Wizard of Oz (Leeds)

The late, great theatre director and mentor Stephen Joseph defined theatre
as “a passionate affair between actors and audience”. It is clearly not a
philosophy to which Jude Kelly subscribes in her new production of {The
Wizard of Oz::L01847296378}, in which the actors are largely confined to being observed through
a gauze opaquely and heard only through the intervention of mikes.

The hard drive of this Wizard is its ostentatious expenditure on
technology. On a very wide stage, we have another of JK’s three-screen sets
(remember Singin in the Rain?), so before the show gets cranked up, it’s a bit
like Cinerama. In addition to the screens, there are a variety of gauzes at
different depths to enable settings to be projected giving a 3-D effect.
Everything is projected upon – including the stage floor, of course, with
the yellow brick road – with a view to creating spectacular effects.
Unfortunately, the technology isn’t perfect: actors also get projected
upon, bewilderingly, and the gauzes are insufficient to black out stage-hands
re-setting furniture behind them or the solid flesh incarnation of the good
witch walking on behind the gauze which carries her image descending in a
bubble from the flies. Magic, alas, it ain’t.

With Munchkins, too, there’s an obvious problem, which the production
seeks to solve with a combination of large images of kids’ faces thrown on to
the cyclorama and various rather small puppets on stage. Close-up
photographs show the puppets to be delightfully sculpted, but on stage –
peeping out of hedges, over the top of grassy knolls, round the corners of
any available object and strung on to the four sides of a trolley wheeled
around the stage by a bloke sitting inside trying gamely to cope with the
manipulation – they are insufficiently differentiated to make their impact.

Touted as “a new look” at The Wizard, with this production, it’s evident that nobody thought to return to source. It is as if Jude Kelly has seated her cast in front of the
motion picture version and given instructions to imitate that as closely as
possible. Unfortunately, fine actress though Charlie Hayes may very well
be, it does seem perverse to cast someone with such a thin voice, whose
natural talent for movement doesn’t allow her to walk-on-the-spot
convincingly, in the role of Dorothy. (In fairness, it can’t have helped to
lumber her with sticking her right arm up the backside of a prosthetic Toto
– a cross between Spit the Dog and Emu – and telling her to keep its head
nodding and its tail wagging.)

Alan Cowan, Simon Quarterman and Tony
Timberlake – as the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion – give perfectly respectable, but
quite uninspired, readings of their roles, as, indeed, do the rest of the
cast. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion, however, that, whatever their efforts, the cast are not
the main focus of the project. And they should be.

PS Forget Patrick Stewart‘s much-featured appearance on tape as the
“Virtual Wizard”. It’s just loud.

– Ian Watson