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SMT 9 (1) pp. 53–69 Intellect Limited 2015

Studies in Musical Theatre Volume 9 Number 1

© 2015 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/smt.9.1.53_1

Keywords

The Wizard of OzThe WizWickedadaptationmusicalsperformance

ryan BunchRutgers University

oz and the musical: The

american art form and the

reinvention of the american

fairy tale

aBsTracT

Much as the musical is touted as an American art form, L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900) has been called the American fairy tale. Since its publica-tion, the book has been eclipsed in popularity by a series of musical–theatrical adap-tations, which are also among the most popular shows in the canon of musicals, suggesting an affinity between musicals and Oz. Close analysis of four Oz musicals, the Broadway extravaganza of 1903, the MGM film of 1939, The Wiz (1975) and Wicked (2003) shows how the conventions of musical theatre translate the already powerful symbolic national mythology of Baum’s book into participatory expressions of American identity through embodied performance. In return, Oz gives the musi-cal a signal national text which, through adaptation, allows the musical to reassert its own American pedigree while rearticulating the meaning of American identity at significant moments in the history of the genre.

I was at camp with some other kids one summer when somebody broke into ‘We’re Off to See the Wizard’ and started skipping down the path. We all joined in, and soon some other kids jumped out of the woods and started

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1. IuseAmericantorefertocommonconstructionsofUSidentityinspiteoftheobviousinaccuracyoftheterminaglobalcontext.TheideaofanAmerican musicalissimilarlyconstructedwhileatthesametimeconstitutingahistoricallyviablecategory.The Wizard of Oz,orsimplyOz,referstothetotalityofculturalinfluenceemanatingfromBaum’sstory,includingalladaptationsandtransformations.Referencestospecifictextswillbemadeclearineachdiscussion.

2. ForsummariesofcriticalandpopularinterpretationsofThe Wizard of OzasanAmericanmythaswellasofitssymbolsandpersonalquestnarrativeasdiscussedbelow,seeBurger2012:12–29;Rahn1998:8–22;Swartz2000:19–22;Kidd2011:92–102;andtheintroductionandrunningannotationsinHearn(2000).

chasing us, pretending to be winged monkeys. Nobody said, ‘Let’s play The Wizard of Oz’ or bothered explaining what part of the story we were in. Everybody knew the script, and with some liberties, could join in the perform-ance as easily as if it had been rehearsed. Indeed, this story has been – and always already is – rehearsed. We were participating as a community in a body of common cultural knowledge. The source of this common ritual was L. Frank Baum’s 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but it was the famous MGM film adaptation of 1939 – a musical – whose conventions made it possi-ble for us to burst into song and dance spontaneously.

There seems to be a special affinity between Oz and the musical. Much as The Wizard of Oz has been touted as the American fairy tale (or more gran-diosely, an American myth), the musical as cultivated on Broadway and in Hollywood is regarded as a distinctly American art form (Hearn 2000: xii; Zipes 1994: 119–38; Burger 2012: 10–11; Wagenknecht 1929: 17; Rahn 1998: 8–9; Swartz 2000: 10; Knapp 2005: 3; Wolf 2011: 13).1 Over time, Baum’s children’s book has been superseded in popularity by a series of stage and screen musi-cal adaptations, which are also among the most popular shows in the theatri-cal canon. Given that many people’s experience of Oz is likely to be a musical and that many people’s first or primary experience of a musical might well be a version of The Wizard of Oz, I would like to consider how Oz and musi-cals can be understood in terms of each other and what we can learn about the performance of American identity in the formal and social spaces where they meet.

Many explanations for the persistence of Oz as an American myth point to the power and universality of its symbols.2 The gift of the musical to The Wizard of Oz is to translate the already powerful symbolic national mythology of Baum’s book into participatory expressions of American identity through embodied performance. What Oz gives the musical in return is a signal national text which, through adaptation, allows the musical to reassert its own American pedigree – while redefining ‘America’ itself – at significant moments in American and musical–theatrical history.

In the readings that follow, I analyse four prominent musical adapta-tions of The Wizard of Oz to see how the conventions of musical theatre facili-tate their transformations of the story according to divergent expressions of American identity: Baum’s own Broadway extravaganza of 1903, the famous MGM film (Fleming 1939), the stage and screen productions of The Wiz (1975 and Lumet 1978) and the revisionist Broadway musical Wicked (2003). In each case, I will consider the circumstances of adaptation, the ways in which the theatrical conventions of each musical revise the story, the lessons of personal and communal performance learned by Dorothy (or Elphaba) in close reading of the performance text, evidence of participation by spectators, and the ways in which each adaptation uses The Wizard of Oz to stake out a position within the historiography of the musical and social history of the United States. First however, it might be useful to identify the symbolic elements of the basic story and their compatibility with the conventions of the musical.

The man behind The curTain

The Wizard of Oz is often read as a coming-of-age story in the form of a quest narrative with simple, recognizable symbols. Dorothy, stranded in Oz, seeks to return home, while her travelling companions – the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion – seek brains, heart and courage. They petition the Wizard

