Oz on Stage as “a full-on visual assault”

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of the MGM Wizard of Oz has reached Clearwater, Florida, and the Tampa Bay Times’s critic Stephanie Hayes reviewed it thusly:

Since The Wizard of Oz story has been around more than 100 years, and on screen since 1939, everyone has been conditioned to accept that flying monkeys and yellow brick roads and emerald palaces and Ambien poppy fields and smallish people who dance in curly shoes and eat lollipops are totally regular. But they're not! This stuff is wonderfully weird even today and can withstand a modern polish.

Andrew Lloyd Webber and director Jeremy Sams' adaptation of The Wizard of Oz for the stage makes good use of the trippy, Cirque du Soleil elements of the narrative. This is a full-on visual assault designed by Robert Jones, in a good way, with pyrotechnics, animation, moving parts, rainbows, lights and glitter — so much glitter.

There’s also a local production of The Wiz.