✭✭✭✭✩

music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by E. Y. Harburg,

directed by Allen MacInnis

Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People, Toronto

November 8-December 30, 2007

The Wizard of Oz now playing at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People is loads of fun.  It is not easy to pitch a show to appeal both to children five years and older and to the adults that accompany them, but that’s exactly what director Allen MacInnis, his cast and design team manage to do.  On opening night the children were enraptured and the adults continually amused.

The show is John Kane’s stage version of the much-loved 1939 film first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987.  It is only 90 minutes long but incorporates all the famous music from the film plus, for Oz fanatics, much music deleted from the final print including the legendary “Jitterbug” number in the forest.  Of course, the stage version is in no way a substitute for the classic film.  What it does is to allow people to experience a well-known story live and to enjoy both allusions to and divergences from the film.  African-Canadian Saccha Dennis as a feisty Dorothy tells us at once we’re not in 1939 Hollywood any more and Thom Allison’s backwards ball cap sets the action sometime in the present.  Designer Michael Gianfrancesco’s costumes are best when they diverge from the film as in the naughty, frilly frock he gives the Wicked Witch of the West or the tomato soup can body he gives the Tin Woodsman.  He has imagined Kansas as a flat painted drop and Oz as a warehouse extending to the back wall of the stage filled with a jumble of sets of all periods and styles.  For adults MacInnis makes clear that Oz is a theatre where Dorothy acts out a solution to the disturbing aspects of her life in Kansas.   

Though Dennis tends to be overemphatic, she exudes an infectious enthusiasm as Dorothy.  Sharron Matthews is a treat as the Wicked Witch, still a virulent child- and dog-hater but more like Megan Mullally than Margaret Hamilton.  Molly Atkinson plays Glinda as a comically smug Samantha from Bewitched.  Of Dorothy’s companions, Allison pretty much steals the show as the Tin Woodsman both for his detailed physical comedy and fine singing.  Sam Moses, looking like a befuddled Einstein, is very funny both as the travelling huckster Professor Marvel and as the Wizard himself.

The real wizard of the show, however, is lighting designer Steve Lucas, who creates a wide range of marvellous effects from the tornado to Glinda’s bubble, the Yellow Brick Road, the Wicked Witch’s face on the moon and the glowing greenness of the Emerald City.  MacInnis ensures the magic world surrounds us.  When characters step off the stage or winged monkeys race down the aisles, we get shivers only live theatre can give.    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-11-09.

Photo: Saccha Denis as Dorothy.