Taking a different road

ORDINARILY, actors don’t want to die onstage -- unless, of course, they can do it literally and splendidly. And is there a splashier demise than the industrial-strength denouement of the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy douses her with water and she melts into a watery corpse?

Evillene, the witch’s pesky persona in the urbanized musical “The Wiz,” will put that image to the test when she makes her high-tech exit at the La Jolla Playhouse. The “reimagined” multicultural production opens next Sunday.

During a recent rehearsal in the Mandell Weiss Forum, Evillene was heading for her death. The black-box space is tucked behind the Mandell Weiss Theatre, which was filled with workers putting flesh on a high-tech environmental set designed to take the audience inside the land of Oz.

At the suggestion of La Jolla’s Tony-winning artistic director, Des McAnuff, William F. Brown reworked his book of the original musical, taking Evillene’s water phobia to its logical conclusion. “Soap does not smell good to Evillene because she associates it with death,” McAnuff told the cast. Evillene doesn’t bathe. She doesn’t brush her teeth. Her eyes bulge. And, in a dry rasp, she alternately bellows at and smarmily cajoles Dorothy while trying to steal her silver slippers. She is, in short, icky.

“She’s only a page away from dying,” McAnuff said.

“I know,” E. Faye Butler, who plays Evillene, responded brightly. “I love to die.”

Chances are you’ve seen the wicked witch die at least once in your life, either in the 1975 stage or 1978 film versions of “The Wiz,” staged with African American casts, or the 1939 MGM classic starring Judy Garland. As David Alan Grier, who plays the Wiz in La Jolla, puts it, “When you have a story like ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ there’s nobody who’s going to come into the theater who doesn’t know the story. Maybe some recently arrived Croatian refugee. It’s like Santa Claus.”

But McAnuff, whose production of “Jersey Boys” won this year’s Tony for best musical, is determined that his “Wiz” will be nothing like anything anyone has seen before. The show boasts new choreography, a built-from-scratch set with scaffolding and trusses using six miles of steel, cutting-edge technology and a book updated with the vernacular of 2006.

In this “Wiz,” Dorothy (Nikki M. James) is back in Kansas after her disastrous move to a blighted cityscape in the 1978 film, but this time she watches 500 channels in a simple wood-frame house affixed with a satellite dish. Toto, played by dancer Albert Blaise Cattafi when Dorothy hits Oz, sees the world through Toto Cam, a camera in his hat that projects the pup’s-eye view on LED screens.

The production is among the most ambitious ever staged in La Jolla, although McAnuff declines to divulge the cost. Most of the cast and creative team are Broadway veterans: Tituss Burgess (“Jersey Boys” in La Jolla and on Broadway) as the Lion, Michael Benjamin Washington (the recent revival of “La Cage aux Folles”) as the Tinman and Rashad Naylor (“Hairspray”) as Scarecrow. Uncle Henry is played by Orville Mendoza (“Pacific Overtures”), Valarie Pettiford (nominated for a Tony for “Fosse”) doubles as Aunt Em and Glinda, and Heather Lee (the 2003 revival of “Gypsy”) appears as Addaperle. If any show was tailor-made for New York, this one would seem to be it.

But McAnuff is reluctant to comment on the show’s prospects for the Great White Way. He insists he’s not looking past the Southern California run, which ends Nov. 12.

“We never use the B-word,” he says. “Occasionally, we use Bombay or Bora Bora or something else in a facetious manner, but we never do use the B-word.”

That sort of theatrical superstition is probably well placed, given the uncertainties of the marketplace. Still, McAnuff has a track record for helping to reinvigorate the American musical. Beyond “Jersey Boys’ ” recent triumph, he won Tonys for directing 1985’s “Big River” and 1993’s “The Who’s Tommy.” His credits also include 1995’s “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” among other noteworthy productions.

So while they may not be talking about New York in La Jolla, New York is keeping an eye out for McAnuff’s latest project, his penultimate show as artistic director at the La Jolla Playhouse. “There’s buzz in New York about it,” says Jack Viertel, creative director of Jujamcyn, which owns and operates five Broadway houses. “A lot of people, including me, will come out to see it. Des is a first-rate theater artist. Whether he wins a Tony or not, we all take him extremely seriously.”

McAnuff notes that of the 21 shows that have won best-musical Tonys since “Big River,” three originated in La Jolla, a disproportionately high number for a regional theater. “There’s probably an expectation that a high percentage of the shows that we launch are going to go in,” he says. But, he adds, “you’re not going to send a show in unless you feel like you’ve got a shot at succeeding. And sometimes you’re wrong and sometimes you’re right, but it doesn’t mean that everything we develop here has necessarily got a life beyond La Jolla.”

Assumptions may be tricky commodities, but Dodger Theatricals, a New York-based group of theater producers to which McAnuff belongs, is optimistic enough to have created the website WizBroadway.com. And the pedigrees of the creative team and cast suggest that the B-word must be on somebody’s mind.

An Oz-side seat

WHEN Dodger Theatricals optioned the rights in January 2002, McAnuff recruited Harold Wheeler, the show’s original orchestrator, for a new production set in 2006. He also consulted set designer Robert Brill, a 1991 graduate of UC San Diego, who had collaborated with McAnuff on the multimedia extravaganza “Sinatra: His Voice, His World, His Way” at Radio City Music Hall. Brill had also created environmental sets for 1998’s “Cabaret” and 2004’s “Assassins,” for which he was nominated for a Tony. An environmental set was precisely what McAnuff had in mind for his “Wiz.”

