The company of Metamorphoses (Photography-by-Brittany-Diliberto)
Alexandria, VA – Playwright Mary Zimmerman is a national treasure. With two productions currently running in DC theaters and last year’s Helen Hayes Award-winning production of The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, her reputation in our area is firmly cemented. I’ll see anything with her name on it. You should too.
In Metamorphoses Zimmerman uses stories from David Slavitt’s translation of the Latin poet Ovid’s masterpiece written in 8 A.D. to form the foundation of this dramedy that puts these ancient myths in modern context describing the history of the world in a hilariously topsy-turvy vision of the classic.
Miss Kitty (Photography-by-Brittany-Diliberto)
Most of the vignettes here are the familiar cautionary tales of greed, lust, incest…oh let’s just proffer the seven deadly sins and call it a day. Under Director Psalmayene 24’s singularly creative interpretation we find an all-Black ensemble playing multiple parts in a flurry of costume changes to express the multiple roles each actor portrays within the individual vignettes.
Gerrad Alex Taylor and Miss Kitty (Photography-by-Brittany-Diliberto)
Psalmayene has conjured up one of the most explosive openings seen on DC stages. It is so stunning that the audience goes utterly silent. Led by the Water Nymph (Miss Kitty) the entourage parades through the center aisle, tribal dancing, whirling, summoning the Gods with African music as they arrive onstage. There they undergo an a sort of transmogrification – as captured slaves undergoing the Middle Passage from their ancestral lands. Tossed by a tempest at sea, their journey reflects the pain and degradation of a slave market. From that dramatic unveiling, our storytellers find themselves in dire circumstances humorously expressed through costume, character and morphing appearance. Because the actors play multiple parts, I found it tricky to puzzle out who played which character. That’s a testimonial to the extraordinary costume design by Mika Eubanks, who hascreated here some of the most beautiful, zany, over-the-top and imaginative costumes I’ve seen all year.
Manu Kumasi, DeJeanette Horne, Kalen Robinson, and Yesenia Iglesias (Photography-by-Brittany-Diliberto)
Imagine the goddess, Iris, sporting a pink Afro with a frilly rainbow-hued and ruffled tutu – another character super fly in full-on glittering gold and white and the morphing of Alcyone (Renee Elizabeth Wilson) who with her beloved husband take the form of birds, reflecting the well-known phrase ‘halcyon days”.
There’s a lot to be said for brevity when it comes to complex themes of love and loss and in these stories, the objective is clear. In each piece we meet the hapless cast of characters and learn of the hot mess they’ve gotten themselves into challenged and complicated by the muse or god positioned on high – in this case upon the balcony. The frailties and passions of mere mortals are highlighted, while the gods, busy spewing their edicts and curses, become fodder for ridicule with the moral of the story revealed after each vision quest.
The choice of Midas (brilliantly played by Jon Hudson Odom) as the opening myth, is a good one, since we all know the tale of the greedy king who wished everything he touched turned to gold unfortunately that included most his beloved daughter (Kalen Robinson). Clad in a green velvet jacket and crown, Midas rues the day he threw over his daughter for the golden touch and goes on a mission to undo the terrible curse. Odom, totally tricked out, returns as Orpheus busting Motown moves to James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine)” and Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”. And, boom! We are laughing our tailfeathers off.
Metamorphoses shows that it is possible to speak of enigmatic things when they are creatively and hilariously interpreted and passionately performed by an ensemble of such high calibre.
DeJeanette Horne and Renee Elizabeth Wilson (Photography-by-Brittany-Diliberto)
Lighting Designer William K. D’Eugenio and Scenic Designer Lawrence E. Moten III have crucial tasks since there are no set changes and no curtains to draw. Along with Sound Designer and Composer Nick Tha 1DA Hernandez, ambiance is key to support the stories. And because the wigs and hair designs are so over the top, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to Designer Rueben D. Echoles.
Highly recommended!
With Edwin Brown as Third Man: Phaeton and others; Dejeanette Horne as First Man: Zeus and others; Renea S. Brown as Third Woman: Myrrha and others; Yesenia Iglesias as First Woman: Aphrodite and others; Billie Krishawn as Second Woman: Eurydice and others; Manu Kumasi as Fourth Man: Vertumnus and others; Gerrad Alex Taylor as Fifth Man: Bacchus and others.
