There are no slippers, ruby, silver, or otherwise, and Dorothy’s journey to find her way home is often eclipsed by a story about a political rebellion in the Land of Oz. The Wicked Witch of the West never appears and so cannot be melted. In this version of the story, the Lion is never described as Cowardly, never becomes a friend of Dorothy, and cannot speak. I will only note that this play provides a fascinating look into one of the great American myths before it had fully solidified in the national consciousness. I therefore leave most of the historical contextualization of this adaptation to them. In the coming days several Oz scholars and fans will be contributing blogs about the history of this particular text, and I fear that anything I could offer would be at best incomplete and more than likely inaccurate compared to their superior knowledge of the subject. In part, it was this book that inspired the Musical of the Month team to select one of the first such adaptations for our December Musical of the Musical. I mostly forgot my visits across the Deadly Desert into Munchkinland until, several years ago, on a visit to a favorite independent bookstore in Annapolis, Maryland I happened upon Mark Evan Swartz’s excellent book “Oz Before the Rainbow”, which chronicles the many stage and screen adaptations before the iconic 1939 movie.
There are plenty of (mostly) rational adults who remain as obsessed with the world of Oz as I was as a child, but as I entered pre-adolescence the Oz books went into the basement and I, like any normal tween-age boy, became more interested in well…the Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (but that’s another story for another time).
I vaguely knew that there were dramatic adaptations of The Wizard of Oz before Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr followed the yellow-brick road, but living as I did in the Midwest in those days before the commercial Internet, I suspected I would never get a chance to read or see them. Frank Baum, and hunted in used-bookstores for the additional authorized books by Ruth Plumly Thompson, Jack Snow, and Dick Martin. As a six year old, I became a card-carrying member of The International Wizard of Oz Club, read all 14 Oz books by L. Unlike most children, though, I spent much of my later childhood obsessed with the story. Like many who spent their early childhood in those years before home video technology (VCRs, DVDs, Netflix, etc.) became ubquitous, I have fond memories of watching the annual television broadcasts of the 1939 film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz with my family.
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