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Schele Williams first saw \u201cThe Wiz\u201d when a tour of the original Broadway production came through Dayton, Ohio. She was 7 years old, and recalled it being the most \u201cbeautiful reflection of Blackness that I had never seen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Years later, she was cast as Dorothy in a high school production of \u201cThe Wiz,\u201d and the thrill of that experience led Williams to pursue a career in musical theater. She even used the show\u2019s soaring finale, \u201cHome,\u201d as one of her audition songs.<\/p>\n
Now, after working on Broadway as an actor (\u201cAida\u201d) and an associate director (\u201cMotown\u201d), she is directing the first Broadway revival of \u201cThe Wiz\u201d in almost 40 years. It\u2019s a chance, Williams said, to celebrate what \u201cThe Wiz\u201d has meant to her and to pass the story along to her daughters.<\/p>\n
Since becoming a Broadway hit in 1975, \u201cThe Wiz,\u201d a gospel, soul and R&B take on Dorothy\u2019s adventures in Oz, largely composed by Charlie Smalls, with a book by William F. Brown, has been a vibrant cornerstone of Black culture. The show blends Afrofuturism with classic Americana to enact a sort of creative reparation, reframing an allegory about perseverance and self-determination to feature Black characters who, in the \u201970s, had rarely appeared in popular children\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The 1978 Motown film adaptation, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, was a critical and box-office flop. But the movie has been a trippy favorite of family living rooms for multiple generations, and the musical has remained a staple on local stages around the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe weight of that is not lost on me,\u201d said Williams.<\/p>\n
The new production of \u201cThe Wiz,\u201d beginning previews on March 29 at the Marquis Theater, arrives in New York after a 13-city national tour that began in September. The creative team said its goal is to celebrate both the property\u2019s legacy and the richness of Black American history and culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Dorothy\u2019s odyssey in the original production could be read as a metaphor for the Great Migration<\/a>, and the film imagines late 1970s New York City as a gauntlet of urban blight. But here Williams focuses the story on the young heroine\u2019s search for belonging.<\/p>\n \u201cBlack teenage girls are often portrayed as tiny aunties and know-it-all types,\u201d Williams said, pointing to characters like Rudy Huxtable on \u201cThe Cosby Show.\u201d \u201cWe seldom give them permission to be vulnerable.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Now when we first meet Dorothy (Nichelle Lewis), in a black-and-white opening scene that pays homage to \u201cThe Wizard of Oz\u201d film, she is a city transplant in Kansas, lamenting to Aunt Em (Melody A. Betts) that her rural classmates have shunned her. \u201cHere is exactly where you belong,\u201d Aunt Em says.<\/p>\n The production makes a similar statement about Black culture in America, emphasizing its deep roots and broad influence in the country\u2019s history with the subtlest of details.<\/p>\n The show\u2019s set designer, Hannah Beachler, has lived in New Orleans for some 20 years, and Dorothy\u2019s landing place in Oz is modeled after Trem\u00e9, a historically Black neighborhood there. The celebration that ensues, over Dorothy\u2019s flattening of the wicked witch Evamene, resembles a second-line parade<\/a>, the jazz-infused tradition with origins in West Africa. The overhead set piece is inspired by an arch in New Orleans\u2019 Louis Armstrong Park.<\/p>\n \u201cI kept bringing it back to this idea of finding the future in the past,\u201d said Beachler, who in 2019 became the first African American Oscar winner for production design, for her work on \u201cBlack Panther.\u201d<\/p>\n Like Williams, Beachler was a young girl when she saw a tour of \u201cThe Wiz\u201d in Ohio, several years later in 1984. \u201cIt broke the dam open for me,\u201d she said, and began a pursuit of design that she described as \u201cgetting into my weird.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The overhead set piece also features patterns<\/a> found on quilts hung outside houses, quietly marking them as stations of the Underground Railroad. Each symbol corresponds with a stage in the journey of Dorothy and her friends. The North Star means they\u2019re easing on down the right road (the yellow brick one, that is), but wrenches in a square formation signal danger ahead, like an enchanted poppy field.