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for help, and after doing his bidding to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, they discover that he is a fraud, but still insist that he grant their wishes. The characters are simply defined in terms of their most essential desires – brains, heart, courage and home. Dorothy – earnest, pragmatic, kind-hearted and self-reliant – represents an ideal of American pre-adolescent girlhood and is broadly sketched as a character so that readers might readily identify with her (Hearn 2000: 12–14). Important for our purposes is the Wizard, who is a circus showman. This character, an American archetype sharing much in common with the politician, the salesman and the preacher – and vividly embodied in the popular image of P. T. Barnum – suggests much about the performance of identity in American culture, in which self-invention is a creed. The Wizard is a master performer (if a ‘very bad Wizard’). He uses tricks and ventriloquism to effect illusions of transformation (including the famous giant head) and to convince Dorothy and her friends of his great power. In the MGM film, his true identity is exposed dramatically when Dorothy’s dog Toto pulls back a curtain (in an act which itself is notably theatrical), revealing the Wizard’s performance as he works his theatrical machinery. In spite of this revelation and the Wizard’s insistence that they already possess the qualities they seek, Dorothy’s friends are not satisfied until he gives them prosthetic (in the book) or symbolic (in the movie) brains, heart and courage. Dorothy learns from the Good Witch Glinda that her magic silver shoes have always had the power to transport her home. They become outward symbols of her own powers of self-determination, and the ability to go home comes to symbolize self-knowledge. On a more practical level, however, Dorothy cannot go home just by believing in herself. She must perform the proper ritual to use the shoes (clicking her heels three times). In all of this, there is a complex relationship between internal and external versions of the self. Although Dorothy’s friends know the Wizard’s performance is just that, they still choose to believe in its efficacy by completing their own performances of identity.

The same ability to accept performance in a dual relationship with authentic expression is true of our experience with musicals. No matter how hard musicals try to obscure the performance through plot integration, tran-sitional dialogue and other naturalizing techniques, when an actor bursts into song, we accept the contradiction of its being both a spontaneous, authentic expression and a well-executed performance (Knapp 2005: 12–13; Wolf 2011: 11). Like Dorothy’s companions, we still believe, even after the performance has been revealed. The musical also has its pantheon of Wizard-like persuasive showmen, with The Music Man’s Harold Hill leading the pack (Laird 2011: 198).

The Wizard’s curtain might serve as a useful image for ways in which the musical negotiates these issues (Knapp and Morris 2011: 150). If Baum’s book attempts to conceal its performativity behind its seemingly transcendent symbols and authorial, canonical voice, the musical adaptations pull back the curtain to reveal its literary performance and invite us to participate actively. The combination of symbolism with embodied performance encourages the tale’s persistence, but in ways that suggest multiplicity and difference rather than universality and unity. In their emphasis on performance, both Oz and musicals privilege doing over being in the quest for personal fulfillment and community formation. This commitment to acting, in all senses of the word is what makes The Wizard of Oz a distinctly American tale (Knapp 2006: 140–41). The complicated relationship between authentic and performed identities will be a running theme of musical adaptations of Oz.

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Some other ways in which The Wizard of Oz and musicals share the same concerns are worthy of note. Oz and the musical are both understood not only as American, but utopian (Wagenknecht 1929; Zipes 1994; Dyer 2002: 19–35). However, unlike many classic examples of the genre, musicals that faithfully adapt The Wizard of Oz construct their utopian community in the absence of the marriage trope (Altman 1987: 104). Only the 1903 Wizard and Wicked indulge in generic romantic plots, and even in these cases, the rela-tionships are incomplete, inconsequential, or potentially queer (Wolf 2011: 197–218). The female protagonist is central to both Oz and the musical. Musicals empower women through song, even when the narratives oppress them (Wolf 2011: 6–7, 12). It is notable that in all of these musicals, Dorothy is not a little girl, as in the book, but an adolescent or young woman. This way of representing Dorothy adds intensity to the coming-of-age narrative by giving her access to the empowering affect of a singer on the verge of acquiring the mature voice of womanhood.

Because of the influence of the musical, most people’s experience of Oz is physical, performative, participatory, ritualistic, playful and profoundly subjec-tive. My childhood example of playing, re-enacting or performing The Wizard of Oz serves as a model for the ways in which each musical adaptation is just such a renewed and reinventive performance of the communal script.

a carnival of performance: Baum’s musical exTravaganza

Perhaps none of the musical adaptations of Oz revels in its performances more gleefully than the first one, the Broadway extravaganza of 1903, co-authored by Baum himself. Baum had been an actor before he became a writer of children’s books and was always keen to turn his literary properties into stage works. With composer Paul Tietjens, he wrote an operetta faithful to the book, with songs relating closely to the story. Producer Fred Hamlin and director Julian Mitchell, however, saw the show as an extravaganza (Swartz 2000: 27–158).

Under their direction, the popular theatre conventions of the day were grafted onto Baum’s story with such zest that Dorothy’s quest became lost in a show packed with spectacle, chorus girls, topical humour, physical comedy, romantic subplots, speciality numbers, mistaken identities, and the general frivolity typical of the extravaganza’s blend of vaudeville, operetta, burlesque and pantomime. The true stars were Fred Stone and David Montgomery, a vaudeville comedy team who, as the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, engaged in comedic cross-talk and speciality songs that were essential to the show’s popularity. The Lion’s role, on the other hand, was reduced to a non-speaking actor in pantomime costume. Added subplots introduced a raft of new char-acters, including Pastoria, a motorman who is the rightful ruler of Oz; his girl-friend Tryxie Tryfle, a waitress; and Cynthia Cinch, a ‘lady lunatic’ who is in love with the Tin Woodman (who is now named Niccolo and plays the piccolo). These characters appear not only as themselves but also in disguise during the plot’s twists and turns, adding to the playfulness around the performance of identity. Dorothy herself is no longer a little girl but a teenage ingénue played by 15-year-old Anna Laughlin, kicking off a long tradition of the character being played by adolescent actresses on stage and screen. Even Dorothy gets something of a romantic subplot, since the Oz poet laureate Dashemoff Daily, played by an actress en travesti, is smitten with her.

