THE MUSICALS THAT MADE ME #5 - The Wizard of Oz
On longing, belonging, and the courage to keep journeying
The Wizard of Oz begins with a shot of an open road. A young girl and her dog run into the centre of the frame. The road stretches out away from them to the horizon, endless, vanishing into the distance, the promise of freedom, an invitation to escape, the suggestion of a journey without end.
For all of us, this is a road well travelled.
The Wizard of Oz seems to exist outside time. I remember the room where I first encountered it. The same room where I came to know Maria Von Trapp, Curley and Laurie, Billy Bigelow, Marian the Librarian, Anna Leonowens, the Banks family and so many other old friends. But I do not remember when I first encountered Dorothy Gale, that dearest of friends. Perhaps I was born knowing her. Born a friend of Dorothy. Like my eye colour or my height, Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz feel part of who I am. They exist outside time, but they feel like the beginning.
In fact, the film marks the beginning of many journeys. It was one of the first films to use the three-strip Technicolor process as a storytelling device. Arthur Freed cut his teeth as an (uncredited) associate producer on The Wizard of Oz. He later created the Freed Unit at MGM, which produced some of the most beloved film musicals of all time. The film functions not just as a prototype of film musicals but also as an early template for the tentpole blockbusters that would later come to define Hollywood. It is based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, an American fairytale from the turn of the century, and forms part of a nascent storytelling tradition that mythologises the nation.
While it would be some years before musical theatre scholars codified a structure for musicals and gave us modern definitions like the ‘I Want’ song, Over the Rainbow is nevertheless one of the earliest clear examples in film: a song that expresses the hero’s desire and sets the story in motion. Its placement in the opening minutes has become practically a fixed structural point that is still used today. Judy Garland, on the precipice of stardom, on the precipice of womanhood, expresses a yearning that is both profound and universal.
Musically, Over the Rainbow follows an AABA structure, the principal form for American popular song at the time, a form that would dominate popular music and musical theatre ‘I Want’ songs for decades. The lyrics are simple, as befits a Kansas farm girl. The staging moves between the natural world and the industrial one, suggesting a bridge between the old and the new. Garland’s distinctive contralto sounds mature and womanly even as she is dressed in a simple gingham frock, her hair in pigtails, her breasts bound to make her look younger. The scene places Garland, like cinema in 1939, like the world at the time, on the edge of the old and the brink of the new. In that precise moment of fear between two World Wars, Over the Rainbow is a world dreaming of a better future. In that moment we believe in fairytales and so the adventure can begin.
In the dusty, sepia-painted world of Kansas, only Dorothy sings. The magic of music is gifted only to her, marking her different from the others immediately, an outsider from the outset. While everyone around her is preoccupied with work and industry, music sets Dorothy apart. It gives her romance and imagination and magic. In 1970s Kilburn, pitched somewhere between Church and school, my discovery of old film musicals felt like I too had been given a gift, one that marked me out, just as clearly, as different.
As a child, I didn’t have words for the longing expressed in Over the Rainbow, couldn’t explain why that octave leap between some and where affected me so much, but something deep within me understood the desire for escape onto an open road, one that would lead me somewhere magical and beautiful. The Wizard of Oz not only taught me to believe in adventure but also, I think, showed me the world where those adventures lay. Just down that path, just follow that road.
The Wizard of Oz felt like an invitation.
The citizens of Oz, like the people of Kansas, are all quite content to stay where they are. Munchkinland, the Emerald City, even the Wicked Witch’s castle are all self-contained spaces. Their inhabitants show no inclination to leave, to explore the world beyond their home. Only Glinda the Good Witch, the two Wicked Witches, and Dorothy herself are curious enough, or powerful enough, to travel between the realms. Dorothy’s arrival in Oz explicitly fulfils the longing expressed in Over the Rainbow but she quickly discovers the land over the rainbow is not the wonderful place she imagined. For Dorothy, it is a place of danger and threat. Immediately she desires, not adventure, not freedom, not an open road stretching into the future, but to return home. That desire now supplants the yearning to escape and becomes the narrative driver.
On her journey, Dorothy does not encounter any other travellers; indeed at one point we see the road abandoned and deserted as if no-one has passed that way for years. The Yellow Brick Road is a liminal space and the only people Dorothy meets on it are stuck, physically or psychologically. The Scarecrow is held firm by a wooden peg, the Tin Man has rusted in place, and the Lion’s crippling fear keeps him from moving forward. All three, like Dorothy, share a defining characteristic: longing for something they believe they lack. That there is no-one else on the road, that it appears there have been no other travellers, only underlines how unusual this journey is. Most people, it seems, are content to stay where they are, content with what they have. The Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion can take the journey only because they are with Dorothy.
