THE WIZ: 2015 NBC LIVE MUSICAL — Page 66

Stephanie Mills just announced on Radio Andy that she's most likely reprising her role in the Broadway revival!

She really was wonderful. And a good actress. I hope she gets more work out of this exposure.

I know and admire the way some went crazy about this show. But the question is, was it really a success?

Both Meron and Zadan states that the show itself is cultural for the African American community and it even got major support from high profile people, coming from the same community (and that is understandable). My point is that two million viewers more than Pan, which was also a ratings smash for NBC, is not immense, considering this is a population of at least 41.7 million people. And the show was also supposed to get attention from fans of Frank Baum novel. NO I am not a racist, but I do not believe that this particular performance was in any way of what it maybe considered a phenomenon. Despite other plans, I did tune in, but turned away an hour later since watching a show with an interval every five minutes made me bored and feel tired.

Shanice is a great performer but I do hope she will move on from The Wiz and go to other things.

Updated On: 12/4/15 at 07:18 PM

Yeah, for a live musical (which is definitely a niche market) running alongside Thursday Night Football on a major network (the game was on CBS last night, as opposed to cable), this was definitely a success. FWIW, the ratings are comparable to the season finale of Empire, if we're going to talk about attracting a black audience.

^You're moving the goalpost to some arbitrary, hypothetical criterion for what would have constituted a "success" based on... what? Nothing but your own asinine conjecture. Musical theatre is a niche market. Not everyone is going to go for something like this. Even at its height, Glee only pulled around 12 million.

It did well for a network event in 2015. I also wonder if more eyeballs were watching than reported for this particular year. Neilsen ratings are notoriously under-representative of black households, and the show's Facebook page is flush with posts about people holding viewing parties in their homes (I think lots of folks watched TOGETHER). Read two articles about how unprecedented the live social media presence was for a non-sports program. Not that it makes any difference to the network or advertisers; just a thought.

Updated On: 12/4/15 at 08:16 PM

A half dozen lively, hummable numbers is hell of a lot better then many shows I have seen on Broadway. I saw the original many times as well. Took the children in the residence I worked at after put on a musical of our own, took my niece and a few out of towners. It was wonderful, there was so much raw energy on stage that it was infectious. Made up for the shortcomings of the book.

I liked last nights performance. For Prime Time Network television it was more then adequate. I did feel it lacked some of the energy that it should have had. I think they need a better Television director. His calls were all off. I believe part of the problem was there were 12 cameras so they couldn't go wide as much as they could have because you would have caught them.

Maybe they were also skewing conservative with the calls because a camera got into the frame real big within like 90 seconds of the show...?

I wondered if that was a technical error or if Shanice missed her mark.

Everything could conceivably do way a lot better. Except Hamilton.

OK, I am sure it's in this thread or somewhere, but is the upcoming Broadway production scheduled to be a strictly limited run or has that not been decided?

52 million people watched the last episode of Friends.

I thought this musical was horribly boring, and the music insipid. I turned it off after 45 minutes or so. Give me the original Wizard of Oz, or even Wicked over this snoozefest.