Showing posts with label going on the stage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label going on the stage. Show all posts
30 October 2025

At Last an Our Gang/Wizard of Oz Crossover

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In 1962, as described yesterday , Starlight Musical Theatre of San Diego held tryouts for a production of The Wizard of Oz , using music fro...
4 comments:
29 October 2025

The Wizard of Balboa Park

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The San Diego Civic Light Opera Association was founded in 1945. Its first show was Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado  in the Wegeforth Bowl...
28 October 2025

How Johnny Downs Grew Up

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I mentioned Our Gang cast member Johnny Downs in this posting on Elmer “Scooter” Lowry going into vaudeville. Johnny Downs was born in 19...
18 October 2025

“Beyond a cute small-boy personality”

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In late 1929, Elmer “Scooter” Lowry finished his vaudeville tour with fellow Our Gang veterans Mary Kornman and Johnny Downs. They had been...
16 October 2025

“A tiny 8-year-old comedian”

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As discussed back here , seven-year-old Elmer Lowry lost his contract with the Hal Roach Studio in the spring of 1927. By that fall he was t...
25 July 2025

Marking the Many Media of Oz

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Tori Calamito, host of the Oz Vlog , is doing a live online event called “Defying Gravity: The Evolution of Oz from Page to Stage to Screen”...
5 comments:
15 August 2024

From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Our Gang

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As influential as Uncle Tom’s Cabin was on ante-bellum American culture and politics, stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel co...
17 April 2024

“Outside the Box” Opening Reception in Jamaica Plain, 21 April

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With friends from the Boston Comics Roundtable, I’m helping to organize an exhibit of comics art in the gallery of the Footlight Club, Amer...
04 July 2023

The Characters of Oz and the Character of Oz the Wizard

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Later this year McFarland will publish The Characters of Oz: Essays on Their Adaptation and Transformation , edited by Dina Schiff Massachi...
03 January 2022

The “Shipoopi” Problem

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Over the holidays, Godson informed me that Godson’s Brother had never seen The Music Man , the stage and screen musical by Meredith Willson...
3 comments:
16 September 2020

Coming Over the Wire

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KidLit411 is featuring an interview with my writing colleague Lisa Robinson about her new picture book Madame Saqui: Revolutionary Rope D...
08 September 2020

A Scarecrow in Wodehouse

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“The Aunt and the Sluggard,” one of P. G. Wodehouse’s earliest stories about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, turns out to have an Oz connectio...
1 comment:
20 July 2017

DeConnick Scripting from the Dialogue

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In this 2011 interview with with Tom Spurgeon at the Comics Reporter, comics scripter Kelly Sue DeConnick described her method of writing...
15 December 2015

Marvelous Land in Minneapolis

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Back in 1981, the Children’s Theatre Company and School of Minneapolis staged a production of L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz . O...
09 December 2015

The Feelings We Once Had

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Of all the famous dramatic adaptations of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , The Wiz in its original form is the most faithful....
4 comments:
08 December 2015

Fierstein Adding “a Little More Sense” to Oz

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Last week NBC broadcast a restaging of The Wiz that’s also slated for Broadway next year. It has a new book by Harvey Fierstein, who boas...
4 comments:
29 September 2015

The Electric “Elements of Oz”

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Elements of Oz is a new stage/video show that seems to combine an homage to the MGM movie with Ozma’s Magic Picture. (Which, as we all kn...
1 comment:
21 January 2015

Woodsman, Spare This Retelling

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Today’s New York Times offers Laura Collins-Hughes’s review of The Woodsman , an hourlong play inspired by  The Tin Woodman of Oz : A ...
1 comment:
18 August 2014

Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

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Over the weekend the Boston Globe ran an interview with eleven-year-old actor Aidan Gemme. He’s currently starring as Peter Llewellyn in...
14 August 2014

Wrapping Up the Winkie Convention, part 3

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Here’s the final schedule for the final day of the 2014 Winkie Convention in San Diego—Sunday, 10 August. Sunday, 8:30 am Ozzy Tai Chi l...