This is probably a throw-back. Some may even consider it to be a take-back if they were there, but with the entire hubbub about The Wiz Live! this last week, I just have to share…
Rewind to a small village in Northern Indiana circa 1990 something, comprised of corn fields and soy bean farms, surrounded by factories, traversed by the Amish… and white. Very very white. Now the town next door, a whopping 30,000 strong compared to the village’s wee 1500, had more diversity, sure. Was it a melting pot? Hell no. Today, twenty odd years later, could be a different story, but to embrace the full impact of the experience I’m about to drop, one must remain in the cultural makeup of yesteryear.
High school productions were no joke. When the football season was done, in Middle America there was one thing to cling to – the Spring Musical. Every high school around the area had one. Theater and choral students everywhere anxiously anticipated the announcement of the Rogers and Hammerstein or Andrew Lloyd Webber story to be told that year through off-key ditties and awkward choreography. As they say in the South – Bless Their Hearts.
Big Sis was heavily involved in these performances so by default (meaning I was forced to attend each and every one) I like to think I became a local expert critic of sorts. She was in every musical I can remember my school produced – Oklahoma, The Sound of Music, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Oliver!, Carousel, The Wizard of Oz … see a commonality here? Now, the kids the director had to cull from sometimes dictated his or her choices and we didn’t have a lot to cull from. They worked with what they had and kudos to them for doing so.
Having such a tiny school, it also meant having a tiny budget. Again, the directors worked with what they had while the high school down the street was 5 times our size, with a bigger budget and a bigger population and at least a handful of kids that weren’t white. Which means they had just enough money and courage mixed with ignorance to think they could perform The Wiz.
Now, I admit, I inspected Soul Train on Saturday mornings after my cartoons. I watched The Cosby Show (though that probably doesn’t count). I knew who Redd Foxx was. I listened to Run DMC, loved Eddie Murphy Raw and enjoyed Coming To America – I caught The Wiz every time I could on BET, but the bottom line, no matter how you slice it or dice it – I am white and was raised in a pretty white society on episodes of Growing Pains and interviews with Larry Byrd. My parents raised me well, don’t get me wrong. They discussed other cultures, world politics and kept me informed about how my race wasn’t the only race. My culture wasn’t the only culture. They educated us. But in hindsight I don’t know that every kid (and adult) in that community were granted the same exposure to and understanding of the outside world, hence a director casting 40+ white kids and like 3 black teens in an attempt to pull off an erroneously ill-advised homage to Michael Jackson’s and Diana Ross’s stroll down that Yellow Brick Road.
It’s the best musical I’ve ever seen performed live in my life and I’ve been to Broadway and the West End, folks. But it wasn’t the best for the reasons you’d think. Even at 16, I knew it was wrong, but sometimes you have to watch the ship sink, the train wreck, the cars crash… you just can’t look away no matter how hard you try.
I went with my Icelandic foreign exchange friend, and probably the last person on the planet to have even an inkling of what The Wiz was supposed to be. We were tennis buddies and she attended the neighboring school that was putting on the performance. She wanted the entire “American” experience and to her that that included seeing a high school musical. So we went.
We entered the auditorium and before the lights ever dimmed, I knew in my heart this director and these theater students were about to pull off potentially the most racially insensitive thing to which I’d ever bear witness. Yes, it was the nineties, but where I grew up could be a good ten to fifteen years behind the times. Mixed race relationships, homosexuality, you name the hot button social issue and I can bet you we weren’t on the same page with the rest of the nation. Here’s the thing, though, most of these people were good people with good intentions trying to embrace new things; they were trying to break down barriers and spread the love. I’m just trying to be clear that oftentimes good intentions are like the pathway to hell, or light the pathway, or set it on fire or something like that …
The lights dimmed and the musical commenced. It’s hard to say what made the performance so wrong (ok, not really, it’s kind of easy to say what made it so wrong) Was it the way too intense fog machine choking the audience? Was it the chicks without rhythm roller skating haphazardly around the auditorium? Was it the licentiously dressed underage Poppyseed girls dancing promiscuously making everyone watching wildly uncomfortable? OR could it just be the white kids impersonating classically black roles by exaggerating the “blackness” that embodied each character, embarrassing the human race as a whole? I think the only thing that could have trumped it would have been watching the school’s attempt at Roots.
(just imagine the white high school students using their amateur acting chops and angelic voices to attempt a scene like this)
But you know, props to them misguidedly and ineffectually trying to tear down racial walls, though inadvertently enabling and perpetuating wholly inappropriate cultural stereotypes in the process. It was probably the best damn white performance of The Wiz this country has ever seen. Possibly the only one … so there’s that.
To that high school (you know who you are) – you had balls when no one else did. Thank you for putting them out there for the world to see. I’m glad I got to see them.
