Amber Ruffin on Adapting The Wiz for 2024: “It’s Not Like Dorothy’s Holding an iPad”
(Photo: Mary Ellen Matthews by Peacock)
Amber Ruffin remembers her first time watching the Sidney Lumet movie The Wiz, in the basement of the family home. “On the big TV. We had one big TV,” she told Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek on The Broadway Show.
As Ruffin explained, as a young Black girl, The Wiz—an all-Black take on The Wizard of Oz—”just expanded how you thought about what entertainment could be.”
Young Amber was also struck by the fact that her whole family had memorized every moment—clearly they were seeing it for the umpteenth time. “And then you come to find out, if you go to almost any house in America, everybody knows every part of The Wiz.”
Kyle Ramar Freeman and Nichelle Lewis in The Wiz (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)
Today, Ruffin—one of the Tony-nominated book writers of the musical Some Like it Hot—is part of the creative team for the Broadway-bound revival of The Wiz, adapting the book originally penned by white librettist William F. Brown. “I feel like my task is to bring The Wiz into 2024,” said Ruffin. “It's not like Dorothy's holding an iPad…”
One of Ruffin’s tasks has been weeding out Brown’s on-the-nose ’70s street slang (sample line: “Man, I have seen me some spaced-out garbage cans in my day…!”) to fashion something more timeless. “I wanted to write one that kids can do 20 years from now, that you wouldn't read it and go, this is from [the 2020s].”
Audiences’ familiarity with the material is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, audiences who already love The Wiz are going to be geared up to have a good time. On the other hand, well…
“Yesterday I was like, Oh God, everyone's going to be so crazy because we changed this and this…” said Ruffin. “But I hope people are going to love it.”
One of the major changes is a Dorothy that’s roughly the same age as her straw-filed, metallic and furry companions on the Yellow Brick Road. As Ruffin and the show's director Schele Williams have determined, they’re a ragtag group of friends, not a girl and her weird uncles.
“It really changed everything,” said Ruffin. “For her to be a young Black girl leading these people—that's fantastic. We wanted her to be the natural leader that she is."
"And then, in the end of our version, she becomes president.” A beat. “I'm just kidding.”
