Homeward Bound: A New Revival of The Wiz Eases Its Way Back to Broadway

On a Thursday evening in early November, a pack of Steelers fans poured out from a bar in downtown Pittsburgh and trooped past the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts, a stately old movie palace turned theater and concert hall. As black-and-gold jerseys mixed in with the overflow from the venue’s box office, one of the football guys asked what the line was for, and a patron told him.

“Oh, The Wiz?” a friend of his cried, eyes suddenly shining with delight. “That’s a great show!”

The Wiz tends to have that effect on people. Between its original Broadway run, starring a young Stephanie Mills, from 1975 to 1979; Sidney Lumet’s 1978 movie adaptation with Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor; and countless stagings in school auditoriums everywhere, to know its inspired, all-Black retelling of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it seems, is to cherish it.

That’s certainly true for the people behind its new revival, now on a much-celebrated national tour. (After engagements in San Francisco and Los Angeles this winter, The Wiz begins previews at the Marquis Theatre in New York in late March.) All four wonderful principal actors, Nichelle Lewis (Dorothy), Avery Wilson (the Scarecrow), Kyle Ramar Freeman (the Lion), and Phillip Johnson Richardson (the Tinman)—not one of them older than 30—grew up watching the movie; and in the late 1970s, director Schele Williams (Motown: The Musical) saw the show in Dayton, Ohio, during its second national tour. “I have never lived in a world without The Wiz,” says comedian Amber Ruffin, brought on to refresh William F. Brown’s original book. “It’s like asking, When did you first become aware of the news?”

The musical’s Tony-winning score—principally composed by Charlie Smalls, and layered with the sounds of soul, jazz, and gospel music—has a lot to do with its staying power. There are at least four perfect performances of “Home,” the soaring finale, rattling around the internet, including versions by a 19-year-old Whitney Houston, on The Merv Griffin Show, and an 11-year-old Jazmine Sullivan, at her Philadelphia elementary school. Rest assured that this revival sounds very, very good; I found that even the rather staid crowd in Pittsburgh couldn’t help but bob their heads to act two’s “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News,” led by a marvelous, tambourine-wielding Melody Betts as Evillene. (Moreover, in the 24-year-old Lewis, who will be making her Broadway debut, we now have a Dorothy with a thrilling whistle register; and it’s not for nothing that Deborah Cox, who plays Glinda the Good Witch, is also a beloved recording artist with a TikTok riff challenge named in her honor.) But the question remains: Nearly 50 years after its world premiere in Baltimore, in the fall of 1974, can The Wiz enchant an entirely new generation in New York?

To those who encountered it early on, The Wiz offered something almost unheard of: An insistently Black, mainstream musical fantasia that, instead of rehashing generational traumas or centering the scourge of modern racism, was just heartfelt and fun. “No one was on a slave ship, no one was being whipped, no one was being oppressed,” recalls Wayne Brady, who took over from Alan Mingo Jr. as the Wizard this month. “It was utter joy, and I think that’s why it stuck out so much.”

Directed and costumed by Geoffrey Holder, with choreography by former Alvin Ailey dancer George Faison and scenic design by Tom H. John, The Wiz announced itself to Williams as something special—to say nothing of seeing Mills, “a young Black girl onstage that looked like me,” as Dorothy. So she recognized both the tremendous opportunity and the towering stakes when, in 2021, she was approached about directing a revival. For The Wiz to capture an audience’s imagination all over again—and at a time when theater created by and for Black people is much less rare (and Wicked, a reworking of similar material, has been running for 20 years already)—it would have to feel exciting, big, and certainly not a half-century old.

