The Show

The Script

“Oz” is a new, original work for the musical theatre based on L. Frank Baum’s classic American fairy tale.

Back Story

The movie made the characters from the book world-famous. This script doesn’t try to redefine the iconic identities, but does fill them in, providing more personal history and depth, especially for the Lion, Tin Man, Wizard, and Wicked Witch of the West.

Girl Power

Baum was a radical feminist of his time, but his Dorothy nevertheless mostly let things happen to her. Ours starts out meek and well-behaved, but her experiences in Oz teach her to take control of her life. What was a Hero’s Journey is now a Coming of Age story.

Beyond that, the Wizard is the only serious, powerful authority figure who isn’t female. (With the possible exception of the Good Witch of the North, as explained below.) All four Witches are intelligent, independent, and wield power with confidence. Neither Dorothy nor Nimmee are helpless damsels waiting for a hero to arrive. They are the heroes.

Believability

With a fantasy story, it’s particularly important that the characters come across as real, and true, rather than as caricatures or stereotypes, if you want the audience to really be invested in the story. One of the ways we’ve done that is to adjust the ages of Dorothy’s companions to be closer to her own age. Dorothy is 10–14 years old. The Scarecrow is adult in appearance, but only three days old, and is the most innocent of all of them. The Tin Man is our Romeo, around 14–16, and has his Juliet, in the form of Nimmee, his fianceé. The Lion is also a teen-ager, at that gangly awkward stage, and circumstances have forced him to grow up quickly. Of course he’s afraid! Weren’t we all at that age?

This transforms what was “Dorothy and the three Geezers” into an adventure with her peer group, and the events that unfold forge close friendships between Dorothy and her companions.

Family

A secondary theme of the script that I expect to resonate powerfully with the LGBT community is that a family isn’t defined by blood, it’s defined by love. Dorothy loses her parents, but her aunt and uncle love her dearly. Our Dorothy isn’t a truant, wishing she could escape Kansas. She’s an orphan, who starts out recognizing how fortunate she is to have a place to live and be loved after her parents die, but does not understand why that isn’t enough to make her happy. By the time Glinda reveals that the Silver Slippers can take Dorothy home, Dorothy has grown to understand how important family is. She also can see that her companions have become a second family to her. Since the Shoes only offer a one-way trip, she is forced to choose between her relatives in Kansas, and her new friends in Oz. Whichever way she goes, it will cost her dearly. This is the emotional climax of the show.

Representation

Baum’s vision of personal independence and lack of hierarchy easily extends to a broader 21st century perspective. Nothing in the original story requires anybody in Oz to be white or straight. Full-spectrum casting just makes sense, and can be done without needing to finagle the story. Beyond that, the Scarecrow is clothing stuffed with straw. It doesn’t have any primary or secondary sexual characteristics. It is genderless. However, the story does not require the Scarecrow to have a gender, so this quality goes unremarked. I’m sure many audience member will just assume our Scarecrow is male. But for some people, the Scarecrow’s non-binary genderlessness will be an affirmation of their own lives.

Locasta, the (Mostly) Good Witch of the North, is another opportunity to cast outside the box. The role wants a venue-filling gospel voice. It does not require that the actor be of a specific gender, or color, or even mobile. For reasons that are integral to the story, Locasta is an Air Witch, and thus the ground is…distasteful. If the role is played by somebody who normally needs a walker or a wheelchair, then she can fly in, or be carried by servants, or roll in on some suitable contraption, and still be completely authentic to the story.

The Source

One of the true classics of American literature, L. Frank Baum's “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” is most widely known through MGM’s musical movie version from 1939. Somewhat less well known is that the book it was based on was just the first of a series of fourteen books about Oz (plus collected short stories and other related titles) written by L. Frank Baum. Even less well known is that the MGM movie was the fifth time that “The Wizard of Oz” had been made into a movie, and that it unquestionably owes its existence to the massive smash theatrical musical “The Wizard of Oz” created by Baum himself that debuted in 1902, opened on Broadway in 1903, ran for almost 300 performances, and toured the country for the rest of the decade.

Since that time, “The Wizard of Oz” has never returned to Broadway (with the arguable exception of “The Wiz”), although there have been many versions written for the stage, including productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company and Andrew Lloyd-Webber. Notably, all of these versions have been based on MGM’s cinematic retelling of the story, rather than on the original source material. “Oz” is our attempt to reveal to audiences some of the magic that made the original novel a runaway bestseller and the original musical a nationwide sensation; a truly American story for a great American art form.