The Wiz Rolls Back Into Town

Photo: Jeremy Daniel

If you’re at all familiar with The Wiz, elements of Charlie Smalls’s score hit with Pavlovian precision. There’s the groove of “Ease on Down the Road,” the seductive slickness of “Slide Some Oil to Me,” and of course that triumphal, transporting lilt that kicks off “Home.” When that tune peeks out, early on in Dorothy’s journey to Oz, you can feel a collective ahhh from the audience at this revival. Yet it’s a particular kind of familiarity, given that The Wiz is arguably both overlooked and omnipresent. The all-Black reimagining of The Wizard of Oz hasn’t been on Broadway since 1984—and that was a short stint after its immensely successful four-year run in the mid ’70s—but it’s maintained a staying power in other forms, thanks to the Sidney Lumet film starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, lots of community theater and school productions (seriously, watch future R&B star Jazmine Sullivan as Dorothy), and even The Wiz Live!, one of the better NBC live musicals. This revival of the The Wiz is playing to audiences that both know the show and yet are hungry to see it done full out—and crucially, to hear it.

It succeeds more on the latter front than the former. The score of The Wiz, full of funk, R&B, gospel, and more, will still thrill and delight you. Boy, can this cast sing—especially Nichelle Lewis, the 24-year-old discovery making her debut as Dorothy who can riff into the heavens. She’s joined by Wayne Brady, showing off more than his comedy skills as a wizard who’s a kind of pop star; Deborah Cox as a high-glam Glinda; and Melody A. Betts, doubling as Dorothy’s kindly Aunt Em and the campy, furious witch Evillene. The cast, when director Schele Williams (she also co-directed The Notebook) allows them the room to simply lay into the music, delivers. So do the dancers, whether swirling around as tornados or showing off an eclectic collection of quotes from contemporary styles as the chic crowd in Emerald City—JaQuel Knight, who worked with Beyoncé on “Single Ladies,” did the choreography.

But although the talent is all over the stage, it’s also trapped in confused and even ugly packaging. This revival traveled around the country before coming in New York, and indeed it looks like a cheap touring production rather than something that was honed and improved. The sets, by Hannah Beachler (contrasting with her beautiful Black Panther film work) are thin and garish, while the costumes (by Sharen Davis) have winking touches—Scarecrow dances in Timberlands; the Emerald City’s populace wears a variety of sci-fi silhouettes—that are realized with dull materials and fabrics. (The creative team said it aspired to designs that reference Black history and Afrofuturism, so it may be simply that the budget fell short.) Everything takes place in front of a giant video backdrop (by Daniel Brodie) of the kind that has come to make the experience of watching too many musicals—Spamalot and Almost Famous, in recent memory—feel like standing in the TV aisle at Best Buy. The video wall wages war with the human-scale charms onstage, making your eyes dart between the people trying to connect with the audience and whatever flickering digital animation looms behind them. In The Wiz’s case, there are fantastical renderings of Oz that, while clever—the Wiz can be found inside a tower that looks like a heaped-up pile of Afros, with a gate that resembles a pick—more often reminded me of weightless video-game loading screens or the resting page of Roku City. (The production has denied that AI was used in generating those projections, but the fact that the possibility comes to mind says a lot.) Instead of immersing us, the big screen makes the stage seem smaller and emptier, and everything becomes less real. When the characters bickered at the gates of Oz, I kept getting distracted by a train sliding through the background.

Those deficiencies cramp a show that, for all its musical advantages, already faces an uphill battle against its book. William F. Brown’s original rewiring of the story of The Wizard of Oz is a dated clunker, and so Amber Ruffin has stepped in to give it a fresh pass. Her work is light and mischievous, if also, like the staging, short on grandeur. Ruffin is best known as a comedian and talk-show host (she also co-wrote last season’s Some Like It Hot), and her goofy, hard comedy sensibility lends itself to writing silly theatrical punchlines, now spiked with contemporary signifiers: Dorothy is charged with murdering the Witch of the East, Evamene, “with reckless disregard for the housing market.” Ruffin has also reworked some of the characters’ backstories. Tinman (a totally charming Philip Johnson Richardson) is a fast-talking player who insulted the witch’s skills at karaoke. The Lion (a sweetly pouty Kyle Rama Freeman) was raised by strong lionesses who never made him lift a finger. The Scarecrow (a remarkably bendy Avery Wilson) was a crop scientist until his work got in the way of the witches’ weather-control agenda—maybe there’s a climate-change metaphor in there.

The jokes are good, but as they pile up, they undermine the show. My childhood memories of seeing the film of both The Wizard of Oz and The Wiz are tinted by moments of real terror, especially from that menacing witch. Here, Ruffin and Williams shoo all the scary stuff away. Betts’s Evillene is made too goofy to be a real threat—while melting, she announces that “worst of all, it is ruining my silk press!”—and those threatening poppies are mostly about blissing out and encouraging the characters to prioritize self-care. A show like The Wiz needn’t be a horror movie. Part of its lasting power is in its upbeat, joyous qualities, especially as a Black American narrative without a significant trauma plot. But if you subtract what’s ominous from Dorothy’s journey you also risk losing the adjacent sensations of awe and wonder. There should be something a little mysterious and chilling about a fantastical trip into another world, which neither The Wiz’s punched up book nor its shrunken-down staging manage to access.

The closest the revival gets is during Dorothy’s big journey back to Kansas as she sings “Home.” There, thankfully, the focus stays on the performance: The backdrop shifts to a black sky punctuated by stars, and Williams has Lewis illuminated by a spotlight belting her heart out from center stage. I felt my heart rising as Lewis sang, but even then the spell was incomplete. The Wiz’s sound design, which had been glitchy for much of the show, was askew, at least from my vantage point, and Lewis struggled to make herself heard above the orchestra. The effect was, as with so much of the revival, of missing out on a moment that could have been great, if only given more care and fine tuning.

The Wiz is at the Marquis Theatre.