Artistic Director, Karen Ann Daniels; Choreographer, Tony Thomas; Original Composer, Willy Schwarz; Sound Designer, Nick Tha 1DA Henrnandez; Props Designer Deb Thomas; Dramaturg, Faedra Chatard Carpenter PhD.
Through June 16 at the Folger Theatre, Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol Street, SE, Washington, DC – For tickets and information visit www.folger.edu or call the box office at 202 544-7007.
“Who thuh man?!” “Who thuh man?!” So boast and taunt the two African American blood brothers vying for survival and dominance in Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize–winning two-hander now at Round House Theatre. Acclaimed as a modern classic when it premiered in 2001, the cuttingly calibrated script has lost none of its edge, and its story still transfixes. As director Jamil Jude’s electrifying production makes manifest, Parks’ play may never have been more gut-busting comedic nor more gut-punching tragic.
The brothers, named Lincoln and Booth by their father as a joke, share a painful family history: they were abandoned by their parents in their teens and were left with only a treasured photo album and 500 dollars each. They share a rivalry about survival: whether to steal and scam (Booth’s MO is three-card monte on milk cartons; it used to be Lincoln’s too, but he quit) or whether to hold down a demeaning job (Lincoln poses as Honest Abe in an arcade where customers play at assassinating him). The brothers also share a lack of success relating to women: Lincoln’s wife kicked him out (which is why he’s staying with his brother); the woman Booth imagines to be his girlfriend (“She so sweet she makes my teeth hurt”) isn’t interested. The only buddy they refer to, a three-card-monte accomplice, was shot by cops. They really have only each other…until they don’t.
Yao Dogbe (Booth) and Ro Boddie (Lincoln) in ‘Topdog/Underdog.’ Photo by Margot Schulman Photography.
The performances of Lincoln and Booth by Ro Boddie and Yao Dogbe respectively are extraordinary and revelatory. Dogbe’s Booth is the more animated and exuberant, adept at physical comedy; Boddie’s Lincoln is initially the more staid, the somber sibling five years older. Yet early in the play Lincoln opens, picking up a guitar and accompanying himself as he sings mournfully (and beautifully):
My dear mother left me, my fathers gone away … My best girl, she threw me out into the street … My luck was bad but now it turned to worse …
In flashes, we glimpse the conspiratorial joy the young brothers once had, as in a story about how they secretly gave their father’s car four flat tires. But there’s always a current of competition. For instance, Booth wants Lincoln to return to the three-card Monte hustle, which Lincoln excelled at and which could be, Booth says, “You and me against the world.” Lincoln resists. Are they a fraternal bond or must they be ranked? The question persists.
By turns the tension and tenderness between the brothers chills and warms the stage then chills again in a mesmerizing volley of emotions lobbed by two combatants at the top of their game. And while they’re at it, they uncover so much humor tucked in the script, so much downright delight, that we want them to be okay — both of them. For in this play’s universe of winners and losers, epitomized by a card con, we dearly don’t want one to be underdog, even though that’s the deck their fate has stacked.
TOP LEFT: Yao Dogbe (Booth); TOP RIGHT: Ro Boddie (Lincoln); ABOVE: Yao Dogbe (Booth) and Ro Boddie (Lincoln), in ‘Topdog/Underdog.’ Photos by Margot Schulman Photography.
The story is told in six scenes, and the play takes place in an apartment that in Meghan Raham’s ingeniously high-ceilinged scenic design has seen better days. The walls are worn, and a single bulb hangs from where a chandelier once did; in windows facing what seems a seedy street, neon signage can be seen. Nick Hernandez’s subtle sound design evokes a cityscape outside and apartment life next door (voices, a TV, baby crying). The sense of place in the production is palpable. In the gaps between scenes, director Jude has crafted fascinating wordless vignettes, incorporating Hernandez’s apt music tracks and Xavier Pierce’s dramatic lighting design.