The meaning of home, so important in the book and the later musicals is practically an afterthought here as Dorothy’s story is eclipsed by the political

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intrigue around Pastoria’s attempts to reclaim his throne from a usurping Wizard. The Wicked Witch of the West is omitted (as are the magic shoes), eliminating much of the potential drama from Dorothy’s story. The Oz in which Dorothy has landed is at times barely distinguishable from the America from which she has come. There are topical jokes with political references, characters with modern occupations and hobbies, and much ethnic humour that reflects the changing demographics of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the Good Witch helps her return at the end, the curtain falls before we see Dorothy return to Kansas.

Performance itself, rather than fidelity to Baum’s novel, was the point of this production. Although a few story-driven songs remained, the most popu-lar had no connection to Dorothy’s story – or anybody else’s. One of the best remembered numbers was sung by Tryxie Tryfle while travelling in disguise as a circus performer. Asked to demonstrate her speciality, a serio-comic song, each night the actress playing the role would turn directly to an unsuspecting male audience member seated in the box and serenade him with ‘Sammy’, a minstrel-influenced love ballad (Swartz 2000: 92). This indulgent perform-ance, breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge the participation of the audi-ence, was emblematic of the entire enterprise. Both the song and the stunt were wildly popular. Similarly, Fred Stone’s biggest hit from the show, ‘The Traveler and the Pie’, was sung as a diversion in the second act while the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman are fleeing in disguise from Pastoria, who has been restored to the throne and views them as allies of the Wizard. The Wizard himself is a more than usually cynical version of the cheap-trick circus performer. He was played in the pre-Broadway Chicago production as an Irish comedic speciality, but the ethnic flavour was changed to ‘Dutch’ follow-ing weak reviews of the performance. When a new performer took over the role, he returned to Irish (Swartz 2000: 87). After granting the Scarecrow and Tin Man their brains and heart, the Wizard does what he does best – put on a show. In celebration of his own genius, he presides over a ‘Ball of All Nations’, a long divertissement in which members of the cast perform as a variety of national and ethnic stereotypes.

It might be tempting to dismiss the 1903 Wizard as irrelevant to my larger project, given its lack of emphasis on the more straightforward elements of Baum’s story. However, there is much to be learned about the perform-ance of identity from all the ethnic stock characters, mistaken identities, and wanton playing to the audience. Many of these performances reflect a turn-of-the-century ‘melting pot’ ideal of American society, manifesting not only the growing diversity of the country, but also the opportunity presented by theatre as a site of participation by immigrant and minority populations – even as it serves as a spectacle for a dominant white audience. Through all the antics going on around her, Dorothy remains, as one of her songs has it, ‘Just a Simple Girl from the Prairie’ with whom this mainstream audience may easily identify and for whose benefit this carnival of performed identities is staged. Regrettable though some of these performances are in hindsight (including the occasional coon song), they show Dorothy the diversity of America. Moreover, they show her that it is performed. Each Oz musical teaches Dorothy and the audience something a little bit different about how to act American. In the 1903 Wizard, it is the conscious and multi-vocal performance of identity itself.

Although largely forgotten today, the 1903 Wizard was hugely popu-lar in its time. It was one of the last of the extravaganzas and it occupies a transitional moment between nineteenth century variety entertainment and

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twentieth-century musical comedy. It probably contributed to the popular-ity of the book, and it exerted influence on later musical adaptations. Critics hated the show, but audiences asserted their role in the process of reception by ignoring them (Swartz 2000: 102–04). Subsequent national tours brought the show to America’s heartland where it was warmly received in small towns (Swartz 2000: 124). The show was sufficiently secure in the collective memory by 1939 that its spectacular centrepiece, an elaborate transformation scene featuring a snowstorm and voluptuous chorus girls dressed as poppies, was the inspiration for a similar scene in the MGM film. Ray Bolger had idol-ized Fred Stone and was inspired by his dancing in his own portrayal of the Scarecrow (Swartz 2000: 244–45, 250).

Together, Baum’s children’s book and this first musical adaptation set up the terms of a binary theme that returns in each version. The book is notable for its straightforward style, folkloric structure, unity of purpose and universal-izing symbolism. The musical is a Bakhtinian carnival of performance, plurality, and difference in its unapologetic indulgence of variety entertainment. Baum himself spent much of his career hereafter pursuing the more carnivalesque approach in his thirteen book sequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chaston 2001). Some of these books were written as though they were really sequels to the musical, with the idea already in mind to musicalize them as well. The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), is not only dedicated to Montgomery and Stone, but stars their characters, uses much theatrical humour, and includes an army of women revolutionaries who could be portrayed by chorus girls in the even-tual stage production. A certain tension between the cohesion of operetta and the carnival of musical comedy – the former emphasizing the integrity of story, the latter the pleasure of performance – followed Baum through the remainder of his career, and it also follows musical–theatrical transformations of Oz to the present.

my own BacKyard: mgm’s The Wizard of oz

The MGM film returns to the essential form of Baum’s story while introduc-ing the conventions of the classical Hollywood film musical. This is the first time a musical adaptation of Oz takes a form resembling the modern concept of the ‘integrated’ musical (Meyerson and Harburg 1993: 122–25). The tone is sentimental, the narrative strives for cohesion, and the songs serve character and story. Nonetheless, these coherent strategies are continually undermined by disruptive elements of vaudeville and camp.