“I really felt you could create Oz as a world that you enter as opposed to a world you sit back and watch,” he says. “I started thinking, ‘Why can’t we have a yellow brick road that wanders around the theater? I know I’d love to go to the theater and feel like I’m in Oz and I’m one of the Ozians.’ ”

The yellow brick road makes a loop through the audience sitting in orchestra seats, but Brill’s primary inspiration for shaping the extended stage was the music. He designed an intimate concert space, a 25-foot-diameter theater-in-the-round surrounded by scaffolding and trusswork. Hundreds of lights change the color of the scaffolding to correlate with color-coded lands within Oz, as delineated by author L. Frank Baum in his book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

Multimedia became another important component. When Dorothy is in Kansas, images of dry grass and turning windmills are projected on metal mesh covering the scaffolding. In Munchkinland, enormous sunflowers are projected around the space. When the Tinman first appears, he’s dangling from a giant metal claw, surrounded by images of surplus electronics and other salvage.

“Concert lighting technology has evolved, so there are hundreds of moving lights that become a scenic component, part of the visual landscape,” Brill says. The show also uses retro elements, such as the 16 3-foot-diameter mirror balls that hang over the audience and the 6-foot mirror ball that deposits the wizard onto the stage. Brill also had fun with the quintessential ‘70s icon in his design of the 16-foot-high bling-thing in the shape of the word “Oz,” created from hundreds of mirror-ball “gems,” that appears when the quartet arrives in the Emerald City. All told, 5,000 mirror disks were used.

In the original musical, Evillene’s flying monkeys scaled 12 feet of scaffolding, then clambered down. In 2006, the flying monkeys really will fly, harnessed to five miles of cable assembled by a company called, appropriately enough, the Flying Monkeys.

As soon as Brill began sketching out his ideas, it became clear that the show would not be light on its feet. His initial designs were for a set permanently anchored to a Broadway house. But by the time the project picked up steam in 2004, the focus had shifted to La Jolla, where the production could be mounted at a lower cost and polished, away from the limelight.

Renewed relevance

THE latest incarnation of “The Wiz” almost didn’t get made. In the early-’90s, when someone first suggested that he stage a “Wiz” revival, McAnuff balked. He’d missed the original production when it was on Broadway and had been unable to sit through the first “reimagining” of it -- the critically hammered film directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Michael Jackson and a 34-year-old Diana Ross as the adolescent Dorothy.

“Like a lot of people, I found the motion picture very disappointing,” McAnuff says. “And at the time, I couldn’t get my head around why we would do it.”

The rights had been optioned for a 25th anniversary tour in 2000 that never materialized. When they became available the following year, Dodger Theatricals sought out the director to take on the project. By then, McAnuff’s perspective had changed. Dorothy’s conclusion that there’s no place like home had particular relevance for him in post-9/11 America.

“Any child who’s thinking about that point in their life where they’re going to leave the nest has got to have a different feeling about the world they’re entering into than I did when I was 16 or 17,” he says.

The journey of early adulthood was on the mind of McAnuff, by then the parent of a teenager. “A lot of us are late bloomers as parents,” he says. “I see their kids going off into the world, and it’s a scary world.”

Beyond that, the director found that the show’s groundbreaking R&B; score still held up. “The Wiz” was among the first musicals to use popular music that crossed over to radio play (Ross and Jackson’s version of “Ease on Down the Road” made it to No. 41 on the pop charts).

“It’s not that different from the music we’re listening to now -- the stuff that Charlie Smalls was writing in the ‘70s,” McAnuff says of the late composer-lyricist. “You add a house beat to that, and it’s very similar to the music we’re listening to today.

“That all made sense, the possibility of updating ‘The Wiz.’ ”

Multicultural presence

CASTING began in La Jolla, L.A. and New York in early March, with everyone -- even those with marquee names -- auditioning for their parts. Grier, a TV and film veteran who starred in “Dreamgirls” on Broadway, says he sought the part because he’s long admired McAnuff’s work.

“I thought it was a rare chance to get to work with him,” he says, adding that he knows there are no guarantees the show will make it to New York. “I’ve been around long enough to know. I’ve made both calls.”

Wayne Brady was initially cast as the Scarecrow, but less than two weeks after casting was announced, La Jolla issued a statement saying he’d been replaced by Naylor. McAnuff says that another commitment would have prevented Brady from being in La Jolla for technical rehearsals, a delicate time when the cast practices staging with all the tricky moving parts.

Though most of the principals are African American, the 27-member cast includes white, Latino and Asian performers. Staging “The Wiz” with an all-African American cast may have been groundbreaking in 1975 -- at that point, “Raisin” was the only other Broadway musical with a black cast -- but in 2006, a multicultural production seemed fresher to the show’s organizers.

“I think it’s smart to diversify the cast to reflect the world we live in,” James says, “which we’d like to think is a little more integrated.”

But that does come at some cost, in the view of some African American performers. When Butler appeared in the first colorblind production of “The Wiz” in Chicago 20 years ago, the show was picketed by critics who decried the loss of opportunities for black actors. “The problem for a lot of African American and multicultural performers is, why does it only work one way?” she says. “Why can it be multicultural with ‘The Wiz,’ but it doesn’t work that way with ‘Oklahoma’?”

Still, Butler believes the casting “speaks to our culture now,” as do so many facets of the 2006 “Wiz.” “I’m really proud to be involved with this production because it’s innovative and a step forward and I think big chances are taken,” she says. “It’s ‘The Wiz,’ you know, but it ain’t.”

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‘The Wiz’

Where: La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla

When: Opens Oct. 11. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Call for exceptions.

Ends: Nov. 12

Price: $48 to $72

Contact: (858) 550-1010