Two program credits hint at the artful physicality in the performance: fight choreographer Casey Kaleba and card manipulation consultant Ryan Phillips. Clothed in Danielle Preston’s versatile costumes — the characters have countless wardrobe changes on stage — the show is solid on all creative counts. It really is a gem.
In Topdog/Underdog, Suzan Lori-Parks lays bare the tragedy in the drive to be on top, to be “thuh man.” And the seriously entertaining Round House Theatre production does that insight all the justice it desperately deserves.
Running Time: Approximately two hours and 20 minutes with one intermission.
Topdog/Underdogplays through June 23, 2024, at Round House Theatre, 4545 East-West Highway, Bethesda, MD. For tickets ($46–$94), call the box office at 240-644-1100 or go online. (Learn more about special discounts here, accessibility here, and the Free Play program for students here.)
Audio-described performance: Saturday, June 8 at 2:00 pm Open-captioned performance: Saturday, June 15 at 2:00 pm Mask-required performances: Tuesday, June 18 at 7:30 pm; Saturday, June 22 at 2:00 pm Black Out Night performance on June 19, 2024
Topdog/Underdog By Suzan-Lori Parks Directed by Jamil Jude
CAST Ro Boddie: Lincoln Yao Dogbe: Booth
CREATIVE TEAM Scenic Designer: Meghan Raham Costume Designer: Danielle Preston Lighting Designer: Xavier Pierce Sound Designer: Nick Hernandez Fight Choreographer: Casey Kaleba Properties Coordinator: Chelsea Dean Casting Director: Sarah Cooney Dramaturg: Naysan Mojgani Card Manipulation Consultant: Ryan Phillips Production Stage Manager: Che Wernsman
Yao Dogbe as Booth, left, and Ro Boddie as Lincoln in Round House Theatre’s “Topdog/Underdog.” (Margot Schulman/Round House Theatre)
There’s sibling rivalry, and then there’s the pitched fraternal battle between Lincoln and Booth, the fatefully named brothers at the center of Suzan-Lori Parks’s devastating card-trick psychodrama “Topdog/Underdog.” Had the playwright, who won the Pulitzer Prize for this deceptively rich two-hander, named her characters Cain and Abel, she’d still have captured the tragic inevitability of the thing. But she wouldn’t have the recurring chord of cruel, fundamentally American absurdity that has made this Black hybrid of “Waiting for Godot” and “True West,” first performed in the summer of 2001, one of the most rightly celebrated plays of this young, bloody, cruel and absurd century.
Parks had the peculiar genius to imagine a character that encapsulates the contradictions of our shaky republic: A Black man who performs in whiteface as his namesake, our 16th and most revered president. No, he’s not reciting the second inaugural or the Gettysburg Address; he’s letting wannabe John Wilkes Booths shoot him with blanks dozens of times each day at what’s described merely as “an arcade,” in one of Parks’s surreal flourishes.
“It’s easy work,” Lincoln insists to his little brother, if you can ignore the nesting-doll layers of humiliation baked into it — including the fact he fears losing even this dire gig to a wax dummy. Booth is not at all inclined to overlook those not-so-micro aggressions.
“Topdog/Underdog” isn’t set in any specified time or place, but its insular story of two deeply isolated brothers and roommates has uncannily predicted the air of menacing unreality that now surrounds our public discourse.
Director Jamil Jude’s confident Round House Theatre revival, anchored by nimble and entrancing performances from Ro Boddie and Yao Dogbe as Lincoln and Booth, respectively, harvests every note of humor and pathos from Parks’s immortal script. These brothers were abandoned by their parents at an impressionable age, each given an “inheritance” of $500. Their most prized possession is an album of photos from their distinctly un-idyllic childhood, which Booth, in particular, is given to reminiscing about. He even claims to want to emulate their negligent mom and pop, declaring his ambition to sire many offspring and then leave them to figure things out on their own.
Not that either of them have figured out very much. Booth wants Lincoln to return to his former calling as a cardsharp, taking the same slack-jawed rubes who now line up to shoot him for all the cash they’ve got at three-card monte. Booth even rehearses Lincoln’s fast dealing and faster patter (“Watch me now!”) when he’s home alone, and tries to get his brother to address him as “Three Card.”
