Baselines
There is always a baseline.
I do not have a memory of the first time I knew about The Wiz. It has just always been. An anchor, a through-line, a recurring beat.
I loved musicals, and The Wiz was a musical that looked like me. In a “world” (specifically: my home town where I discovered performing; and generally: musical theatre, which through my obsession became the backdrop of my adolescence and transition to adulthood) where most things did not look like me, The Wiz was close in proximity.
Thinking about The Wiz’s place in my psyche immediately brings to mind Big River’s place in my psyche (I was cast in Big River in my hometown, two years after being cast in The Wiz). With The Wiz I just stepped into a story – like many of my peers could many stories – through myself, from myself, without having to wrestle with myself in the process. I didn’t have to choose to and then actively work (audition) to have a chance of being cast (chosen!) to play a slave. In an activity people are drawn to because it allows them to take on other personas, in The Wiz the persona I rehearsed and performed and was complimented on didn’t involve betraying (depressing? terrifying? compromising? disassociating from?) my own.
The baseline of a musical is set by the writers, composers, producers, actors, and other creative folks involved in the original staging. Through the necessity of building the “world” of a musical, the baseline touches (sometimes by not touching) elements of class, gender, ability, race, nationality, plight, world events, etc. Any of the above is also filtered through the lens of what is
understood/acknowledged/known by the writers/creators
translatable to a broad audience
effective in driving the story
Take Annie. Annie in Annie is a girl, an orphan, a particular age, has a particular personality, lives in a specific time, and has a specific color hair. Because of the setting and the year and the circumstances in which the story takes place as originally constructed and performed, Annie is white (and has a religious status — or lack of — that makes centering Christmas an easy story point). For her to not be any of the things listed above in that time and in that setting would have changed a number of elements of the story as originally written, constructed, and performed for and consumed by mass audiences.
There is an idea attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes that I refer to often in my professional life when I’m working on getting ideas across. In The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Holmes muses on the nature of dialogue, asserting that lively and rich conversation comes from the fact that in any exchange between two people, there are actually six people present:
The real version of Person 1
Person 1’s ideal version of themself
Person 2’s ideal version of Person 1
The real version of Person 2
Person 2’s ideal version of themself
Person 1’s ideal version of Person 2
Holmes’ point is about what is made possible by the distance (and sometimes dissonance) between any of the six listed above. He argues that what makes lively and rich conversation is the stuff in between. Of conversation without recognition of the above he says:
“This is precisely as if a musician should insist on having nothing but perfect chords and simple melodies,--no diminished fifths, no flat sevenths, no flourishes, on any account.”
I refer to Holmes’ “6 person concept” often because it brings shape to the “stuff in between.” The “stuff in between” is energy that can compete with, accelerate, block, or morph a message or idea. Acknowledging that it's there and making it part of what’s on the table is essential housekeeping. We can’t address what we don’t acknowledge, but it’s at play whether we acknowledge it or not.
Applying the “6 person concept” to musicals, I would add at least two “people.” The Creator(s): what they know, what represents their ideal, what they choose. The Audience: what might be known or familiar to the world at large, what might be known from someone’s lived experience. With these 4 (12?) “people” in the mix, there is a lot of room for distance, dissonance, “in between.”
Performing and/or taking in stories is inherently about traversing the space “in between.” When there is proximity to the baseline, the “in between” can be filled with interpretation, exploration, reflection, and play. “Getting into character” is a thing that takes intention and energy. The law of energy (energy can neither be created or destroyed), tells us that when getting to the baseline requires a leap, that’s less energy available for expansion, nuance, play.
In Big River, cast as originally constructed, the baseline asks black actors to play at being enslaved and to display through acting and song the emotion of longing for freedom and the terror of capture. The baseline asks some white actors to play at being willing (planning) to sell — or allow to be sold — another human for reasons ranging from greed to indifference to a focus on their own whims. That is the baseline. The show succeeds and the story relies on the audience believing these things and the actors’ (and designers, and directors, and crew, and and and) ability to make all of the above (and more) believable, moving, and hilarious.
The Wiz found its way into existence through a pitch that leaned into the fact that the Motown sound was consistently at the top of the Billboard charts. Music performed by black artists and selling to all audiences. Soul is at the baseline of The Wiz (along with fantasy, whimsy, adventure, family, and joy). If we go back to the filtering, we know the context of that baseline is what was
understood/acknowledged/known by the writers/creators
translatable to a broad audience
effective in driving the story
A short and incomplete list of the context during the time The Wiz was written, pitched, and staged:
the recency of the assisination of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
the Vietnam War,
the Civil Rights Movement,
the Black Panther Party,
COINTELPRO
and all of the nuance, tension, struggle, triumph, coalition building, distance, and dissonance created by the previous and so so much more.
That is the baseline of The Wiz.
One of the reviews in response to the official Broadway opening began:
“The latest revival of The Wiz just wants to be fun. And that’s a problem.”
What does it say to unapologetically offer soul, fantasy, whimsy, adventure, family, and joy when [see incomplete list above] is your baseline? Smack dab in the middle of all that distance and dissonance? What parallels to [see incomplete list above] might be the context in which this 2024 revival lands?
We say “Black” and we mean Black and we also mean traversing the “space in between” as people have done in order to thrive for centuries in these united states of structures and systems that count heads and hands without regard for souls and soul and lineage.
There’s always a baseline. The baseline of the 2024 Wiz is “Welcome. We got this. Let’s gooooooo.”
