The road isn't all that easy in The Wiz

Photo by Dan Norman

The Wiz is not a great piece of musical theater. Apart from the music, its soulful twist on The Wizard of Oz hasn’t aged all that well. The book is blah and the story misses plenty of important beats from the original that make it feel more like discreet episodes instead of a fully unified story.

The combined talents of Penumbra Theatre and the Children’s Theatre Company do their darndest to make it work. While the final product is far from perfect, it is much more entertaining than the various parts would indicate.

Dorothy is still from Kansas and is still under the care of her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry. The difference? The family is African American, and when the twister comes and takes her to Oz that fantastical land is modeled after New York City.

After landing on Coney Island, Dorothy makes her way south, picking up her familiar friends (though Toto is seen at the beginning and end, he is missing in action for most of the show) on their journey to see the Wizard. In this case, the Emerald City is the Apollo.

And yeah, you know the story from here. Wizard scares the quartet into taking care of the evil witch, Evillene. They dispatch her without much trouble, come back, get their rewards, and learn valuable lessons about themselves.

Mind you, this 1970s-era musical wasn’t trying to create a new interpretation, like Wicked. The Wiz really just wants to tell a familiar story with some punched up, soulful tunes. Songwriter Charlie Smalls gives the company plenty of great moments to dig into, from the funky choruses of “Ease on Down the Road” to a string of solos that threatened to bring the house down.

We’ve got Greta Oglesby, cast as Aunt Em and Evillene, reaching for the rafters on two numbers, the opening “The Feeling We Once Had” and “Don’t Nobody Bring Me Bad News.” Paris Bennett sings well throughout as Dorothy, and it is hard to go wrong with the likes of Dennis W. Spears, Aimee Bryant and T. Mychael Rambo filling out the cast.

When they are singing, The Wiz is great fun. It’s harder for the company to overcome William F. Brown’s sludgy script. All of the hard work done by the company, the creative team, and director Lou Bellamy can’t save us from the fact that we’re watching a facsimile of the original story, and like so many copies, it doesn’t capture all of the details of the original.

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