Two University of Michigan professors are putting a different spin on  L. Frank Baum’s beloved The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Jose Casas, head of the playwriting minor in the Theatre & Drama department, has written Our Oz as “a reimagination of the The Wizard of Oz through a BIPOC and queer lens” Jake Hooker, head of drama at the Residential College, is the director.

Our Oz is being presented April 4-13 at the Arthur Miller Theatre on U-M’s North Campus.

The collaboration between Casas, Hooker, and theater students is a story in progress and described in the show's notes as “Intersectional and interdisciplinary, this project will evolve over the course of the next year, exploring and experimenting with the tropes and images of multiple renditions from the Land of Oz as originally conceived by L. Frank Baum.”

Our Oz is very different from Baum’s or MGM’s version of Oz. The set is a street in a tough neighborhood. The opening music is the loud grind of industrial machinery. An older Dorothy is in distress and somehow magically ends up with her dog, Toto, in a place that is very much like the place she just left.

Hooker describes Dorothy as “a queer Latinx woman from a small industrial Midwest city, angry at society that devalues them and those like them. That anger propels them into Oz, a world that eerily mirrors their own, a place where power is built on spectacle and the illusion of control.”

The play then builds on several well-known scenes from books, movies, and Broadway presentations as Dorothy and Toto meet the Scarecrow who wants a brain, the Tin Woman who wants a heart, and the Cowardly Lion, working as a waitress at a bar and yearning to breakthrough as a singer. All of this is more than a little vague in Our Oz, but most people know the basics of the classic story.

In this version, the Wizard is a young man with dreams of being a dictator but who answers to the evil Pandora. There are no flying monkeys here—and very little attempt to address the issues the playwright and director admirably want to emphasize. 

The minimalist set does include a set of different screens for projections of prerecorded action. They are more funny than scary but include some unhappy views of hard-hit neighborhoods.

The production needs work but it does have good performances from the cast and some are especially noteworthy.

Ryan Buyers plays Toto. He is really a suggestion of Toto and towers over Issie Contreras’ Dorothy. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is the inspiration for having a poetic narrator, in this case Toto. Buyers has a great voice and handles the role of narrator and sensible advisor to Dorothy with élan. If he ever has a chance to perform in Our Town, he’d be great.

Hugh Finnigan plays Oz. Finnigan has been watching a lot of Elon Musk (well haven’t we all) and gives a spot-on portrayal of the billionaire at his most manic. Finnigan is funny and captures the styles of two-bit dictators everywhere.

Issie Contreras has a difficult part. She has to carry the emotions and does well but the play leaves little room to fully understand her situation. Ultimately, the play falls back on the main theme of The Wizard of Oz: There’s no place like home.

Simon Nigam plays El Scarecrow, Annika Juliusson plays Tin Woman, and Jonas Annear plays Lion. Each has their moment. Nigam doesn’t have the dance moves of famous Scarecrows Ray Bolger and Michael Jackson, but he has his own rolling way of walking that’s funny and does the job. Juliusson’s Tin Woman is a funny take on our over-wired, over-plugged-in world. Annear’s Lion delivers a touching version of Nancy Sinatra’s "These Boots Are Made for Walking."

One of the highlights of the show is Club Em, one of those places found in New York and Los Angeles where a bouncer decides who is worthy enough to enter. Dororthy and friends are admitted and become part of a nice dance number.

Baum’s first Wizard of Oz book led to 13 more Oz books. He would have been amazed by what followed. In 1939 MGM released the groundbreaking musical with a great score and a star-making performance by Judy Garland. We have since seen Diana Ross skipping down the road as a school teacher Dorothy, Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked and its subsequent hit Broadway play and Oscar-nominated movie based on Maguire’s book, and several other television programs drawing on Baum’s creation.

"Over the Rainbow," the Harold Arlen-Yip Harburg song from the MGM movie, captures just that sense of isolation that the creators of Our Oz are working on. The play rightly ends with the song.

More of that haunting desire is needed in this play.

Hugh Gallagher has written theater and film reviews over a 40-year newspaper career and was most recently the managing editor of the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers in suburban Detroit. 

The U-M School of Music, Theatre and Dance's Department of Theatre and Drama presents "Our Oz" at 8 pm on April 4, 5, 11, and 12; at 7:30 pm on April 10; and at 2 pm on April 6 and 13. For tickets, go to tickets.smtd.umich.edu or call 734-764-2538.