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 similar 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 patronizing up another gear with the lyric "Go ahead, believe in all these things, not because I told you to."
In the stage version Dorothy was played by relative newcomer Stephanie Mills, presumably a better fit than Diana Ross, who actively lobbied to be cast in the movie. At the time, Ross was 34, way too old to be Dorothy and already a certified legend who never feels right to portray a timid, naive wallflower. Her duets with Michael Jackson play like a completely embarassing waste of everyone's time, even if Jackson wasn't yet on her level. The Wiz did push him in the right direction - on set he bonded with Quincy Jones and the rest is history. That history doesn't work in the film's favour when watching two of the most confident, cool performers in the world act towards each other with wide-eyed sincerity and an explictly pronounced lack of poise, pretending to be 'hilariously' uncoordinated dancers. Moreover, our current knowledge of the bizarre disbalance between Michael Jackson's stage presence and his actual self makes the whole thing only more grating; his performance as the Scarecrow demands him to emphasise the same simple-minded childishness that made his personal life so thoroughly unpleasant to follow.
Bringing to the foreground all the things that are completely offputting about Michael Jackson, while neutering everything that made him the most popular man in the world is not a recipe for a succesful musical. The Wiz does however work decently well as an urban fantasy. Lumet is interested in making places that symbolise urban rot come alive with Oz essentially being an unnerving version of New York. A lot of the aesthetic elements (e.g. brownstones, street waste, construction sites) that are usually used (often by Lumet himself, for example in the opening montage of Dog Day Afternoon) 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 concrete-filled playgrounds situated below street level, 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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