`MAN OF LA MANCHA' TILTS TOO FAR.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Sometime, preferably very soon, ``Man of La Mancha'' is going to get the ``Show Boat'' treatment. That is, an impossible dreamer like Harold Prince will take scalpel in hand and begin the tough business of reconstructive surgery.

Meanwhile, we have Robert Goulet and company gamely going through the motions at the Pasadena Civic.

When ``La Mancha'' opened in New York 31 years ago, it was absolutely cutting-edge. A musical set in a 16th-century Spanish dungeon, with an insane hero and a brutal ``abduction ballet'' to boot? Broadway didn't get much edgier in those days.

Then, within a year or so, pop culture produced both ``Cabaret'' and ``Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.'' The American musical would never be the same, though Broadway would be among the last to notice.

Director Albert Marre once won a Tony award for ``La Mancha,'' and his current revival strains to re-create Dale Wasserman's original vision of Cervantes' novel about a loony idealist.

But characters who used to look hale and robust have grown tedious and/or cartoonish. Staging that formerly gleamed like new armor now seems stiff and clunky.

As the windmill-tilting Knight of the Woeful Countenance, Goulet possesses the requisite wide-eyed earnestness, the air of chivalrous befuddlement. His baritone remains richly imposing, and his rendition of ``The Quest'' (a k a ``The Impossible Dream'') has an old-timey, show-biz creaminess.

His performance, though, is largely externalized. He offers no fresh insights in his musical soliloquies, only towering affirmations - a shortcoming that hampers the production as a whole.

And the Mitch Leigh-Joe Darion score, an amalgam of stirring melodies, opera-size sentiments and vaudevillian schtick, cries out for a warmer, wittier arrangement than the coldly synthetic one provided here by a two-man keyboard orchestra.

Under these circumstances, the production yields some emphatically good singing, especially from tenor David Wasson's gentle Padre and Susan Hoffman's Aldonza (looking a bit too much like a Ventura biker chick, in her leather bustier and Loretta Lynn hairdo). Yet the cast, unchecked by the director, also indulges in a good deal of extraneous mugging that's closer to Hanna-Barbera than Borscht Belt.

That's distracting in a show the tone of which has always been tricky, teetering between its grim, Inquisitorial setting and its characters' psychological pratfalls, which frequently border on slapstick. The tension surfaces awkwardly at such moments as when the faithful Sancho Panza (Darryl Ferrer) breaks into the pitter-pattering ``A Little Gossip,'' while the comatose Don Quixote lies on his deathbed.

Inexplicably staged with an intermission - the original show ran in a single, riveting take - the production frequently has to jump-start itself. What ``Man of La Mancha'' really could use is a top-to-bottom tuneup.

THE FACTS

What: ``Man of La Mancha.''

Where: Pasadena Civic Auditorium, 300 E. Green St.

When: 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday; through Sunday.

Tickets: $22 to $61; call [phone].

Our rating: Two Stars.