The Wiz Has Me in Full Flashback Mode

Last night’s presentation of The Wiz Live on NBC has me feeling feelings I didn’t know I had about a 30+-year-old musical. When I was growing up in the late 70s/early 80s, I watched The Wizard of Oz regularly on network TV. I had the sense even then that I was going through the details of someone else’s memories, that Kansas, that Auntie Em, they belonged to Dorothy, but not to me. The famous black and white opening sequence, the technicolor middle, the longing to return to a “home” that had at one point felt like a prison…it all fascinated me, but I wouldn’t say I understood it. In the end, the whole movie was like that opening sequence: color-free. Then came 1984 and The Wiz on CBS. In my memories, it was the first time I heard Lena Horne sing, thought given my grandmother’s record collection, I know that can’t have been true. It was quintessential Michael Jackson piece, sometime between Off the Wall and Thriller, when he was magical, before we all started to think he was crazy, before the business with Bubbles the Chimp. It is set in Detroit in my head, though I know in reality the movie is set in Harlem…I can only guess that for 10-year-old me, Detroit was the Blackest place I could imagine. Diana Ross in that silly little dress was my least favorite part and Richard Pryor’s Wiz was my favorite. Richard Pryor who boasted and fretted and whom I both hoped and feared would say motherfucker at any moment. What left the biggest impression on me were the villains, the Crow…