The Wiz - 30th Anniversary DVD

Should not legendary triumphs like the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz be left alone rather than inadequately reimagined as the 1978 movie The Wiz? The Tony Award-winning all-black Broadway musical Wiz of 1975 was a deserved success in a new, different medium; but the subsequent movie Wiz, its clumsy reconception, was an equally deserved flop.

Flop or not, the movie musical is now available in toto and with Toto on a 30th-anniversary edition DVD, with an accompanying CD comprising some of the musical numbers only. What is the rationale? That rash fans of Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Lena Horne and Richard Pryor, along with scarcely less starry others—Tony winner Ted Ross, Mabel King, Thelma Carpenter—would rush to buy its ownable version. Count me out.

The Broadway version did not have to compete with a stage predecessor, had the benefit of the great Geoffrey Holder as its guiding spirit and, in Stephanie Mills, then 16, a Dorothy who could pass for a little girl. She, moreover, was a resident of Kansas, where whirlwinds and fairy tales are plausible. In the movie, with Joel Schumacher rewriting William F. Brown's Broadway book, the setting became far-too-sophisticated Harlem, and Dorothy transmogrified into Diana Ross, for whom this Motown project was cooked up.

Thus L. Frank Baum's child heroine—aged into a 24-year-old schoolteacher Dorothy, played by 33-year-old Ross—is a rather fishy kettle of fish. If such an adult cannot find her way back home without the help of a wizard or good witch, she is less likely to be a teacher than a retardate.

Further trouble was the choice (actually second choice) of director: Sidney Lumet, by no means untalented but an inveterate, incorrigible New Yorker. So locations had to become transmogrified New York landmarks: Yankee Stadium, Brooklyn Bridge, New York Public Library, Lincoln Center, and the World Trade Center Plaza, which became the Emerald City. Although Tony Walton is a fine set and costume designer, the grander film medium and $24 million budget—hypertrophic for its time—must have gone to his head or eye. The movie's visuals are of a grandiose garishness almost unparalleled, yet confined to spoofing actual locations that did not translate felicitously: Gotham-strung, Walton keeps outbidding himself until reel after reel leaves us reeling.

Fatally, there is the pedestrian dancing, Universal having missed a chance of hiring a sorely missed major choreographer. Simplistic steps performed by swirling masses on a giant screen have a way of looking sadly uninspired.

What remains, of course, are the songs, mostly by Charlie Smalls, from the stage show. Reorchestrated for the movie by Quincy Jones, with added songs and music by him, Luther Vandross and the team of Ashford and Simpson, the result is not unpleasant, but somehow less than memorable.

The cast is a mixed bag. Michael Jackson, still in his youthful innocence, is pleasant enough, but a childlike Scarecrow doesn't mesh with an overripe Dorothy. Nipsey Russell's Tin Man and Ted Ross' Cowardly Lion come off better, but Richard Pryor, meant to be a phony wizard, is a bit too anticlimactic. Worst of all, Diana Ross, trying hard to be a mousy minor, ends up uninteresting.

Minor characters are likewise problematic. Graffiti coming off the walls as Munchkins lack personality; Flying Monkeys turned into a menacing motorcycle gang are rather too ugly; and Baum's poppies becoming would-be sexy drug-bearing Poppy Girls are even more out of place.

The veteran British cinematographer Oswald Morris does well with his trusty camera, and editors do not come better than Dede Allen. Lumet tries valiantly to be Busby Berkeley, but no cook can overcome inadequate ingredients. The movie was a critical and commercial failure; DVD and CD cannot rescue it.

John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.