For a musical that almost didn’t make it to Broadway 40 years ago, “The Wiz” is receiving a second wind that is tantamount to a Kansas tornado. On Thursday, December 3, NBC will air the third installment, after “The Sound of Music” and “Peter Pan,” of a spectacular based on a Broadway show: “The Wiz Live!” With a cast headlined by Queen Latifah in the title role, the show also features the quartet of David Alan Grier, Ne-Yo, Elijah Kelley, and Shanice Williams as The Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Dorothy, respectively. To this group add Mary J. Blige as the Wicked Witch of the West, and you have a potential ratings blockbuster. If anything, it will be a three-hour infomercial for the Broadway revival to be produced by Cirque du Soleil late next year.In 1974, “The Wiz,” a modern, all-black retelling of the L. Frank Baum classic, was Broadway-bound and in serious trouble in Detroit when director-choreographer Geoffrey Holder was brought in to replace Gilbert Moses. A nearly complete overhaul led to success with the show, winning seven Tony Awards and a run of more than four years. In 1978, the film version, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and a young Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, flopped. It has since become something of a cult classic, especially among African-American audiences.This new version, produced by Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, has a revised book fashioned by Harvey Fierstein and a powerhouse creative team including director Kenny Leon, choreographer Fatima Robinson, costume designer Paul Tazewell, and music production by Stephen Oremus and Harvey Mason, Jr. The latter two have collaborated with Ne-Yo and others on a new song — called “We Got It!” — to add to the original score by Charlie Smalls.“I knew that we needed a new song to end the first act when the four go off to kill the witch,” says Leon, adding that this realization had come from his previous direction of four amateur productions of “The Wiz.” “I told the producers, ‘We need a bonding song among the characters and it has to be a showstopper.’ And it is.”Leon says that he knew he had to “shake things up” when he was approached by Meron and Zadan to direct this production. “You want to be respectful of the work but you’re re-painting the way people look at this so you want to bring in a cast that will broaden the lens,” he says. There will be Cirque du Soleil acrobats stirred into the mix, “but not [too] much that it will steal focus,” says the director. He adds that what will really jazz things up are the addition of newcomers to musical theater, such as Blige, Common, Elijah Kelley, and Ne-Yo. “Just because they haven’t done it doesn’t mean that they can’t,” he says. “I can say that everybody in the cast does an ideal job. People are going to be surprised.”Queen Latifah, who was the first to be cast, says that “The Wiz” inspired her to become an actor. As is the case with many African-American performers, she notes that the musical is totemic. “This musical is a part of who I am, a part of why I am,” she says. “There are elements of 'The Wiz' that I’ve used throughout my days.”That goes back to her childhood in Newark, New Jersey, when, as Dana Elaine Owens, she performed the song “Home” from “The Wiz” and received her first standing ovation. “It’s a question of being able to create something out of nothing,” she says of her character and her own background. “Growing up with no money, you take a pair of sneakers and jazz them up and make yourself into someone even if you can’t afford to be that person. Despite the lies that the Wiz is telling, she has to have some sort of intelligence and determination to weave such a grand fiction. “The Wiz made me think of Bernie Madoff and all those Wall Street con men who just make up stuff and get away with it: ‘No, no, your stocks are doing just fine! Give me another $150,000 and I’ll make you even more money!’ I know people who are liars on a regular basis and I think, ‘Man, it takes a lot of energy to be that much of a liar!’” Latifah is forgiving of the Wiz, however. “Oh, like everybody else, she just wants to be loved. She just wants to get back to who she was at the beginning, a magician’s assistant. She just wants to get home.”
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