Ro Boddie as Lincoln. (Margot Schulman)
Alas, his own sticky fingers are more adept at shoplifting than card-throwing. Despite his childish insistence that a woman named Grace is so gobsmacked by his pilfered prosperity that she’s both consented to unprotected sex and demanded that he marry her, Booth is utterly confounded by the perceived unfairness of the fairer sex. As for Lincoln, his wife left him years ago — then briefly sought solace in Booth’s bed!
They’ve had a rough time of it, these two brothers.
The despair they’re both working overtime to keep at bay is so omnipresent and oppressive that Jude, Boddie and Dogbe must mine every kernel of levity just to keep the enterprise from being too depressing to endure. One of these gags comes early, when Dogbe performs a sort of clown-car variation on a striptease, somehow producing an entire pilfered wardrobe from beneath his oversized parka — not just two complete suits, but two pairs of dress shoes. “I stole, and I stole generously,” he gloats. (The costume designer has dressed Dogbe’s Booth in an old Washington Bullets T-shirt, a welcome local touch.)
Yao Dogbe as Booth. (Margot Schulman/Round House Theatre)
Throughout the long evening, the light of a neon sign — one we can’t quite read — suspended outside the window of Meghan Raham’s appropriately dingy set bathes the brothers’ barren home in a hellish crimson cast. The subtextual query beneath each stanza of Parks’s lacerating dialogue is, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We already know the answer, but it hits with the force of a bullet all the same.
Topdog/Underdog, through June 23 at Round House Theatre. About 2½ hours, including an intermission. roundhousetheatre.org.
Almost every Black person of a certain age remembers being terrified by something in The Wiz.
For me, it was the sharp-toothed trashcan monsters of the New York subway that antagonize Dorothy (Diana Ross) and her friends Lion (Ted Ross), Tinman (Nipsey Russell), and Scarecrow (Michael Jackson) in the 1978 movie musical that came out a few years after the show’s Broadway debut. For others, it was the wicked sweatshop mistress Evillene — don’t bring her no bad news — and her menacing band of simian motorcyclists.
For Melody Betts, who plays Evillene and Aunt Em in the Broadway revival opening April 17 at the Marquis Theatre, “the ‘Mean Ole Lion’ track scared me half to death.” Betts began listening to the soundtrack on vinyl when she was just a toddler in the late ’70s. “I would listen to the whole thing and I would sing along. And then when that part came, I would get up and go into the closet and hide because I was scared. And then when that song was over, I would come back out and finish listening to the rest on the soundtrack.”
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Fans who’ve been hoping to revisit the soundtrack have nothing to fear. Nearly 50 years after it first opened on Broadway April 17, 1975, The Wiz, in all its “Black-is-beautiful” glory, has returned. It’s a show that, in a departure from the 1939 film based on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, has always been more vibes and music than plot, a space to bask in Black excellence, elegance, fashion, dance, and futurism. The revival is queerer and funnier than ever, with an updated book full of new material by comedian, writer, and first Black woman to host a late night show, Amber Ruffin, and steered by Schele Williams in her Broadway directorial debut (Williams is directing two Broadway shows this season; the other is The Notebook).
While the musical, in all its iterations, holds a venerable place in the hearts and minds of Black families, with love for it passed down like a treasured potato salad recipe, others still chiefly remember The Wiz as a spectacular flop. The 1975 Broadway production, with its all-Black company starring André De Shields in the title role and Stephanie Mills as Dorothy, was seen as a revelation. Even the snappy new title —The Wiz — heralded a brand new day. With a book by William F. Brown, music and lyrics by Charlie Smalls, a thoroughly modern, soul-funkified iteration of the classic story bowed at the Majestic Theatre and took home seven Tony Awards, including one for Best Musical. But the 1978 film adaptation, directed by Sidney Lumet (who had never directed a movie musical before), lost a reported $10.4 million (approximately $48.4 million today). At the time, The Wiz was the most expensive movie musical ever made; a bomb that left a decades long fallout of producer anathema to splashy, big-budget Black projects. The lingering hangover of The Wiz is a disproportionate and chilling skepticism toward funding Black cinematic audacity as a whole. It calls to mind something Judas and the Black Messiah director Shaka King told The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb in 2021: “Even the math in Hollywood is racist.”
