THE QUEEN IS NOW THE GREAT AND POWERFUL
Latifah joins a team of pop, R&B and Broadway talent for ‘The Wiz Live!’
Since seeing The Wiz on Broadway as a child in the ’70s, Queen Latifah has “gone through a phase of wanting to play every character,” she says, “from Dorothy to The Wiz.”
On Dec. 3, Latifah finally will get her shot at the latter role in NBC’s The Wiz Live!, the latest installment in what has become a seasonal tradition. Like 2013’s The Sound of Music Live! and 2014’s Peter Pan Live!, this Wiz follows the original stage incarnation, based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (also the source of a certain beloved film).
There are new elements in The Wiz Live!, being co-produced by Cirque du Soleil, whose theatrical division is planning a Broadway revival of the show for the 201617 season. Cirque-trained acrobats will be featured in the live broadcast, with choreography by film and music-video veteran Fatima Robinson, whose credits include Dreamgirls.
Harvey Mason Jr., another pop and R&B veteran who worked on the Dreamgirls soundtrack, is music producer for The Wiz Live!; he joined Ne-Yo and Elijah Kelley, respectively cast as Tin Man and Scarecrow, and Broadway veteran Stephen Oremus (music director) to write a new song, We Got It. And four-time Tony Award winner Harvey Fierstein contributed new material to William F. Brown’s original book.
Director Kenny Leon, a Tony winner himself for a 2014 revival of A Raisin in the Sun, says The Wiz Live! will emphasize Dorothy’s “emotional journey,” taking into account that she is being raised by her Auntie Em.
Leon says: “It’s important that Dorothy is an African-American girl, that girls of color can find themselves in this story. With where we are right now ... in terms of understanding each other racially, it’s important to get this story out.”
Latifah notes that while seeing the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz “opened up my mind to dream,” watching “people who looked like me and my family” in The Wiz — on stage and on screen — “made it seem ... that I could grow up and do what I’m doing now.”
At the same time, Leon says, The Wiz tells “a universal story about dreams and courage and tolerance. And about realizing, as Dorothy does, that home is where the love is.”