Camp, the overriding style of the film, is inherent to the film musical gener-ally, and particularly those produced by MGM (Knapp 2005: 13; Knapp and Morris 2011: 146–50; Cohan 2005: 1–40). Its effect is especially pronounced as employed here, in conjunction with the subgenre of the fairy tale musical, where the attempt to appeal to adults and children simultaneously produces a ‘doubleness’ of meaning (Knapp 2006: 124). This duality is implicated in the film’s decision to explain Dorothy’s journey as a dream – likely in order to make the fantasy acceptable to an adult audience. While the Kansas scenes are rendered in nostalgic sepia tones and cinematic realism, the dream world of Oz removes all restrictions on spectacle, fantasy, visible theatricality and camp. Oz is saturated in Technicolor, the sets are extravagant, the costumes are whimsical and the sparkling ruby slippers (changed from silver for added colour) dazzle. Nothing in Oz tries to hide its artifice. We can see that the Munchkinland flowers are plastic and the backgrounds are painted (Rahn

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1998: 116). Similarly, the character portrayals are visible as performances: we recognize the inhabitants of Oz, both as characters and as actors in costume, especially since we have already met the ‘real’ versions of most of them in Kansas (Knapp 2006: 132). Because of its camp style, double-voiced attitude towards the believability of its subject matter, and exaggerated use of the trap-pings of fantasy and spectacle, MGM’s The Wizard of Oz is less a fantasy film than a film in fantasy drag.

In the midst of all this, Dorothy is once again a typical American girl with whom we might easily identify. And yet she does not quite fit in at home, either. Judy Garland, sixteen years old, is manifestly not a little girl, but a young adult, with an adult’s voice, in child drag. In the cinematic realist environment of the Kansas scenes, where the farmhands have not yet gotten into the costumes they will wear in Oz, Dorothy’s obvious theatricality only serves to intensify the feeling that she is out of place. Even her exaggerated earnestness comes across as camp. In ‘Over the Rainbow’ she expresses a child-like desire to get away to a place without any trouble, but her voice gives away her burgeoning maturity. The effectiveness of the scene is made more compelling by its duali-ties of authentic and performed identity. She becomes a more authentic version of herself when she sings, but in Kansas she is the only one who does. She is a singer in a non-singing world who can only indulge in private performance. She is unable to perform as a member of the community in Kansas.

In Oz, Dorothy learns to perform as a member of a community by under-going a transformation from soloist to member of an ensemble. When she arrives, she finds herself in a world of nearly continuous song and dance. There is a shift of register from Kansas, a change of theatrical mode from speech and narrative to song and dance (Cohan 2010: 3). Upon opening the farmhouse door onto the Technicolor set of Munchkinland, she walks right into a mini-ature operetta, and from this point to her arrival in the Emerald City, Oz may be seen as one long musical sequence occasionally interrupted by the threat-ening Wicked Witch of the West. At first, Dorothy is a bewildered observer of this scene. She neither sings nor dances during the Munchkinland sequence. She does not know how to participate in this new community. As they see her off on her journey, the Munchkins teach her the first steps to commu-nal performance. She moves tentatively at first, but the Munchkins encourage her, repeating ‘Follow the Yellow Brick Road’ till the chant builds rhythmi-cally, her steps turn into a dance, and everyone bursts into song.

Dorothy becomes an increasingly confident performer each time she encounters a new friend in Oz. The Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion each have solos in which they sing of their missing traits while discovering the use of their bodies – the Scarecrow can hardly stand and the Tin Man is liter-ally rusty. With each new addition, they sing ‘We’re Off to See the Wizard’ together as they dance down the road. These episodes give Dorothy the chance to practice her new performing skills with her equally inexperienced peers. Whereas ‘Over the Rainbow’ was solitary and longing, Dorothy’s performance in group numbers in Oz allows her to grow and become empowered through song and dance as her solo act becomes a duet, a trio and a quartet (and Toto too!). On arrival in the Emerald City, Dorothy has sufficiently mastered the mechanics of group performance to sing along with the ensemble in ‘Merry Old Land of Oz’ and become a fully performing member of the community. This community is besieged by one major threat – the non-singing Wicked Witch of the West (although she is monstrously ‘envoiced’ with a bone-chilling cackle), who must be destroyed in order to maintain harmony in Oz.

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In counterpoint to the communal performances are the individual ones, which exploit the vaudevillian backgrounds of the actors (Harmetz 1977: 159–61; Rushdie 1992: 48–49). These performances foreground the self-inventive possibilities – and limits – of performance. ‘If I Were King of the Forest’ was written specifically for Bert Lahr’s performing abilities by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg in a collaboration recalling the speciality numbers of Montgomery and Stone (Harmetz 1977: 160; Meyerson and Harburg 1993: 149–52). In the role of the Cowardly Lion, Lahr delivers a virtuoso perform-ance of fluid identities, alternating between masculine bravura and feminine sensitivity in a burlesque of the pretensions of opera through encoded flour-ishes of gender, class and ethnic humour derived from his vaudevillian back-ground and Brooklyn Jewish roots. Frank Morgan, in a role originally intended for W. C. Fields, appears as no less than five different characters, including the Wizard (Harmetz 1977: 120). His awarding of tokens for brains, heart and courage to Dorothy’s friends was written by Harburg to satirize the charac-ters’ investment in ‘the images of things rather than the things themselves’ (Meyerson and Harburg 1993: 58). This performance satisfies her friends, but the Wizard’s inability to return Dorothy home shows us the limits of an act not backed up by something genuine. Glinda appears to be the true author-ity figure, but even she seems motivated by theatrical concerns, because only at the end of the movie does she reveal that the ruby slippers could have taken Dorothy home from the beginning: it turns out that Dorothy’s journey through Oz has all been an elaborate performance designed to teach her self-reliance.

