'The Wiz' Review: What Made the Original 'Wickedly Amusing'

December 3, 2015 11:00 AM EST

The live telecast of The Wiz that’s set to air on Thursday night will hardly be the musical’s first trip down the yellow brick road.

In 1975, when the theatrical version first opened on Broadway, it was an immediate hit. “Purists and adulators of Judy Garland may carp, and one can understand why, but this all-black musical version of The Wizard of Oz is a carnival of fun,” TIME declared. “It grins from the soul, sizzles with vitality, and flaunts the gaudy hues of an exploding rainbow.”

But what truly made it “wickedly amusing” was that its writers had transplanted the classic story of Dorothy from Kansas into a big city setting without losing “the sense of childlike innocence nor the wonder of revisiting a durable fable.”

The Broadway smash, which made $10,000 a week in its first month, was part of a larger theatrical box-office upswing that year. At the Tony Awards, it went home with seven prizes including best musical. But a few years later, when much-anticipated movie version of The Wiz was released in 1978, critics were singing a different tune.

The reason, TIME’s critic John Skow declared, came down to Dorothy.

So much wit and talent and energy crowd the screen in this lavishly filmed variant of the Oz story that it is depressing to realize that the production never had a chance. The trouble is not that memories are stirred of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, a film so indelibly fixed in the mind that to remake it would be like remaking Gone With the Wind. The Wiz, which came to life first as a Broadway musical, is a cousin of the movie, not a remake. Its independence is firmly based in its cheerful suppositions that Dorothy is a black girl from Harlem and that Oz is downtown somewhere in scary and wonderful Manhattan.

The film’s mortal liability is not merely that fantasy is light but money is heavy. Nor is it that in the most expensive film musical ever made (over $30 million), there are sure to be boggy places where what we see is not a fairy tale but a wounded budget projection creeping off to die. The difficulty is not even that by now we are overentertained and grumpy about song-and-dance numbers. (In The Wiz they are bright and clever, but as elaborate as D-day.)

What is wrong is the bankable-star problem. This means that banks will not back a big film unless the star is someone even a banker has heard of. Thus, when you want to cast a black version of The Wizard of Oz, you do not hold an audition for beautiful teen-age black girls who can sing like crazy, though the possibilities of such an audition stagger the imagination. You sign up Diana Ross, who is beautiful, sings like crazy, and is known to bankers from a career dating back to the early ’60s, when she was the lead singer of the Supremes. Ross is 34, so the script calls for a Dorothy who is 24 and a shy schoolteacher. This is awkward, because if the fantasy is to succeed, Dorothy must be childlike enough to be terrified of witches and wizards, and to talk trustingly with a scarecrow, a lion and a tin man.

Whether the NBC version will be more Broadway or more bust remains to be seen.

Read the full 1975 Broadway review, here in the TIME Vault: Jumping Jivernacular

What Made the Original The Wiz ‘Wickedly Amusing’

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