A Musical Called The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz With An All...

In 1974, a musical called The Wiz opened in Baltimore at the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre and on Broadway in 1975. The Wiz was an urbanized retelling of L. Frank Baum s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with an all African-American cast placed within the context of 1960’s and 1970’s African-American society. The musical kept the rural Kansas setting and agrarian Oz as well as many of the other central plot devices from the novel. In 1978 Motown released a movie loosely based on the musical which starred Diana Ross as Dorothy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, Nipsey Russell as the Tinman, and Ted Ross as the Cowardly Lion. The movie moved the story from Kansas to Harlem and Oz to fantastical dystopian version of New York City. The Wiz has several female characters that are central to the storyline: Aunt Em, Miss One the Good Witch of the North, Evillene the Wicked Witch of the West, Evamean the Wicked Witch of the East, Glinda the Good Witch of the South, and Dorothy. All of them except for Dorothy are representative of some form of the motherly family-oriented place African-American woman hold in society. Dorothy represents a new type of female role for African-American woman in society, one that is independent and has choices about what role she wants to play in society. This paper argues that Motown’s production of The Wiz shows the creation of a new role for black women in society, one independent from the motherly family-oriented role society previously expected of them. TheShow MoreRelatedThe Studio System Essay14396 Words   |  58 Pagesscreen, and its audience it must go through a three stage process. Firstly and most obviously it has to be produced, following this it must then be distributed, and finally exhibited. Before the introduction of the studio system in the 1920s all of these processes were controlled separately. Although this gave the makers of films, such as directors and producers, room to express their creativity it placed a heavy constraint upon the amount of movies that could be made, and financialRead MoreLena Horne9265 Words   |  38 Pagesoccasionally on Broadway, including in her own Tony-winning one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music in 1981-1982; and she sang and acted on radio and television. Adding to the challenge of maintaining such a career was her position as an African-American facing discrimination personally and in her profession during a period of enormous social change in the U.S. Her first job in the 1930s was at the Cotton Club, where blacks could perform, but not be admitted as customers; by 1969, when she acted