To be certain, the Tin Man asks her directly, ‘What have you learned, Dorothy?’ Having learned to perform both with individual integrity and as a member of a community, Dorothy responds with a more explicit statement of the home-as-self-knowledge trope than is offered by either the book or the first musical: ‘if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with’. She clicks her heels, chants ‘There’s no place like home’, and returns to Kansas ready to integrate into the community. Surrounded by family and friends she declares, ‘I’m not going to leave here ever, ever again!’

For many, this sentiment is less than satisfactory, especially if understood as a young woman’s return to home, household, and traditional gender roles after all the liberating pleasures of Oz (Rushdie 1992: 56–57), but it is suited to the conservative times. The Depression of the 1930s had brought a reaction against the libertine 1920s, and the impending war would usher in an era of patriotic nostalgia largely centred on images of small-town and rural Middle America. The Motion Picture Production Code, which marginalized alterna-tive points of view regarding gender, sexuality and race, was in full effect. In contrast to the diversity of the 1903 version, MGM shows us an America – and an Oz – that is more or less exclusively white. In addition, the MGM film performs a camp version of wholesome family entertainment in imitation of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), whose success it intended to duplicate. It also anticipates the nostalgic and thematically ‘integrated’ musicals of the 1940s, such as those produced by Arthur Freed at MGM and Rodgers and Hammerstein on Broadway. The conservative moral, upholding family and one’s place in it, was perhaps inevitable in the context of war and uncertainty that produced these nostalgic impulses.

However, MGM’s Oz does not simply promote nostalgic Americana. It camps it by simultaneously investing in it and making light of it. The queer and

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Jewish sensibilities that contributed to camp style provided important subver-sive antidotes to the superficial conservatism of Hollywood films during this era (Knapp and Morris 2011: 148). The ironic self-reflexivity and leftist politics of queer and Jewish film-makers in Hollywood coded the film with a double significance that could be picked up by those in the know. Anecdotally, by the mid-1950s, The Wizard of Oz had become a myth of queer subcultures, with Judy Garland as a gay male icon and the journey to Oz a metaphor for leaving a point of origin to find a home in the more inclusive communities of cities like New York and San Francisco (Zank 2010: 64–65; Knapp 2006: 133–34; Wright 1999: 173). Because it may be received either in earnest or as camp, the MGM film is simultaneously a conformist and subversive text.

The influence of the MGM film can scarcely be overstated. Annual televi-sion broadcasts made the movie a classic and allowed people to feel owner-ship of it through ritual viewing. Playing Oz became an American tradition for both children and adults. More recently, at popular sing-along screenings, the film is embraced both by those who find its message affirming and those who view it as camp, as well as many who do both at once. Subsequent versions of The Wizard of Oz considered here are always managing audience expectations on the basis of MGM’s vision of Oz and America.

The super soul musical: The Wiz on sTage and screen

The Wiz makes a direct challenge to MGM’s picket-fence hegemony, troping on both the book and the classic film to make an African-American claim on a presumptively white American fairy tale (Wolf 2011: 111; Woll 1989: 263; Burger 2012: 38). The idea of a black version of Oz is affirmed by the tagline on the Broadway cast recording: ‘The Super Soul Musical Wizard of Oz’. The 1978 film adaptation directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, in spite of mixed critical reception, has secured status as a classic black film musical.

It is possible to see The Wiz as an elaborate act of Signifyin(g) – revis-ing the tropes of the ‘white’ versions of Oz ‘with a black difference’ (Gates 1988: xxii).3 ‘Ease on Down the Road’, sung by Dorothy and her friends as they journey together, revises a familiar song from the MGM film by translat-ing the Anglo-American music and dance styles of ‘Follow the Yellow Brick Road’ into words and music readily identified with black popular music and culture of the 1970s. The Wiz (even the title signifies) thus speaks to both black identity and white hegemony simultaneously. Black vernacular speech, music, and movement transform the agrarian, rooted, nostalgic myth of Baum’s book and the MGM film into an urban, mobile, modern vision, with new ideas about home and community influenced by black histories of migra-tion, struggle and faith (Wolf 2011: 113). There had been black versions of ‘white’ stories on Broadway before, but The Wiz was created by an almost entirely African-American creative team, resulting in a show with a relaxed style of self-reflexive humour and a level of comfort with satirizing both The Wizard of Oz and black cultural expression from within.

The Broadway collaborators, influenced by the Afrocentric and Black Arts movements, produced a show that incorporated pan-African pageantry, costumes inspired by Trinidadian carnival and African mask art, and a high energy presentation of black performing traditions. Much of the story and setting are conveyed abstractly through creative use of costume, dance and ritualized performance. For example, the Yellow Brick Road is represented by

3. In rendering the concept of Signifyin(g) with a capital S and parenthetical (g), I follow the practice of Henry Louis Gates, who devised this spelling to show both the relationship and the distinction between the black vernacular practice and its standard English homonym (1988: 46).

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men in yellow tuxedoes who escort Dorothy and her friends as they sing and dance their way to the Emerald City. Participation is an important tradition in African-American performance and The Wiz proceeds in this spirit. No signifi-cant character is denied his or her moment to step out from the ensemble and sing a solo, including the Wicked Witch, who gets a show-stopping gospel number. This emphasis on providing musical performances for each charac-ter is accommodated by The Wiz’s being developed first for the stage, which results in its having many more songs than the MGM version. Within a plot structure resembling the classic film, a Blaxploitation-style version of vaude-villian ethnic humour, along with the pleasures of presentational performance as described above, resulted in a carnival of performance close in spirit to the 1903 Wizard.

