The LA Times is Mixed:
"Condensed to a little over two hours, McAnuff's electric if not particularly emotionally stirring rendering features a dazzlingly innovative multimedia staging that revealed a few kinks on opening night. Twice the show was stopped for glitches, with the director having to grab a microphone and play emcee as a stray drilling sound was tracked down and a computer rebooted.
Robert Brill (billed as the "scenic and environmental designer") has reconfigured the theater so that the yellow brick road runs through the audience. It's a nice touch, though it leaves little room for dancing, and Sergio Trujillo's choreography seems clumsily confined.
Brill and projection designer Michael Clark, however, succeed magnificently in creating a 21st century look for the show. The array of technical wizardry on a darkened stage outfitted with video screens may have a disembodying effect, but it lends freshness to familiar antics.
Dramatically, the work may have been boiled down a bit too much. At times, the new version feels like musical-theater postcards from Oz. But then Brown's clunky book was never easy to make fly.
Mostly, this latest "Wiz" amounts to a celebration of Smalls' music, which has been given a subtle yet highly effective hip-hop face-lift by musical director Ron Melrose, with singing that ranges from good to transcendent. Much on display is top-drawer, yet something fundamental seems missing.
When "The Wiz" was first done, it was historic, not simply because an all-black cast was triumphing on Broadway but because they were doing so in a classic that Judy Garland had made a staple of childhood. McAnuff approaches the material as though the time for cultural correctives of this kind is behind us. Apparently we've come to point where we can all appreciate "The Wiz" on purely theatrical grounds, potholed though it may be.
_______________________________________________________________
Striving to be inclusive, the utopian production casts the good witch Addaperle with Heather Lee, a white actress who's like a cross between Shelley Long and Carol Kane, decked in wacky Cyndi Lauper threads. Her ridiculously kooky performance seems bizarre even in a land overrun by flying monkeys.
But how does "The Wiz" speak to us today? I'm not sure that a white director, even one as abundantly talented as McAnuff, is the person to most compellingly answer this. Hypothetically speaking, a staging by George C. Wolfe might be just as otherworldly, but I'd expect he'd confront the issue of race with more complexity than simply providing Burgess' big sissy Lion with some "Oz bling."
http://www.calendarlive.com/cl-et-wiz14oct14,0,3515259.story?coll=cl-home-top-blurb-right
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
