broadway musical, and he's also been nominated for a Tony for his straight dramatic work in August Wilson's King Hedley II.
But Man of La Mancha -- based on the Cervantes novel of the early 1600s and reborn as a musical in the 1960s -- has always had a dear place in Mitchell's heart. He first played the title role at age 17, and his own dream -- far from impossible, as it turns out -- was to see the production return to Broadway.
It opened in December after an out-of-town tryout in Washington, D.C., and is about to end its run at the Al Hirschfeld Theater on W. 45th Street.
Mitchell says he feels the production was needed as a breath of idealism in a world turned deeply cynical, though skeptics felt it might miss the mark with today's audiences because of the tenor of the times. It was revived a decade earlier without making much of an impact.
"The reason I wanted to do the show is because there's a lot of fear and hatred and xenophobia floating around," Mitchell says. "And I think people need this show and this story."
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