Dorothy once again plays ‘straight’ to the performances around her. On Broadway she was another simple farm girl, played in the adolescent tradi-tion by 15-year-old Stephanie Mills. In the film, she is a 24-year-old Harlem schoolteacher played by Diana Ross. In neither case does Dorothy desire to leave home in the beginning as in the MGM adaptation – Ross’s Dorothy is reluctant to leave Aunt Em’s house and strike out on her own. In Oz, the other actors put on a spectacle of racial difference – a tourist performance of black America – for her. The Scarecrow, The Tin Man and Cowardly Lion sing pastiches of black vaudeville, gospel, soul, funk, and disco in an overall Motown sound. The character of the Wiz is a James-Brown-like showman variously described as a pimp, politician and preacher (Earle 1993: 158). On Broadway, Andre de Shields brought a queer sensibility to the role from his racy cabaret act, performing a chameleon-like character undermining fixed notions of race, gender and sexuality.

Dorothy is at first bewildered and frightened by this strange new world (‘Soon as I Get Home’), but, as before, she builds a community as the ensem-ble grows with the addition of each new friend (Wolf 2011: 115–16). In the end, Dorothy must demonstrate her ability to perform as part of this community. Her foil in this respect in the movie is the Wiz, played by non-singer Richard Pryor. Unable to become empowered through song and dance like the Broadway version of his character, he is ultimately unable to function in the community – unable even to grant Dorothy’s friends their wishes. Dorothy herself must step in to explain that they already have what they need, and importantly for the movie’s message, she offers no symbolic substitutes. Glinda (Lena Horne – what higher authority could there be?) appears to assure Dorothy that brains, heart, courage and even home are found within: ‘If we know ourselves, we’re always home anywhere’ (Lumet 1978). Just before clicking her heels, Dorothy sings her final number, ‘Home’, an anthem of self-determination, about what she has learned from the people in this strange new world: ‘And I’ve learned that we must look inside our hearts to find/ a world full of love/Like yours, like mine/Like home’ (Lumet 1978). This soulful ballad is the strongest statement we have had yet of internal self-knowledge, drawing on both soul and the black tradition of testifying. That Dorothy expresses her newfound knowledge in song – in contrast to the MGM film, in which singing is overwhelmed by narrative halfway through – makes it all the more powerful. She sings directly to the audience (or the camera), in an act of honesty that, at the same time, reminds us she is performing. Although soulful singing involves a good deal of spontaneity and honesty, it simultaneously requires virtuosity. Following this sanctifying statement of self-determination, Dorothy clicks her heels and returns home ready to face new adventures of fulfilling self-discovery.

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Direct community participation with The Wiz was provoked by its initially weak Broadway opening and lacklustre reviews (Wolf 2011: 114–15). Mainstream critics, perhaps falling victim to the show’s signifying tricks, did not seem to understand the appeal of this piece of black musical theatre. The Amsterdam News, New York’s African-American newspaper, advocated for the show in reviews and editorials, and the promotional team recruited black church groups. As a result, the show continued its run for the next four years. Both the film and the stage performances continue to be popular within and beyond the black community. There is a tradition of ritual view-ing in black households paralleling that of the MGM film (Curry 2008: 63). Mixed-cast productions of the stage version have challenged binary assump-tions of race, and school and community theatre productions are frequently mounted with mixed or all white casts, which have understandably attracted some controversy.

The Wiz reinvents The Wizard of Oz, the musical, and America all at once to include a black perspective. In the process, Oz serves as an authoritative American text revised by black music, which is perceived to be an authenti-cally American artistic expression. All of this took place during a larger renais-sance of black musical theatre on Broadway (Woll 1989: 249–73). Dorothy’s soulful vocal performance – more empowering than anything available at the time of the MGM film – is made possible by black musical traditions as well as changes in vocal technique, musical style and sound technology developed in musicals during the intervening years. In the context of the 1970s, The Wiz’s stereotypes of black difference, like soul music itself, were celebratory expres-sions of black pride and optimism in the post-civil-rights era. They also reflect ongoing struggles. Dorothy may be read as a black woman heading a house-hold or rescuing black men for the preservation of the family and the commu-nity (Wolf 2011: 111; Williams 2010: 191–99). In a time of both disco and urban decay, The Wiz’s urban style was a celebration of the glamour and grit of the city. The use of disco in the score evokes queer and feminist intersec-tions in The Wiz’s black fantasies, and ‘Everybody Rejoice (Brand New Day)’, sung after the melting of the Wicked Witch, captures the liberating spirit of the black and gay clubs where disco was popular.

At the same time, The Wiz was part of a trend of less overtly political black musicals on Broadway in the late 1970s, perhaps reflecting black aspirations to mainstream success and the era’s growing emphasis on personal fulfill-ment and self-help summarized in Glinda’s song ‘Believe in Yourself’ (Wolf 2011: 114; Woll 1989: 263–65; Earle 1993: 165). Historically, musical theatre was ‘one of the few avenues of black mobility in a white world’ (Woll 1989: xiv). The yellow brick road might serve as a symbol of this mobility and the histories of migration and diaspora that The Wiz embodies. In The Wiz more than any other version, home is independent of geography and wholly identi-fied with essential self-knowledge.

The rules of someone else’s game: Wicked’s amBiguiTies

Whereas The Wiz particularizes its retelling of Oz by embedding it in the performance practices of an influential minority community, Wicked allego-rizes its concern for difference and exports it around the world. The musical is nominally adapted from a single source, Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel of the same name, which inverts the perspective of the familiar story to explore the construction of wickedness from the perspective of Elphaba, the Wicked

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Witch of the West. In reality it tropes on any existing versions of Oz, and like The Wiz, it challenges MGM’s canonical authority through reinterpreta-tion and by capitalizing on audiences’ familiarity with that version of the story (Boyd 2010: 64).