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Losing money is a regular occurrence on Broadway, so much so that when a show recoups its investment, there’s a press release trumpeting the occurrence. Yet everyone is aware of the historical stakes accompanying this show, and every Black show that manages to make it to Broadway. Part of the reason this revival is what Wayne Brady — who plays the titular Wiz in the revival — calls “a beautiful example of Black excellence” is because in this economy, it can’t afford to be anything else.
For years, rumors of a modern Broadway revival of The Wiz floated about New York’s small Black theater community, an urban legend that could one day see reality if enough folks just kept hope alive. In 2018, hope began its long journey toward reality when Ruffin, who also co-wrote the book for the Tony-winningSome Like It Hot revival, began developing a new book for St. Louis’s Muny Theatre, the oldest and largest outdoor musical theater in the United States. Like everything else in the world that relied on in-person interaction, the show encountered a setback when COVID hit. But that forced pause turned out to be a blessing.
“It takes this time to marinate so that it can really become exactly what you want,” Ruffin says. “And I guess it kind of makes you braver because you’ve been staring at it for so long. You might as well just go for it, is how I feel. Everything about this show is a very big swing, and that’s what makes it work.”
Visual details in the revival telegraph a contemporary, post-Obama Wiz before the first ba-da-bump-ba-dump of “Ease on Down the Road” bass line ever drops. The set, conceived by Oscar-winning Black Panther designer Hannah Beachler, is framed in a black-and-white pattern evoking body paint commonly seen at Afropunk, while Sharen Davis’s costuming speaks to the show’s overall ethos of compassionate, multifaceted expansiveness.Dorothy — sans Toto — sports a black watch plaid skater dress and Doc Martens, a choice sure to capture the attention of both vintage-curious zoomers and their Gen-X relatives.
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“Our Dorothy is a teenager, and it was important to me to raise the stakes of the show to not give her a companion because that makes it a little safer,” Williams explains. (For the record, she loves dogs! She has nothing against canines as a species!) “She’s got this buddy with her and I really wanted her to feel isolated. I did not want to give her anything that could give her comfort and make her feel like she had something from home.”
Nichelle Lewis, in her Broadway debut as Dorothy, seems to combine the best of Judy Garland, Mills, and Ross’s performances even as she creates her own. Lewis, 24, was able to connect to the lonesomeness and alienation that endears Dorothy to so many. She grew up next to a farm in Virginia, and her mother raised Lewis and her sisters after Lewis’s father died when she was 10. “I wanted to create a Dorothy who was free in herself, who felt very confident in herself and knowing who she is, but also was just scared of what was happening around her,” Lewis says. She sings with an innocence and yearning rooted in experience.
Similarly, the Guyanese-Canadian Deborah Cox, who plays Glinda, found herself relating to the message of The Wiz — that you already have everything you need within you to face your fears — and Ruffin’s take on the quintessential Blackness of the original. “As a Black Caribbean person, a lot of different things resonate with me,” she says, adding that she felt inspired by the success of Trinidadian director Geoffrey Holder, who brought home Tonys for his direction and choreography of the original Broadway production, despite not being producer Ken Harper’s first choice for either position.
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In Lumet’s film, the foursome traversed various neighborhoods of New York City. The 2024 revival jumps around the country, from the Tremé/Lafitte of New Orleans to the queer, fluorescent haired adolescent buskers and go-go bucket drummers of Washington, D.C.’s Gallery Place, to the smooth calypso rhythms that populate Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. “I mean, the music in the show spoke to me when I read the real history behind the costume design,” Cox says. “There are so many things that I can relate to in the show, even though I didn’t grow up here in the U.S. … I think that’s it from a soul level.”
