Thoughts on The Wiz

Of the three live musicals that NBC has produced in the last three years, I think "The Wiz", which first premiered on December 3rd and is being shown again on December 19th, was produced the best.  The actors, the sets, and the camera work all seemed much better, to me, than the other two films.

The actors who I thought did the best job were Shanice Williams as Dorothy and Ne-Yo as the Tin Man - they both seemed very compassionate, sympathetic characters who seemed very comfortable onstage.  In fact, the only actor who I thought did a poor job was a man named Common, who played the Emerald City's gatekeeper and who apparently is actually a rapper.  He just seemed a bit self-conscious, I suppose.

The sets were in some ways worse, and in some ways better, than the previous two musicals, but overall I think the effect was positive.  The walls in the backgrounds of the stage were actually electronic screens that were able to shift into different backdrops, and the props were able to slide across the stage and glide into place as the scenes shifted.  The hardwood stage floor was the biggest negative - in the previous two plays, "The Sound of Music" and "Peter Pan," there was more of an effort made in set decoration, including the floor.

The cameras were accidentally visible in two instances that I could see, and it was a bit claustrophobic to only see the musical from one side of the stage set, which was not the case in "Peter Pan" (which had all its sets in one large room, and the ability to film from any angle) or "The Sound of Music" (where the sets were all interconnected and there was more of a sense of depth).  However, they did have a neat trick of focusing the camera on certain areas of the stage when sets and actors were changing scenes during the (live) production.  It was particularly powerful in transitioning to the final scene, when the camera had zoomed in on a close-up of Dorothy singing for a few minutes - then her shoes click together and viewers find the stage has changed back into Kansas while they were watching Dorothy's face.

The musical at first seemed like it would be rather strange - I had never heard of this interpretation of "The Wizard of Oz" and initially, from the previews, thought it to be wild and overwhelmingly noisy.  However, there was a sort of rhythm to it that really grew on the viewer, and the songs (and the singers) were very pleasant to listen to.  Critics, also, have stated that this is the best NBC live musical so far, so I hope you get a chance to watch it if you are interested.

The only thing I would have liked to see done differently would have been to have had Toto appear throughout the whole play, as he did in the movie! :)