The musical sacrifices a degree of the novel’s dark complexity to accom-modate the conventions of the musical, notably substituting a more hopeful ending by allowing Elphaba to survive. It also produces a shift in emphasis from the political to the personal, with the friendship between Elphaba and Glinda paralleling the political stakes in the larger story (Laird 2011: 31, 33). In devising a love triangle for these characters, Wicked is the first of these Oz musicals since 1903 to include a romantic subplot. Like the novel, it poses questions about the nature of good and evil, reality and perception, and the role of performance in the realization of personal agency.

Wicked seems to ask, ‘What happens when the witch is allowed to sing?’ Given the chance to belt out the core song types of a musical protagonist – ‘I want’ and ‘I am’ songs like ‘The Wizard and I’ and ‘Defying Gravity’ – Elphaba is envoiced as a complex, empowered subject, raising questions of agency and self-determination (Boyd 2010: 99). A misfit due to her green complexion, Elphaba is presented as a character who performs authenti-cally (Leigh 2010: 148). Her authenticity is evidenced by a natural ability to do magic, in contrast to Glinda, who has no knack for it and devotes much of her energy to cultivating her social image. Because of her powers, Elphaba has the opportunity to meet the Wizard and become his protégé. ‘The Wizard and I’ is an empowering ‘I want’ song expressing her belief that her difference will finally be vindicated (Laird 2011: 132). It contains the first sung iteration of a recurring musical motif set to the words ‘Unlimited, my future is unlim-ited’, borrowing pitches from ‘Over the Rainbow’ and possibly suggesting that Elphaba might be a ‘Dorothy-like heroine’ (Wolf 2011: 207). Certainly, she is linked to Dorothy through theatrical convention simply by being the female protagonist of a musical with ‘I am’ and ‘I want’ songs, not to mention the protagonist of a journey through Oz. At the same time, however, her relation-ship to the community is quite different, and she is never able to quite (liter-ally) fill Dorothy’s shoes.

Like Dorothy, Elphaba seems to be surrounded by people who are constantly performing while she strives to remain true to herself. Glinda tries to teach her how to be ‘Popular’, showing off her own performative prowess by alternately belting and flipping into her head voice. Glinda sings bel canto when performing publicly, exploiting the same stereotypes about the artifice of opera burlesqued by Bert Lahr in the MGM film (Laird 2011: 129; de Giere 2008: 318–19). Elphaba’s attempts to remake herself in Glinda’s image are laughable, but the lesson in performance is preparation for her future role as the Wicked Witch. Later, the Wizard reveals himself to her as another incar-nation of the showman archetype. Joel Grey’s performance of the role on Broadway contained ghosts not only of Frank Morgan from MGM, but also of his own iconic roles as George Cohan and the master of ceremonies in Cabaret. The Wizard’s music is vaudeville pastiche, emphasizing his American constitution along with his slick performing abilities and outsider status in an Oz where Broadway pop is the prevailing musical language (Laird 2011: 198; Boyd 2010: 107). That Elphaba belts in this style further emphasizes her authenticity in contrast with Glinda’s bel canto and the Wizard’s vaudeville.

When Elphaba learns of the Wizard’s plan to deprive Oz’s Animals of their power of speech, she chooses to flee rather than cooperate. She launches into

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‘Defying Gravity’, an Act 1 finale which has taken its place among the most powerful songs of authentic self-expression in the musical theatre canon: ‘Something has changed within me/Something is not the same/I’m through with playing by/The rules of someone else’s game’ (Laird 2011: 199; Boyd 2010: 107; Wolf 2011: 3, 212). She belts out the climax of the song, taking flight on her broom for the first time as she rises above the stage. This theat-rical gesture both draws the audience into her expression of selfhood and reminds us, through its distancing spectacle, of its performance. The final riff is a wordless vocal display that is pure affect (like Hamilton’s cackle), defying and literally exceeding the frame of a narrative intent on trapping her. She will be reinscribed within this narrative in Act 2, but for the moment, this is a tran-scendent display of individual, subjective power, deriving its authority from its performed authenticity.

Ironically, though, this authentic performance forces her to play a role in the second act that is thrust upon her by others. As she escapes, the Wizard publicly frames her as wicked. Having no other choice, Elphaba gradually accepts the role. As she becomes more and more empowered through her performance she grows increasingly feminine and glamorous (Burger 2012: 84; Raab 2011: 250–52). She comes close to an impersonation of the witch we know in her confrontation with Glinda outside Dorothy’s fallen house, cack-ling and obsessing over Dorothy’s shoes in a re-enactment of a familiar scene from the MGM film played for laughs.

The Wizard of Oz teaches Dorothy the performance of self-determination; Wicked teaches Elphaba its limits. In their final duet, ‘For Good’, Elphaba and Glinda acknowledge that they have been changed by each other. The ‘unlimited’ motif returns as Elphaba confesses, ‘I’m limited’. In spite of having acquired the singing voice that the MGM Witch seemed to lack, Elphaba must still die (or at least appear to) in order to restore peace to the community. It is not her silence, but her vocal excess that excludes her. In the end, Elphaba stages her own death by melting, using a curtain, lighting effects, and theat-rical trickery worthy of the Wizard himself. We can now see this moment in the famous film as a performance by the Witch, a show within the show, with the familiar visual imagery of the soldiers in silhouette in the castle. Whereas home stays close to its roots in MGM and is self-determined in The Wiz, for Elphaba it is an impossibility. She escapes into exile from a community that has rejected her. In doing so, she is ‘triumphant to the audience if not in the musical’s world’ (Wolf 2011: 201). The musical revises the novel by making triumph possible through performance.