The movie version of The Wiz didn’t succeed at the box office, but it did become a cult classic. The influence of the film shows up in other works. The Moonin Caroline, or Change evokes Lena Horne’s cinematic iteration of Glinda, while the joyous clutter core of a Taylor Mac show recalls some of Tony Walton’s production design choices. The Wiz is for the misfits, a quality shared by many a queer kid who found refuge in its music, in the thousands of school theater productions that have been staged since 1975. And while The Wizard of Oz has always been queer — hello, friends of Dorothy — this new version of The Wiz boasts quite possibly the swishiest cowardly lion ever to grace a stage. The queer subtext that made The Wizard of Oz a camp classic has blossomed into text, as evidenced by the performances of Kyle Ramar Freeman (Lion) and Avery Wilson (Scarecrow). For one, Lion’s mane could not be more laid if he let Ms. Tina Knowles play in his locks.
“Bay-BEE! Twenty-two inches, the beard and the hair,” exclaims Freeman via Zoom, who has to arrive at every performance 30 minutes before his castmates to complete hair and makeup, which is all kept in place, sweat free, with some sort of industrial strength antiperspirant setting spray. Freeman also makes full use of Lion’s tail, to great comedic effect.
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“When I was trying to discover what I would move and what I wanted to embody, as far as character goes, I am whirling that tail,” says Freeman, who came out to his “religious” family at 23, when he was just beginning to build an acting career in the theater. “I’m shaking that tail. I’m crying with the tail. I’m tracing my tail. I’m just having fun because I love a prop.”
The luxurious mane and the tail-flipping are all wrapped up in something bigger for Freeman, namely the show’s themes of bravery and self-acceptance. Coming out provided necessary liberation that eventually led to Freeman’s casting in The Wiz. “When I freed myself in my personal life from the constraints of trying to be something else, I was denying jobs, which I had never done in my nine years in New York City!” Freeman, whose Broadway credits include A Strange Loop and Fat Ham, says. “I was getting offers. It was like, ‘Oh, I get it.’ I have to do the self stuff first so that the other stuff can be presented to me and I can receive it and I can be ready for it.”
One of the oddball, oft-overlooked canonical notes of the Wizard is a bit where Scarecrow innocently talks about “going both ways.” The fact that Wilson identifies as bisexual puts a nice, tidy little bow on that. “I can be whoever the hell I decide to be. And that’s power,” Wilson says. “Getting into a space where there is a queer maybe undertone or just hints of it throughout a sprinkle of it, I thought it was great, to be honest.”
The stylistic influences of Beyoncé’s Homecoming show at Coachella — which opens with the horn fanfare from The Wiz — are abundant. There are the dancers who bring the yellow brick road to life, dressed as southern HBCU drum majors, complete with tall, furry bearskin hats. Brady’s Wiz delivers flourish after flourish with a cape, mace, and top hat that call back to the deceitful, feel-good chicanery of The Music Man as much as FAMU’s Marching 100. This revival was also choreographed by JaQuel Knight, the man who choreographed Homecoming and the music videos for “Formation” and “Single Ladies.” No wonder The Wiz feels like a show aimed squarely at the viewing pleasures and discernment of Queen Bey and her progeny; there is a true sense of shared creative DNA.
Photo: Elliott Jerome Brown
A high collar, striped afro, and high-heeled platform boots made De Shield’s originating turn as the Wiz into something indelible (yet another detail vindicating Holder’s vision), while Richard Pryor’s Wiz of the 1978 film, once unmasked, is memorable as a shrunken, whimpering pajama-clad normie. In 2015, NBC aired a live broadcast performance featuring a cross-dressed Queen Latifah as the Wiz, enjoying all the unchecked, unquestioned power charismatic men are able to occupy with little friction—well, at least until they’re revealed to be hucksters. For Brady, playing the Wiz is an artistic homecoming that allows him to fully own his capabilities as a theater savant who shares Robin Williams’s peripatetic comic energy. While he attained celebrity as a standout on the television improv comedy show Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Brady has always seemed most at home on the stage, in front of a theater audience, whether as Lola in Kinky Boots or spitting rhymes in Freestyle Love Supreme. “My Wiz is definitely part actor, part magician, part flim-flam man, with a little bit of Willy Wonka thrown in,” says Brady. Once he’s revealed as a con artist imposter, Brady takes all that energy and stuffs it into the preferred uniform of middle-age zaddies the world over: a track suit.
Tinman’s (Phillip Johnson Richardson) backwards cap calls to mind the Fresh Prince. And Cox’s Glinda? Think feathered sleeves that recall Yoncé’s stagewear at the 2018 Global Citizens Festival in South Africa.
