The latest Wairarapa College musical, The Wiz , took its opening night audience on a souled-out and spirited trip to Oz on Thursday.
The Wiz, which has a three-performance season that ends tonight, is Wiki-tagged as the African American retelling by playwright William F Brown (music and lyrics by Charlie Smalls)of L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The production is the first full noise musical spectacle to be staged in the new and expansive Wairarapa College hall, according to director Marilyn Bouzaid, who this week celebrated 40 years as a teacher at the school.
The Motown feel definitely rippled the air on Thursday - thanks to the musical direction of Ivan Patterson and his musicians, pit singers, and ensemble, even if the action began in Kansas, not Harlem, where the most Afrocentric element was the corn rows, as in farm not fashion.
Dorothy (Celeste Rochery) was an honest lead, armed with well-sounded vowels and near classical phrasing, which while out of place in any ghetto was an embodiment nonetheless of the production's blended libretto.
Scarecrow (Michael McGruddy) was the most physical of the principals, Lion (Ben Udy) was most laughworthy, Tin Man ( Matthew Fleet) commanded the greatest stage presence and the little man with the loud voice, The Wiz (Ryan Cundy), was most rewarding.
Several of the principals, including Addeperle (Rose Rattray), Evillene (Auburn Crombie) and Glinda (Tharina Bouwer), each stood out as players who lifted the production with appearances that were all too brief.
The wheeled-house on the prairie, the Emerald City gates-cum-palace walls and The Wiz's stairway bedroom were nifty and fitting by turn, and the forbidding forest and lighting was evocative to a fault.
The dance and choral transitions enriched the production, even though in several places the action, while not stilted, hit dead air, and some elements of the set failed to embrace the greater spaces of the new hall.
Masterton Mayoress Lindy Daniell and Mayor Garry Daniell, a Waicol thespian in his day, joined with the marked applause that rewarded the production on the night and the entire company - funky monkeys, munchkins and yellow road bricks - deserve every accolade for their efforts.
