The Wiz is a 1975 Broadway musical, and an urbanized adaptation of The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum exclusively featuring African American actors. The
play features music and lyrics by Charlie Smalls, and a book by William F. Brown. The Wiz
was adapted into a motion picture in 1978 by Motown Productions for Universal Pictures,
starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Ted Ross, and Lena Horne.
The original Broadway production of The Wiz opened at the Majestic Theatre in 1975
and later moved to the Broadway Theatre. It ran for four years and over 1600 performances,
and won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The most popular song from the
production was "Ease on Down the Road", sung by the characters as they dance down the
Yellow Brick Road.
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The Wiz is among the many plays to debut in New York that venutre in the new and never-before-tried such as Rent, which was a first to deal with drug use and sexuality, and Hair, which embraced full nudity. Along with other musicals like Purlie (1971) and Raisin (1974), The Wiz was a breakthrough for Broadway, a large-scale big-budget musical featuring an all-black cast. It laid the foundation for later African-American hits like Bubbling Brown Sugar, Dreamgirls and Duke Ellington's Sophisticated Ladies. It never performed on London's West End, but a handful of amateur and semi-professional productions have appeared in Britain with black and non-black casts.