Goulet Still Master of ‘Impossible Dream’

You have to hand it to Robert Goulet. Though at 65 the onetime heartthrob looks like a teddy bear sent through the washer a few too many times--and though he doesn’t move as nimbly as before his prostate and hip-replacement surgeries--he still tours in musicals, lands the occasional small film role and cracks up anyone who’s seen that wacky Mercedes-Benz ad.

And the guy’s still got pipes. When he lets his rich, resonant baritone loose on “The Impossible Dream” in “Man of La Mancha” at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, the audience positively roars its approval.

He’s the drawing card for this first venture by Pacific Coast Theatre Group and Bellagio Productions, who dream of taking musicals on tour and, possibly, to Broadway. They’re already charging near-Broadway prices for this solid but unremarkable staging (by Gary Davis), but if they expect the public to keep shelling out that kind of money, they’d better muster more vision.

In the familiar presence of Lenny Wolpe, this production has a Sancho Panza of comic nimbleness and great generosity of spirit, but it is in Goulet’s dual role that the show’s heart resides--in a Cervantes of calm resourcefulness and a Don Quixote of touchingly off-kilter but noble dreams. There’s an amiable moment as he twines his baritone with son Michael Goulet’s, as Cervantes teaches a song to cellmates enacting his manuscript, but for sheer acting power, the elder Goulet is at his best in the deathbed scene, as his eyes search through the fog of his memory, failing to locate anything familiar--a scene, he has told interviewers, that recalls his own mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.

* “Man of La Mancha,” Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, Cerritos Town Center Complex, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. Today-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Sunday. $45-$65. (800) 300-4345. Running time: 2 hours, 32 minutes.