The University of Connecticut will always be a place of constant activity. As the women’s basketball team was getting ready to win another championship, the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts presented “The Wizard of Oz” on April 6 from 2 to 3 p.m.
From “There’s no place like home” to “And your little dog too,” our culture is permeated with this timeless story. “I just hope they’ll be as interested in this as ‘Wicked,’” Henry Martinez said, referring to his kids Zoey and Aaron, along with the 10-time Oscar-nominated movie.
The hall was alive with the sound of children. While some ran rampant between the aisles, others tried staying still and smiling while their parents took a picture.
Given the short runtime, there was curiosity about how fast paced the action would be. In the original stage production, several characters from “Oz”, such as the Cowardly Lion or the Scarecrow, have real world counterparts. Lacking in this version was Almira Gulch, outside of a throwaway line, who is the Wicked Witch of the West’s counterpart.
When Dorothy arrives in Munchkinland — about 20 minutes into the performance — the color spectrum appears with her. While in Kansas, she wore a black and white checkered dress. But after the cyclone takes her over the rainbow, Dorothy puts on the iconic blue and white dress.
Additionally, the lighting design included flower-like symbols which appeared in all the colors you can think of. Soon after she dropped down, Glinda, the Good Witch of the North welcomed her with: “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”
The Munchkins were played by three different men with a puppet on each of their hands. They represented the Lollipop Guild and the Lullaby League.
What partially made this production just an hour long were the quick transitions between scenes. As Dorothy began to follow the yellow brick road, the Scarecrow entered the stage and carried his own stand on stage and stood upon it with the T-pose, causing laughter from the audience. Later in that scene he said, “Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t they?” which garnered the same response.
As mentioned earlier, the timelessness of “The Wizard of Oz” is readily apparent. When you hear someone say, “lions and tigers and bears,” you just know “Oh my!” is the next thing to say. A kid in the audience shouted this out, even though the original movie came out over eight decades ago.
The cast was quite small, and the absence of an ensemble was felt at some moments. These included in the capturing of Dorothy and Toto, which was pulled off by a single flying monkey, and in the song “The Jitterbug.”
The Jitterbug is a monster that causes Dorothy and her Ozian friends to dance uncontrollably. However, in this production, The Jitterbug was represented only by a puppet on the hands of the Wicked Witch. While the song was being performed, we couldn’t see the entity causing them to jitter, which made it less realistic.
The design of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz consisted of a large gray head with a small mouth that could open and close. The actor playing him had an echo filter on his voice, which made his character seem mightier.
“The Wizard of Oz” has had many lives, from the original 1900 novel all the way to the upcoming 2025 film “Wicked: For Good.” Each time “Oz” has a new iteration, there is something new to discover, and this reimagining was no different.