I watched the live performance of the Wiz last night on NBC… The costumes were great and the show as a whole was entertaining, however there was one slight deviation that they took from the original story that left me wandering… ‘What the hell were they thinking’?
When it came time for the Wiz to send Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tinman and the Lion on their quest to prove they were worthy it wasn’t to bring back the wicked witch’s broom they were told to outright kill her. Now I grant you in the original story Dorothy splashes water on the old hag, which causes her to melt and she’s dead. However, they didn’t set out to kill her it was an innocent accident that she died.
The fact that it seemed to be no big deal to Dorothy that in order to appease the Wiz she’d have to kill someone left me feeling weird. Like something is not right here and I watch a lot of Criminal Minds and CSI shows so the concept of murder on television isn’t exactly foreign to me.
Maybe it had something to do with the cast being almost entirely black and I was relating them to the citizens of Chicago who seem to think of murder as just a part of normal everyday life.