Word: wizarding
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AGAINST ALL ODDS, and for no discernible reason, there's a spectacularly good Wizard of Oz at Dunster House. It's obviously a labor of love on the part of a lot of people; more theatrical ingenuity and musical panache than most of this year's desperately gauzy Broadway revivals. Everyone knew from the start that The Wizard of Oz couldn't be put back on the stage in toto, so they didn't try to out-Hollywood Hollywood in the cloying way that's made so many recent Harvard musicals hopelessly wan and disappointing...
...Dunster Wizard of Oz works on the principle that everyone is familiar with the famous movie of the same name and tries to suggest things from the film, not reproduce them. Of course, things are added as well as suggested, or else there'd be no reason not to just set up a screen and show the film on it. There's the enthusiasm and freshness of the cast, for instance, to replace the sometimes frigid tinsel of the movie, and most of all, fresh music. Music director David Garlock, working with half a dozen orchestrators and a fine...
...THINK any red-blooded American could honestly say whether The Wizard of Oz is a good movie, since everyone sees it before he thinks of things in those terms. My primary impression of it as a child was fear--I was scared by Miss Gulch, scared by the twister, scared by the monkeys. I was probably scared by the munchkins too, since all I remember is being afraid. None of the happy moments of the film made any impression on me. And later this put me on the track of deeper meanings. If I knew anything about psychology, or folklore...
...intentions--Dorothy's slippers were silver, not ruby, in the book. The Cowardly Lion is William Jennings Bryan, who never went far enough, for Baum, towards removing the farmer from his "cross of gold." The Wicked Witch of the West, then as now, is the Republican party. And the Wizard of Oz is none other than Grover Cleveland, who promised free silver and then told his supporters to wait. The details can be filled in cleverly enough to almost convince you Paul is dead. It's too bad the Dunster House Drama Society didn't stage a revisionist Wizard...
...hired Wayne the Wizard to fly in from the Virgin Islands to perform a magic show. He sent invitations to all the black diplomats and sent limousines out to have them picked up, and they all showed up and they hadn't been invited..." Which clears up the mystery of what happened to The Wizard of Oz when the balloon burst. 8 at Dunster House; there's a review on page 2, I believe...