Robert O’Hara on changing narrative of ‘The Wiz’
Robert O’Hara doesn’t really have an hour to spare.
He’s just flown into Houston to begin a lightning-paced, twoweek rehearsal process for “The Wiz,” Charlie Smalls and William F. Brown’s 1974 musical that is in the midst of a revival at Theatre Under The Stars(the production runs through Sunday).
He’s been asked to talk to a reporter about how he plans to update a musical that he says is “very much set in the 1970s.” So, rather than eating, O’Hara spends his lunch break in a rehearsal room in the corner of the TUTS building, explaining what he wants to do.
“If Beyoncé wore bell-bottoms now, it wouldn’t be retro. She’d make it now, by simply owning it in a different way,” he says, speaking in a fast, ebullient pace. “Some of the things in ‘The Wiz’ are so set in the 1970s, yet they feel very relevant in a strange way.”
Bell-bottoms are a perfect way to describe what O’Hara, who directs this production, wants to achieve — give something a fresh context.
A director, after all, doesn’t have the legal right to change the music or the dialogue of an old musical. They must work around it and, by doing so, come up with creative solutions. O’Hara has spent his entire career taking well-worn traditions, like farce, and injecting revelatory, idiosyncratic and sometimes shocking ideas about blackness, masculinity and sexuality into them. The New York Times called “Bootycandy,” his 2011 play depicting the life of a gay black man, “As raw in its language and raucous in spirit as it is smart and provocative.”
But “The Wiz” is not Robert O’Hara’s play. It’s a classic musical riffing on “The Wizard of Oz.” Take the song “Be a Lion,” for instance. You might remember seeing the film adaptation and hearing Diana Ross sing to the Cowardly Lion, played by Ted Ross.
“Normally it’s a girl and a man,” O’Hara says. “Now it’s two women. That speaks to where we are, for a woman to tell another woman to have courage and be a lion.”
When casting “The Wiz,” O’Hara decided to open up all roles to all genders.
“I think gender’s something we’ve been thinking about a lot more, as a social construct,” he says. “What does it really mean? How can we experience a
world by opening it to more people who identify different ways? I didn’t go, ‘Only a woman can play the lion or the Wiz.’ I opened up all the roles to any gender. I would have no problem with casting all four friends as women. I went in the direction I found most interesting.”
And he did cast a woman in the titular role.
“So you have a story that is normally told by a young woman, who goes into a dream, meets three men, who meets another man, who tells her to kill a woman,” he says. “Here, Dorothy is meeting two men and a woman, and meeting a woman, and having an interaction and confronting another woman. It’s not men leading her story. It’s a different way of looking at it, in these casting choices.”
Gender-blind casting is distinct from, say, a genderswapped version of a wellknown tale. O’Hara didn’t decide, before casting, which genders would be which. There is no preordained moral or thesis surrounding gender in this “Wiz,” merely possibility. In other words, he wanted the performers to bring their interpretation of who the Lion, or the Wiz, or anyone could be. The casting philosophy broke out of the gender binary.
“The Wiz is usually double cast as Uncle Henry,” O’Hara says. “So Dorothy will be raised by two women, and not a man and a woman. That also speaks to the modern day. One can make of it what they will, but if you open up who can play what part, that will open up the narrative.”
Gender is something O’Hara has been chewing over recently. In January 2018, he premiered the play “Mankind,” which envisions a world in which women have become extinct.
“It’s a satire on how men would deal with women no longer being here to denigrate or control or to place rules upon,” he says. “What happens if men began to be able to reproduce and live under the rules they had placed on the female body?”
Watching audiences consider the play while the #MeToo story unfolded, day after day, was fascinating for O’Hara. “It was difficult to be in the room. Every day there was a new revelation of someone in the industry. Sometimes, when you write a satire, you don’t think you’re in the place where the satire is happening. It resonated with a lot of people. But it’s a difficult play to wrap your head around unless you’re ready to take a few hits.”
As the lunch break ends, an assistant pops in to ask him if he wants to look at some of the early choreography of “The Wiz.” O’Hara finishes his point, mentioning the fact that, because everyone always knows the “Oz” story, he has latitude to push and stretch the story as a director.
“The text is staying the same, but the narrative is changing,” he says. “You are telling a story that is going to be looked at differently and will be enriched by it.”