Theatre in Review: The Wiz (Marquis Theatre)"So you wanted to meet The Wizard!" So sings Wayne Brady at the Marquis, stepping out of a weird green structure that looks like a chess piece or maybe a perfume bottle. (Ozian architecture, it seems, has touches of both Dr. Seuss and Terry Gilliam.) Then again, getting a gander at The Wiz hasn't been easy for some time. William F. Brown and Charlie Smalls' musical is a Broadway legend, the survivor of a nightmarish tryout, saved from the junk heap by the vision of director/choreographer Geoffrey Holder, and defying bad reviews to run nearly 1,700 performances, a blockbuster tally for 1975. It also earned the sneaking admiration of no less a luminary of Stephen Sondheim. As he was known to note, "It's the one show which makes you feel better when you come out of it than you did when you walked in." The cast album remains a delight, featuring a stars-of-tomorrow cast that includes Stephanie Mills, Hinton Battle, Andre De Shields, and the great jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater. Nevertheless, the show's afterlife has been less than stellar. We'll draw a veil over the film version, starring a wildly miscast Diana Ross, which sucked untold millions out of Universal Studios. A 1984 Broadway revival was dead on arrival, barely lasting two weeks. A production at City Center's Encores was a bore and a live TV version unwatchable. The MGM film, it seemed, was forever, but The Wiz was relegated to the shelf of yesterday's successes. The admittedly imperfect Broadway revival has its oddities, but it gets three crucial things right. First, the book, never the show's strongest point, has been given a thorough going-over. (This was utterly necessary; at Encores, the dialogue scenes consisted of so much dead air between the musical numbers.) Amber Ruffin, who did good work a couple of seasons ago, with Some Like It Hot, has trimmed and refocused the story to sharpen the characters' motivations, lightly applying an ecological theme and salting the dialogue with fresh new wisecracks. Second: In streamlining the action, Ruffin makes plenty of breathing room for Smalls' score, a breezy compendium of mid-Seventies soul sounds that audiences find irresistible. There's nary a dud: Standouts include the foot-tapping "Ease on Down the Road," the stirring "Be a Lion," the Tinman's inward-looking lament "What Would I Do If I Could Feel?," and the Luther Vandross interpolation "Everybody Rejoice," an earworm for the ages. (One of these days, we're going discuss why Broadway in the 1970s -- with musicals like The Wiz, Raisin, Ain't Misbehavin', and Bubbling Brown Sugar, to say nothing of plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Charles Gordone, Melvin Van Peebles, Leslie Lee, and Joseph A. Walker -- was so open to Black artists; it's worth thinking about.) And, as in the original production, some bright young talents travel the Yellow Brick Road. Twenty-four-year-old Nichelle Lewis's Dorothy is the essence of youthful insecurity until she unleashes a voice that soars to Ozian heights. As the Scarecrow, Avery Wilson is a skilled eccentric dancer with an array of impressive high kicks. Tinman Phillip Johnson Richardson displays some nifty dance breaks in "Slide Some Oil to Me" while giving his character some surprisingly sensitive shadings. Kyle Ramar Freeman all but devours the stage as the Cowardly Lion. Adding her special brand of mischief is Melody A. Betts, double-cast as that tough-love specialist Aunt Em and as sassy Evilene, the wickedest of witches. (Dorothy: "You just gotta free the people and lift the curse." Evilene: "All I got to do is stay Black and die.") Strangely, the show is more confident when its new faces command the stage. Director Schele Williams, who maintains a breezy pace and buoyant tone, isn't as confident when handling her marquee names. I suppose the role of Glinda had to be built up for Deborah Cox, but giving her "He's the Wizard," normally sung by another witch, Addaperle (Alyson Kaye Daniel, who slays in her book scenes), doesn't work out. The Wiz, played by a distinctly unmenacing Brady, makes a surprisingly weak impression in his first scene; he improves later, dancing surprisingly well and getting the groove of a character here reimagined as a Vegas lounge act with con man undertones. There's also a running down of energy after the intermission: JaQuel Knight's initially lively choreography starts to lose steam in the second act -- The Wiz is a notably dance-heavy show -- and costume designer Sharen Davis, who does amusingly detailed work for the principals, is fresh out of ideas (or maybe money) in the later scenes: The tie-dyed athleisure outfits for the chorus in "Everybody Rejoice" look right out of the rehearsal room. Still, the show rises to a satisfying climax with the one-two punch of "Believe in Yourself," here given a very Lena Horne interpretation by Cox, and the finale, "Home" which Lewis lifts to the stratosphere. Also, scenic designer Hannah Beachler and video/projection designer Daniel Brodie have amusingly collaborated to give each scene a distinct style: A black-and-white Grant Wood rural landscape, a forest with a touch of Maxfield Parrish, a Vegas-influenced Emerald city, and a meadow out of the Serengeti. Ryan J. O'Gara knows exactly how much to pump up each number with saturated colors and big sweeps. Except for "He's the Wizard" (which might have been the result of an off day on Cox's part), Jon Weston's sound design showcases the cast's powerful voices. The Wiz is never going to be a consequential musical, but the people responsible for this revival have restored it to its original status as a slick and honestly entertaining free-for-all. (It's also a good choice for a family theatre excursion.) At the very least, they're making an honest man of Stephen Sondheim. --David Barbour 
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