Movie: The Wiz (Sidney Lumet, 1978)
There is some good stuff here, but you can't have Michael Jackson and Diana Ross star in a two-hour-plus musical produced by Motown and end up with just two (Ease On Down The Road and A Brand New Day) memorable songs. Musical theater is far removed from the sound that made Motown one of the most important record labels in America but I had expected that there would at least be some interesting experiments here that would try to combine the two styles. Instead, we mostly get fairly standard Broadway songs, often with terrible lyrics espousing 'inspirational' self help messages unsuccesfully pretending to be allusions to black emancipation struggles. The ending is preceded by the Good Witch Glinda (Lena Horne) telling Ross' Dorothy that 'if we know ourselves, we are always home, anywhere," setting up a final song where every single line is a hollow bromide about believing in yourself. As it keeps going on and on, it's almost impressive when it finds a way to turn the preaching up another gear with the lyric "Go ahead, believe in all these things, not because I told you to."
It's almost amazing to learn that Diana Ross actively lobbied for the role. At the time she was 34, way too old to play Dorothy and already a certified legend who never feels right to portray a timid, naive wallflower. Her duets with Michael Jackson feel like a completely embarassing waste of everyone's time. We are forced to watch two of the most confident, cool performers in history act towards each other with wide-eyed sincerity and an explictly pronounced lack of poise, pretending to be 'hilariously' uncoordinated dancers. At least, Michael Jackson bonded with Quincy Jones on set, and the rest is history. That history of course includes the bizarre disbalance between his stage presence and his actual self. It's always been thoroughly unpleasant to watch Jackson approach his personal life with the same simple-minded childishness that his performance as the Scarecrow here demands of him. In a nutshell, The Wiz brings all the things that are completely offputting about Michael Jackson to the foreground, while neutering everything that made him the most popular man in the world.
If The Wiz fails as a musical, it does work decently well as an urban fantasy. Lumet is interested in making places that symbolise urban rot come alive. Oz is essentially an unnerving version of New York. A lot of the aesthetic elements (e.g. brownstones, street waste, construction sites) that are usually used to signify New York and its bustle are here placed outside their usual context and given a fantastical, lightheartedly dystopian spin. We find the Tin Man in a defunct theme park among scraps of metal and rusting roller coasters, key songs are staged in abandoned playgrounds below street level surrounded by concrete, and the film's best scene takes place in an empty subway where our heroes are attacked by garbage cans (wherever they go, Dorothy and co. are surrounded by trash) and platform pillars disconnecting themselves from the ceiling. The film would have benefitted from more of that kind of absurdity; the life-sized humanoid microphone Dorothy talks to when trying to reach the Wiz is a great example of what could have been.
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