Much like Shuffle Along, the 1921 grandparent of all Black Broadway shows, this revival’s road to the Great White Way did not begin not with a triumphant run of performances at one of New York’s storied downtown theaters. It was refined on the road — just like the original Broadway run. For the show’s company of travel-tested newcomers, that meant tour stops in Des Moines, Baltimore, Atlanta, Cleveland, San Francisco, Tempe, Arizona, Greenville, South Carolina, and more. Yes, they’re very happy to be on Broadway, but chatting with the cast, one gets the sense that they’re also happy simply to be sleeping in the same place for a few months. Because this revival kicked off with a national tour, the show’s set pieces were designed for a variety of stage sizes and dimensions. When our protagonists finally arrive at the Emerald City, we see how designer Daniel Brodie has rendered it in projections and video. It was a cost-effective method to create the world of Oz that can quickly scale up or down, but also a way to pay homage to the culture — each piece of architecture is shaped like a different Afrocentric hair style. And the Wiz sits upon a throne that appears to be encased in a large green perfume bottle topped with a crown of afro picks.
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Across venues however, what remains consistent is that tapping one’s foot along to the familiar rhythms of “Ease on Down the Road,” or “You Can’t Win” still comes wrapped up, by the show’s end, with a big dose of sweet, full-throated nostalgia and a palpable journey toward self-belief. And that’s because, even when you strip away the costuming and all the other candy-like elements of The Wiz, there’s a soundtrack — or in this case, a forthcoming cast recording — that inspires the same kind of imagination that animated, enchanted, and even frightened a 3-year-old Betts.
“When I first did the Lion in sixth grade, I was a gay black boy from Miami, Florida who came from the church who was not able to be who I fully was,” Freeman says. “So the fact that I get to revisit this role, being who I am and comfortable in my skin and getting to tell this story from a different perspective is beautiful and rewarding to me … you can learn to love yourself. The world will open up for you and you’re going to have to do things that scare you, and that’s okay.”
“That show was so Black,” my8-year-old whispered after we saw “The Wiz” on Broadway. He hadn’t made this observation last fall after seeing a performance of the show in Baltimore, during the national tour that preceded this revival. So I was curious: What had changed, and why was this iteration more culturally resonant for him than even the 1978 movie starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson or NBC’s 2015 “The Wiz Live!” special that I’d screened for him.
I suspected my son was drawn to this version’s colloquial expressions (“All I got to do is stay Black and die,” Evillene tells Dorothy), choreography (ranging from Atlanta street dancing to South African amapiano) and its casting of Wayne Brady as the Wiz, who greets the Scarecrow and the Tinman with a dap. (Brady will depart the production on June 12.)
Wayne Brady as the Wiz in the show’s Broadway revival.Credit…Richard Termine for The New York Times
Lewis, who is making her Broadway debut, with Kyle Ramar Freeman as a glammed up Lion and, in the background, Avery Wilson as the Scarecrow and Phillip Johnson Richardson as the Tinman.Credit…Richard Termine for The New York Times
The show features a cast of newcomers, including Nichelle Lewis, whose TikTok performance of “Home” helped land her an audition for the role of Dorothy. Brady, who made his Broadway debut 20 years ago in “Chicago,” offers up a charismatic Wiz who will do (almost) anything to leave Oz and, in Wayne’s back story, return to his loved ones.
During a recent interview, Lewis and Brady shared their history with the show, how they overcame their fears of joining this production, and the beauty of staging an all-Black musical on Broadway today. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Wayne, you joined the cast after a national tour, and, Nichelle, this is your Broadway debut. How did you prepare?
NICHELLE LEWIS I’m very nervous all the time. But I think it’s a good thing. Wayne said the other day, “If you weren’t nervous, it’d probably be bad.” For me, having those nerves is humbling. I wouldn’t say that I have all of this confidence, but I feel at peace and at home.