Dorothy’s journey has been interpreted as a queer odyssey. She leaves her family and encounters three strange, charismatic, magical friends in a fantasy world. Those of us whose identities or sexualities marked us as different from a young age took the Yellow Brick Road as a journey to discovering ourselves, to a family we created, a ‘found family’ of acceptance. It reflects, too, the journey many actors take, particularly in musical theatre. One of the (few) things I miss about performing is the families I found along the way. For a brief time with every new show, a new family was formed. Each company had its own mother figure, its mentor, its comic relief. In every rehearsal period we shared stories, intimacies, secrets. We argued, we fought, we made up and we created something magical together. I miss that the most.
My own Glinda the Good was a primary school teacher called Clare O’Toole. What an extraordinary gift she gave — to me, and to all of us lucky enough to be in her class. She loved all forms of performance and would take us to the ballet one week, the circus the next, to musicals, to concerts. She introduced us to Shakespeare; how well I remember her suddenly launching into Lady Macbeth to a class of startled seven-year-olds. She taught me to love music and storytelling. She was the first person to put me on stage and to encourage me to write. Funny enough, the first play I wrote was called Return to Oz. Clare allowed me to stage it in the school dining hall. While others in my class wrote homework assignments on their favourite football players I wrote about Sarah Bernhardt, and Clare praised my passion for theatre. When, at the school talent show, everyone else sang pop songs, I sang a medley of my favourite Judy Garland numbers and she told me I had a gift for singing. When no-one else understood the passion that burned within me she stoked the flame. Clare planted the first seed of desire, one that has, I think, never been better expressed than by Moss Hart in that great theatrical autobiography, Act One:
“Suddenly he perceives that his secret goal is attainable - to be himself and yet be somebody else, and in the very act of doing so, to be loved and admired; to stand gloriously in a spotlight undimmed by the rivalry of brothers and sisters and to be relieved of his sense of guilt by the waves of applause that roll over the footlights to those wonderful creatures on the stage.”
I started working professionally when I was 11 years old, the same year that Clare was killed in a car crash. I never had the chance to thank her.
I grew up in backstage corridors and dressing rooms. There, I fell in love. There I learned painful lessons. There I found my own Scarecrows, intelligent teachers like Nicholas Hytner who taught me valuable lessons about professionalism, and Tin Men like Ann Murray who, when I was being bullied, held me while I cried and showed me how to respond with love not anger.
I had my Lions too: brave-hearted men and women like Mary Millar and Antony Newley, both of whom showed up for their audiences through thick and thin. There were even a few Wicked Witches, but perhaps it’s best we leave those unnamed.
Theatre gave me family. More than forty years later, people from those years still drift across my path. I felt like an outsider in my ordinary life, but the theatre welcomed me in. Today I hear the same story from so many young graduates: in discovering theatre they discovered acceptance, a found family, a home.
Yet Dorothy’s journey returns her exactly where she began. A decade or so after The Wizard of Oz, Joseph Campbell, in his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, identified a recurring pattern in stories, known as the Hero’s Journey, which describes the architecture of inner transformation. “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” Accepting her status as an outsider is the cave Dorothy most fears to enter. At the end of her journey in Oz, she discovers she always had the power to return home and while she returns to the same place, she has been transformed. In the closing moments we hear her say “I’m not gonna leave here, ever, ever again.” Was ‘home’ the destination all along?
Returning to The Wizard of Oz in middle age feels less like an invitation to escape and more like a reckoning with how far I have come. For all the adventures and the journeys and the lessons learned, where do I find myself now? In a similar room, in the same city, still struggling to work out where I belong.
The melancholy yearning in Over the Rainbow is never really resolved, in the film, nor in life. While we live, our journey has no resolution, we never quite arrive where we imagined we would. Perhaps the promise of escape is as false as the Wizard himself.
Yet I find myself in thrall to The Wizard of Oz now as ever before. Perhaps it is not because of the story at all. Perhaps it continues to captivate me because the promise of escape is not the point of the tale. Perhaps something else is being promised even before the film begins.
After the opening credits roll but before we see the road for the first time, we are met with the following message:
For nearly forty years this story has given faithful service to the Young in Heart; and Time has been powerless to put its kindly philosophy out of fashion.
To those of you who have been faithful to it in return...and to the Young in Heart --- we dedicate this picture.
It is a reference to L. Frank Baum’s original introduction in the book; “the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to please children of today.”
As a child, I thought The Wizard of Oz was a call to escape. In middle age, I understand its deeper lesson: not to escape, but to keep setting out — again and again — remaining Young in Heart. The Wizard of Oz is not escape; it is about learning to carry longing without resolution. Not to arrive but to follow, follow, follow; follow the rainbow over the stream, follow the fellow who follows a dream. It is an imperative to set out again and again with optimism and hope, to see with innocence, as children do, to remain Young In Heart, and traverse that open road, knowing we may never reach the destination, but journeying on regardless, to take with us everything we hold dear, everything we love, and everything that made us.