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Tuesday, November 12, 2024 |
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Reviving 'The Wiz' through 'the Blackest of Black Lenses' |
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The creative team of The Wiz revival, from left: Amber Ruffin, Hannah Beachler, Schele Williams and JaQuel Knight in New York, Feb. 11, 2024. The beloved 1975 musical returns to Broadway this spring, with nods to Black culture like second-line parades and Underground Railroad quilts. (Rafael Rios/The New York Times)
by Naveen Kumar
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NEW YORK, NY.- Schele Williams first saw The Wiz when a tour of the original Broadway production came through Dayton, Ohio. She was 7 years old, and recalled it being the most beautiful reflection of Blackness that I had never seen.
Years later, she was cast as Dorothy in a high school production of The Wiz, and the thrill of that experience led Williams to pursue a career in musical theater. She even used the shows soaring finale, Home, as one of her audition songs.
Now, after working on Broadway as an actor (Aida) and an associate director (Motown), she is directing the first Broadway revival of The Wiz in almost 40 years. Its a chance, Williams said, to celebrate what The Wiz has meant to her and to pass the story along to her daughters.
Since becoming a Broadway hit in 1975, The Wiz, a gospel, soul and R&B take on Dorothys 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 70s, had rarely appeared in popular childrens stories.
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.
The weight of that is not lost on me, Williams said.
The new production of The Wiz, beginning previews 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 propertys legacy and the richness of Black American history and culture.
Dorothys odyssey in the original production could be read as a metaphor for the Great Migration, and the film imagines late 1970s New York City as a gauntlet of urban blight. But here Williams focuses the story on the young heroines search for belonging.
Black teenage girls are often portrayed as tiny aunties and know-it-all types, Williams said, pointing to characters like Rudy Huxtable on The Cosby Show. We seldom give them permission to be vulnerable.
Now when we first meet Dorothy (Nichelle Lewis), in a black-and-white opening scene that pays homage to The Wizard of Oz film, she is a city transplant in Kansas, lamenting to Aunt Em (Melody A. Betts) that her rural classmates have shunned her. Here is exactly where you belong, Aunt Em says.
The production makes a similar statement about Black culture in America, emphasizing its deep roots and broad influence in the countrys history with the subtlest of details.
The shows set designer, Hannah Beachler, has lived in New Orleans for some 20 years, and Dorothys landing place in Oz is modeled after Tremé, a historically Black neighborhood there. The celebration that ensues, over Dorothys flattening of the wicked witch Evamene, resembles a second-line parade, the jazz-infused tradition with origins in West Africa. The overhead set piece is inspired by an arch in New Orleans Louis Armstrong Park.
I kept bringing it back to this idea of finding the future in the past, said Beachler, who in 2019 became the first African American Oscar winner for production design, for her work on Black Panther.
Like Williams, Beachler was a young girl when she saw a tour of The Wiz in Ohio, several years later in 1984. It broke the dam open for me, she said, and began a pursuit of design that she described as getting into my weird.
The overhead set piece also features patterns 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 theyre 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.
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 Dorothys 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 Haitis independence.
Other visual cues may require less annotation, like the golden gates of the Emerald City, which Beachler designed to resemble The Wiz poster for the original Broadway production, an inky silhouette of a woman trailed by swoops of hair. The citys buildings, in projections designed by Daniel Brodie, are likewise rendered to look like elaborate Black hairstyles.
Each of us brought a different perspective, so its a bit like the diaspora, Beachler said of the creative team, which includes costume designer Sharen Davis, an Oscar nominee for Ray and Dreamgirls, and choreographer JaQuel Knight.
Like Beachler, Knight collaborated with Beyoncé on the visual album Black Is King, and brought the flavor of his hometown, Atlanta, to his work on The Wiz. When the Tin Man (Phillip Johnson Richardson) regains the use of his limbs during Slide Some Oil to Me, his movement has a hip-hop vibe, rather than the usual tap dance associated with that scenes choreography.
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 2 in this production. Knight called his take on the number a master class in Black movement, not just through the choreography which includes ballet, jazz, and several iterations of hip-hop but in attitude and personality.
When it came to the script, book writer Amber Ruffin, who received a Tony Award nomination for her work on Some Like It Hot, sought to give its language and familiar characters a contemporary polish. Each of Dorothys companions has a more specific back story, and elements that seemed dated or off-color were cut. (I dont want to watch a Black lion get arrested by police mice, Ruffin said of one revised scene.)
She acknowledged that the musicals creators, who were white, really did a great job writing an indelible Black show (which also includes songs by Luther Vandross, Timothy Graphenreed and George Faison). Still, Ruffins goal was to write a version of The Wiz, she said, through the Blackest of Black lenses for Blacks sake. That includes updated slang so, yes to word, no to jive that Ruffin hopes will not sound out of step to future generations.
Williams, who is also co-directing The Notebook, opening on Broadway this spring, said that audience affection for The Wiz 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.
For his review in The New York Times, Frank Rich likened the ill-fated 1984 revival, with the shows original star Stephanie Mills, to a trunkload of marked-down, damaged goods. A brief run at New York City Centers Encores! series in 2009, starring the singer Ashanti, was tepidly received.
I hope its the exception, Williams said of this revival, which is set to open 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 The Wiz and to continue its tradition of uplifting Black culture with an eye toward social progress.
It was really important for us to show how much we care about our heritage, Williams said. We have a responsibility to consider how the art we make can influence the way were seen in the world.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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