That meant, for one thing, encouraging the show’s young cast to bring as much of themselves to those oft-​iterated characters as they could. “It’s work, but it doesn’t feel like work,” says Wilson, a popular R&B singer making his stage debut with The Wiz. I meet him, and the production’s other stars, in a sunlit rehearsal room at the Benedum Center, an upright piano tucked discreetly into one corner. “Schele was very adamant about telling me—and I’m sure she’s told everyone—‘I don’t want to see what I already saw. Whatever Michael Jackson did, I don’t want to see that. I want to see you.’ ” (It was a worthy reminder: Wilson rolls up a sleeve to show me the tattoo of Thriller-era Jackson on his left forearm.) For Freeman, who led the London premiere of A Strange Loop last summer before tackling The Wiz, that meant building his Lion, played both onstage and in the film by Ted Ross, from the ground up. The result is “Little Richard meets Jennifer Lewis meets Beyoncé,” he says with a laugh. “All of that is me.”

Engaging a creative team for whom the conventions of musical theater were hardly a thought was another important step. It’s where Ruffin came in (her work with Matthew López on the book for Some Like It Hot, which earned them both Tony nominations last year, came later), as well as choreographer JaQuel Knight, known for Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” visual; Hannah Beachler, the Oscar-winning scenic designer behind both Black Panther films; and costume designer Sharen Davis, a two-time Oscar nominee for 2004’s Ray and 2006’s Dreamgirls. (She calls The Wiz’s Emerald City sequence—which, here as in the film, functions as something of a fashion show—unequivocally “the biggest challenge in my career.”)

The effect of all that creative cross-pollination is awesome; every moment bursts with color, texture, humor, movement. “All of the things that make Black culture very distinct are in the show, whether it’s in the set, in our costumes, in the orchestrations,” says Cox. “I think it turned out so great because Schele was just like, ‘Do your worst—knock yourself out,’ ” adds Ruffin. “We got the best of everyone’s crazy ideas.”

So too did they get a very fine set of actors to mold the piece around. Dorothy was the hardest part to get right, but when Williams saw Lewis—a native of Chesterfield, Virginia, whose TikTok account endeared her to The Wiz’s casting agents—less than a month before rehearsals began, “I was like, Oh, that’s it,” she says. “There is a youthfulness about her that made me want to fight for her.”

Although Lewis is no stranger to a national tour—she spent half of 2022 traveling with Hairspray as one of the Dynamites—The Wiz has been a singular experience, and not only because she sings most of the score. “I don’t even know how to describe this cast,” she says, beaming. Clio, her new mini Bernedoodle puppy, and the company’s de facto mascot, is curled up at her feet. “Just being with a group of people that are all kind of from the same background, all trying to do something with their talent—I think we all relate, and we all inspire one another.”

“The core of the show is the four of us,” adds Richardson, who began his professional theater career doing Hamilton in Chicago. “So if we don’t have our dynamics, the whole show doesn’t really work.” (They are also on a very long ride together: Of the decision to tour The Wiz through 13 cities before it opens on Broadway, where most other productions do things the other way around, Williams says: “I’m a director that really believes in process. I relish the opportunity for a show to grow, and for me to learn from the audience.”)

On the first day of rehearsals, Williams spoke to her cast and crew about creating “radical joy” in the theater, and having the chance to uplift the next generation of Black artists. But what’s clear is that they are all, in one way or another, doing The Wiz for themselves, too. “I’m literally in my dressing room getting ready for my scenes, just glowing with pride because this show means so much to us,” Cox says. To put it on again is both an act of faith and a gesture of gratitude. “I bet all of our lives would be different if The Wiz didn’t exist,” Ruffin reflects. “So we’re taking care of it the way it has taken care of us.” 

In this story: hair, Miwako Urasugi; makeup, Francelle Daly. Wardrobe team: Alan Bennett and Jessica Simons. Character makeup, Kirk Cambridge-Del Pesche and Jaylene Ogle. Character hair and wigs, Marcia Baird, Ashley Wise, and Anita Solomon. 

The Wiz opens at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre on January 17, moving to the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles on February 13. Previews at New York’s Marquis Theatre begin on March 29.