Culture Club

Anyone who has sat through a mediocre 3-hour Broadway musical knows that a little brevity can go a long way. And it’s just the thing needed for a new version of the Broadway hit, The Wiz, which premiered at the First Stage Children’s Theater this weekend.
Commissioned to develop a shorter version of the show that would be appropriate for children’s theaters, First Stage wisely chose to concentrate on the tunes at the expense of the banter between them. The result seems a little schematic at times, with a few lines of dialogue thrown in to keep the story moving along before the next musical number. But this new version preserves the charm and funky energy of the original.
It doesn’t hurt that composer Charlie Smalls tapped into the best of 70s R&B when he created the original music. There’s a lot of sweet soul in the show’s best songs, ballads like “Home,” and inspiring dance-a-longs like “Everybody Rejoice.” And First Stage’s leads (Sheri Williams Pannell as Aunt Em and Glinda, and Jade Taylor, a talented high school senior who is one of the production’s two Dorothys) handle them well. Jackson Evans brings a heaping helping of Ray Bolger-style looseness to the Scarecrow.
But a few extra minutes isn’t the only thing The Wiz has lost in the intervening 35 years. In the mid-70s, the show was more explicitly directed at black America, finding a correspondence between Dorothy’s dreams and the collective longings of African-Americans. (The Newark junior high students I taught in the early ‘80s all wanted to sing “Believe in Yourself” for the school talent show.) In the “post-racial” world of 2010, the show has a more multicultural feel—and it’s not simply because the show has a multicultural cast. The yearnings of black-Americans are no less powerful or warranted as they were 35 years ago, but these days, the road isn’t quite the same.
 

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