Wicked’s phenomenal success is connected in part to its many interna-tional productions and the participatory intensity of fandom among girls and young women. Internet fan sites show Wicked’s girl fans to be empowered by their intelligent and participatory relationship to the show, which centres on identification with the dual divas, Elphaba and Glinda (Wolf 2011: 222). Such identification seems to suggest that they understand the complex relation-ship between selfhood and performance that inheres in each theatrical telling of Oz. The popularity of the score is important in this type of reception as well, because it allows kinaesthetic and envoiced participation in a similar way to the MGM film. By singing along, we can become Elphaba or Glinda and actively insert ourselves into the story.

In an international context, Broadway musicals stand in for ‘America’ (Wolf 2011: 13). Wicked reasserts an American claim on the musical generally – and the megamusical particularly – during a time of American resurgence following

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the British and European megamusicals of the late twentieth century. It does so in part by combining conventions of the megamusical with those of American musical comedy (Sternfeld 2006: 349–50). Because it is not sung-through, the breakage allows actors to play out to the audience, acknowledg-ing their participation in the performance.

With its American source material, Wicked invites global audiences to participate in its performance of international Americanism. This performance not only stages the American ideal of self-invention for an international audi-ence, but also circulates its vague advocacy of social tolerance and diversity as an export of American cultural hegemony. Elphaba is not specifically racial-ized, but is simply an individual whose ‘“difference” stands in for all differ-ence’ (Wolf 2011: 205). Stephen Schwartz’s pop-style music, intentionally lacking a distinct style, perhaps assists in easing the appeal across borders. A hundred years after Baum’s musical acknowledged American diversity, Wicked explores anew the questions of social difference that were sanitized out of MGM’s version and restored from a particular perspective in The Wiz – but its representations are homogenized in a non-specific postmodern simulation.

When Elphaba and Glinda arrive in the Emerald City, they attend a Broadway-style show called Wizomania, which is really a piece of propaganda produced by the Wizard. The Wizard’s performances in these musicals are often shows within the main show – the ‘Ball of All Nations’, the talking head, Wizomania – that can be revealed for the performances they are. It is appropri-ate that the popular backstage tour of Wicked’s Broadway production, ‘Behind the Emerald Curtain’, invokes the Wizard’s apparatus. As ever, we see the curtain pulled back, and yet we believe in the performance we know to be one, happily buying what it sells.

whaT have you learned, doroThy?

Musical adaptations of The Wizard of Oz make evident an embodied perform-ance of identity and community only suggested by Baum’s book, and they do so by employing the well-worn tropes of both the American musical and The Wizard of Oz itself. The ways in which the musical enables a participatory rela-tionship to Oz might seem obvious, since the musical is a manifestly partici-patory art form. But Oz also makes the musical more open to participation by contributing its simple story and recognizable symbolic content. Although all musicals invite a level of real or imagined participation through their ener-gies of song and dance, it is difficult to imagine a scenario such as the one from my childhood at camp involving a similarly spontaneous performance of Oklahoma! or The Phantom of the Opera. The symbolism and familiarity of Oz make it particularly easy to identify with the characters and to become inserted in the story.

Although specific identity positions have come to the fore in each exam-ple we have considered, it is performance itself – a presumptively American performance – that is the point. Communal participation, such as quoting lines and singing songs from the MGM film, is not just performance, but performa-tive – bringing the materialities of identity and community into being in the very doing. On the whole, these performances seem to reaffirm, rather than challenge, the status quo of the community. In spite of a change of regime, the Wizard departs as a beloved figure.

The potential for resistance or reinvention is in the particularized perform-ances that exploit the ‘doubleness’ of musicals. The double meanings of queer

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camp, black Signifyin(g), and Jewish double-coding are among the possibili-ties we have encountered. At no point in the movie do the winged monkeys appear while the four friends are singing ‘We’re Off to See the Wizard’, as they did in our improvised childhood play. Our ability to rework the story in spontaneous performance suggests much about the ability of spectators and participants to repurpose cultural materials, make them their own, and make new meanings of them. Similarly, each new musical adaptation of Oz is a new performance from a collaborative subject position in the ongoing communal practice of playing, and replaying, Oz.

If I seem to privilege The Wizard of Oz in this endeavour, it is because it has been a culturally privileged text. On one level, this has been a case study among other possible case studies for what happens when a story is adapted multiple times in musical–theatrical form. None of what I have said about performance in the musical comes as any surprise to scholars of musical theatre, but there seems to be an especially happy elision of musical theatre conventions with the content of the Oz story. It is in the space of their meeting that I hope the relationship between Oz and the musical can lead to more ambitious conclu-sions. It may be, as many readings suggest, that the powerful symbols in The Wizard of Oz are responsible for much of the story’s success, but it seems clear that the persistence and transferability of Oz is assisted by the combination of these symbols with elements of performance and participation through the musical as a genre. That the study of musicals can illuminate the transmission of a cultural mythology so clearly might be a testament to musical theatre’s value as a field of study. Reciprocally, I hope that these musical adaptations and transformations of The Wizard of Oz might stand synecdochically for the musical itself by demonstrating what Oz and the American musical both do so well – enact an American performance of identity.

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suggesTed ciTaTion

Bunch, R. (2015), ‘Oz and the musical: The American art form and the reinvention of the American fairy tale’, Studies in Musical Theatre 9: 1, pp. 53–69, doi: 10.1386/smt.9.1.53_1

conTriBuTor deTails

Ryan Bunch is a musicologist and instructor of applied vocal performance at Rutgers University-Camden. He has taught courses in music appreciation and American music at the Community College of Philadelphia and Holy Family University.

Ryan Bunch has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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