<\/p>\n Some of the more subtle design details evoke African history and the Black diaspora. Adinkra symbols, native to Ghana, are carved into the bark of trees along Dorothy\u2019s path, meant to indicate support from mother nature and the ancestors. And Glinda (Deborah Cox) enters from a stoop bearing the address 1804, the year of Haiti\u2019s independence.<\/p>\n Other visual cues may require less annotation, like the golden gates of the Emerald City, which Beachler designed to resemble \u201cThe Wiz\u201d poster for the original Broadway production<\/a>, an inky silhouette of a woman trailed by swoops of hair. The city\u2019s buildings, in projections designed by Daniel Brodie, are likewise rendered to look like elaborate Black hairstyles.<\/p>\n \u201cEach of us brought a different perspective, so it\u2019s a bit like the diaspora,\u201d Beachler said of the creative team, which includes the costume designer Sharen Davis, an Oscar nominee for \u201cRay\u201d and \u201cDreamgirls,\u201d and the choreographer JaQuel Knight.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Like Beachler, Knight collaborated with Beyonc\u00e9 on the visual album \u201cBlack Is King,\u201d and brought the flavor of his hometown, Atlanta, to his work on \u201cThe Wiz.\u201d When the Tin Man (Phillip Johnson Richardson) regains the use of his limbs during \u201cSlide Some Oil to Me,\u201d his movement has a hip-hop vibe, rather than the usual tap dance associated with that scene\u2019s choreography.<\/p>\n Knight wanted to put his own spin on the extended dance sequence at the entrance to Emerald City, a beloved scene from the film that comes at the top of Act II in this production. Knight called his take on the number \u201ca master class in Black movement, not just through the choreography\u201d \u2014 which includes ballet, jazz, and several iterations of hip-hop \u2014 \u201cbut in attitude and personality.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When it came to the script, the book writer Amber Ruffin<\/a>, who received a Tony Award nomination for her work on \u201cSome Like It Hot,\u201d sought to give its language and familiar characters a contemporary polish. Each of Dorothy\u2019s companions has a more specific back story, and elements that seemed dated or off-color were cut. (\u201cI don\u2019t want to watch a Black lion get arrested by police mice,\u201d Ruffin said of one revised scene.)<\/p>\n She acknowledged that the musical\u2019s creators, who were white, \u201creally did a great job\u201d writing an indelible Black show (which also includes songs by Luther Vandross, Timothy Graphenreed and George Faison). Still, Ruffin\u2019s goal was to write a version of \u201cThe Wiz,\u201d she said, \u201cthrough the Blackest of Black lenses for Black\u2019s sake.\u201d That includes updated slang \u2014 so, yes to \u201cword,\u201d no to \u201cjive\u201d \u2014 that Ruffin hopes will not sound out of step to future generations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Williams, who is also co-directing \u201cThe Notebook,\u201d opening on Broadway this spring, said that audience affection for \u201cThe Wiz\u201d has been evident on the road. But the success of the original theatrical production, which won the Tony Award for best musical and ran for four years, has proved tough to replicate onstage.<\/p>\n For his review in The New York Times, Frank Rich likened the ill-fated 1984 revival,<\/a> <\/a><\/strong>with the show\u2019s original star Stephanie Mills, to<\/a> \u201ca trunkload of marked-down, damaged goods.\u201d A brief run at New York City Center\u2019s Encores! series in 2009, starring the singer Ashanti, was tepidly received.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope it\u2019s the exception,\u201d Williams said of this revival, which is set to open on April 17 for a limited engagement through Aug. 18. (A second leg of the tour, to begin in February 2025, has already been announced.) The creative team hopes to honor nostalgia for \u201cThe Wiz\u201d and to continue its tradition of uplifting Black culture with an eye toward social progress.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was really important for us to show how much we care about our heritage,\u201d Williams said. \u201cWe have a responsibility to consider how the art we make can influence the way we\u2019re seen in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n