EchoBlog

NBC’s live rendition of “The Wiz,” which airs tonight, is the latest in the network’s efforts to draw in viewers with one-time spectacles, following renditions of “The Sound of Music” and “Peter Pan.” But it’s also the latest chapter in the history of a show that motivated many of its stars to aim for careers in the entertainment industry and that shook up Broadway in its own time, even if it doesn’t have quite the iconic status of NBC’s previous choices.

When “The Wiz” opened at the Majestic Theater in 1975, New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes wrote that the play “has obvious vitality and a very evident and gorgeous sense of style,” but that “I found myself unmoved for too much of the evening.”

But it wasn’t necessarily his dreams that “The Wiz” meant to animate. The show won seven Tonys, including Best Musical in 1975, and it was a major contributor to a boom in black musicals on Broadway, “rooted in a desire of Broadway to capitalize on a public appetite for black-related themes that was whetted by Hollywood a few years ago and more recently spread to a mass audience by popular television series such as ‘The Jeffersons’ and ‘Good Times,’ ” Judith Cummings wrote that year. African American audiences’ new interest in Broadway, sparked in part by productions like “The Wiz,” was even credited with playing a role in expanding the theater business as a whole at a time when a number of playhouses had been taken over by theaters devoted to showing pornography. (The show’s success also prompted sniping that “The Wiz” was kept afloat because it had a black cast, rather than because it had any particular merit.)

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For Stephanie Mills, who starred as Dorothy in the original Broadway production and plays Auntie Em on NBC tonight, “The Wiz” opened up cultural frontiers she never thought she’d have access to.

“My life was transformed along with every person who sat in our audience,” she wrote in an e-mail. “As a young girl of color back stage at the Majestic Theater I had to pinch myself several times. I never imagined in a thousand years I would sit and talk with American icons such as Lena [Horne], Michael Jackson, Liza Minnelli, [Jacqueline] Kennedy Onassis, Steve McQueen and Pearl Bailey to name a few. At the tender age of 17, I was working with giants such as [Geoffrey] Holder, Ken Harper and Charlie Smalls, who wrote the music and scored ‘The Wiz.’ ”

The impact of “The Wiz” wasn’t limited to Mills’s generation; it was a seminal show for many of the performers who star in NBC’s live staging of the play.

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“I was a student at University of Michigan, and I was taking African Dance courses. My teacher’s name was Vera Embree,” recalled David Alan Grier, who plays the Cowardly Lion, when we spoke by phone this week. “I remember she came into class one day and she sat us down and she started telling us about this amazing musical she had seen in New York, and she proceeded to act out ‘The Wiz.’ She described the choreography in particular, the tornado dance, the dancers, how the Winkies and Munchkins would scurry away from Evillene were precursors to what are pretty much standard hip-hop moves now, how they would balance on their hands and wave their feet …We were instructed, if you get near New York, you must see this, this will change your life.”

Grier followed her instructions, catching a ride to New York through the campus ride board during his spring break, paying $6 for his ticket to “The Wiz” and going backstage with a head shot after the show to tell the cast he wanted to be on Broadway. Grier says he wasn’t alone in being inspired.

“In talking with actresses specifically through this production and [hearing] black women saying it was the first time for them as children they saw themselves reflected on stage, being the protagonists of a major drama, this little brown girl, everything being by, for and about her, and a lot of these women said they saw ‘This is how I could forge a place in theater,’ ” Grier said of the conversations on the set of “The Wiz Live!”

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For Queen Latifah, who plays the Wiz in a gender-flipped recasting of both the original musical and Frank L. Baum’s novel, “The Wiz” was the first show she saw on Broadway; she went with her mother. “Orange Is the New Black” star Uzo Aduba, who plays Glinda the Good Witch, still owns the DVD of “The Wiz” she watched for the first time as a teenager. The singer Ne-Yo can’t even remember how young he was when he first saw “The Wiz,” but the show has stuck with him since.

All three shared Grier’s sense of “The Wiz” as a formative experience. “It was so exciting for me to see people that looked like me up there. It was very rare at that time for me to find people/ actors/ characters to relate to,” Latifah wrote in an e-mail, saying the show “was actually a life changing experience.” Latifah’s parents had encouraged her to aim high, but “The Wiz” was the show that convinced her that her parents’ faith in her abilities was based in real prospects for success. Ne-Yo saw in the show a powerful message about the value of self-knowledge. And Aduba wrote in an e-mail that she has turned to “Believe In Yourself” repeatedly; the lyrics have “been leaving a lasting impression on me and have carried me through my work.”

NBC’s live production of “The Wiz” comes at a moment when a number of networks have found success by telling stories about characters of color by creators of color, cracking — if not completely breaking — the monochrome whiteness that dominated television for a period. Grier stars in one of these series, NBC’s “The Carmichael Show,” which debuted this summer and will return for a second season.

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When I asked Grier whether he hoped “The Wiz” would have an impact on Broadway, he harked back to that college trip so many years ago.

“I remember at one point, that trip to New York, I saw ‘Timbuktu,’ which was starring Eartha Kitt, and then I saw ‘The Wiz.’ I think I’d missed [the all-black revival of] ‘Guys and Dolls,’ ” he recalled. “There was a period on Broadway when there were, quote unquote, all these black musicals. But for anything to succeed, it has to appeal and be entertaining to more than just black people, of course. I hope that it does become a tipping point. …We’re in a moment when with ‘Scandal,’ ‘How to Get Away With Murder’ and ‘Empire,’ it’s very different when I started acting. It seems to be more of an easy diversity on television. It’s not there yet. I don’t know if it will ever be exactly proportional for every ethnic group, sexual orientation and all that, but we seem to be going through a lot of change.”

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