WAYNE BRADY Jumping into a show like this was jumping into a game of double Dutch. My default Wayne will always be the 10-year-old Wayne, who is a loner, plays by himself, listens to musical theater and writes because he doesn’t fit in. So I tell myself, “Oh, I don’t know all these people, and they already like each other.” But these things are always all in our head. Then you go, “Come on now. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t supposed to be here, and this is your thing.” Now, this is my fourth Broadway show, so my job is to be here to support my cast.
“The Wiz” is known for its iconic performances, on the stage and screen. How did your predecessors influence your performance?
LEWIS When I got the call, the first thing I did was watch this YouTube recording of Stephanie Mills doing the show. Every time she sang, it was so soulful that I could feel it through the screen. Then I watched a few clips of Diana Ross. If you watch the video of her singing “Home,” it’s as if she’s talking directly to you. So I wanted to take the genuineness and make sure I put that into this Dorothy.
BRADY As a kid, I didn’t only focus on Richard Pryor [as The Wiz], I just loved the whole thing. Later, once I started performing, I said, “Well, if it ever comes around, I want to be the Tinman or the Scarecrow.” And one time, I was even hired to be the Tinman for Des McAnuff’s [2006] production at La Jolla Playhouse, but I ended up doing another TV show instead.
Given that it is a beloved classic, how did you ensure the uniqueness of this adaptation?
LEWIS My Dorothy is 15, and even though she does have her Aunt Em, she still doesn’t feel like she has someone there for her. It’s kind of a teenager thing. It is important for Dorothy to find all of these different people on her journey who are going through similar things and trying to be comfortable in their skin. My goal was to create this person who is growing, and be able to see that those changes are in her voice, within her body, and just her being.
BRADY When Schele called me to do it, we had long talks about the Wiz. I knew this version would be different because of her and Amber’s approach to Dorothy, and the heroes, and their journey. Dorothy does not meet three older people who guide her. Instead, these characters are all similar in age, so by extension, the Wiz had to be different. Is he scamming them right off the top? Is he being genuine with how effusive he is? We had those talks because I wanted to shape this guy so he wasn’t unrepentant.
“A big message of this production was just to spread love for yourself, no matter who you are or where you come from,” Lewis said of the production’s inclusivity.Credit…Justin J Wee for The New York Times
After seeing it on Broadway, my 8-year-old commented how culturally Black he thought your show was.
BRADY Mission accomplished! It’s beautiful that he felt that because it’s unapologetically Black. It’s funny to me that there are times when we say unapologetically Black or Black excellence, it’s triggering for some people. Some people ask, “Why can’t it just be excellent?” I dare say we’ve been more than excellent.
LEWIS I wish I had seen a show where I thought that as a kid. I never remember seeing a show and being like, “That was so Black,” and saying it in a positive way before, unfortunately. I grew up in a small town in Virginia and was often asked, “Why does your hair look like that?” That’s a very different tone from: “That’s so Black. I want to be up there, too. Look at them.” I wish that somebody would have made me feel that way.
LEWIS That was a big part of Schele’s vision. In “Brand New Day,” she wanted to have all the colors for the L.G.B.T.Q. community. A big message of this production was just to spread love for yourself, no matter who you are or where you come from.
BRADY It’s definitely a vibe. This is a “Wiz” for this time, and it is so open to everybody and everything — that in and of itself makes it beautifully that queer.
What do you think the legacy of your show will be, particularly for African American musicals on Broadway?
BRADY The original “Wiz” was a definitive product of the 1970s in its glam and excess. André De Shields, who played the Wiz, said something to me on opening night. He said, “When we did the original ‘Wiz,’ it was the first time that these people had come to see all these Black faces on the stage, they tried to put us under all of this stuff. So you are lucky because you can just come onstage and be beautiful.” In André De Shields’s version, they worked with furs, leather and lights to claim a place in the world. Ours is of this time: We have this place and can just be. From the queerness onstage to the costumes, the musicality, light and bricks. I think instead of fighting to be seen, this “Wiz” is, “Oh, you see us.”
LEWIS I hope the little Black girls in the audience feel beautiful. I hope they feel they can be whoever they want and be proud of that. If I had seen this show where I see braids, I see Afros, I see all kinds of different hairstyles — I hope she will be proud of her hair and curl texture and will do whatever she wants to do. I just hope that she feels she can do whatever she wants in this world.
