Homeward Bound

As a new revival of The Wiz eases its way back to New York, the enchanting cast and sprawling creative team has history and legacy on their minds.

- By Marley Marius. Photographed by Norman Jean Roy

A BRAND-NEW DAY – FROM LEFT: Kyle Ramar Freeman (as the Lion), Nichelle Lewis (as Dorothy), Avery Wilson (as the Scarecrow), and Phillip Johnson Richardson (as the Tinman) in Sharen Davis's costumes for The Wiz. Sittings Editor: Edward Bowleg III.

On a Thursday evening in early November, a pack of Steelers fans poured out from a bar in downtown Pittsburgh and trooped past the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts, a stately old movie palace turned theater and concert hall.

As black-and-gold jerseys mixed in with the overflow from the venue's box office, one of the football guys asked what the line was for, and a patron told him.

"Oh, The Wiz?" a friend of his cried, eyes suddenly shining with delight. "That's a great show!" The Wiz tends to have that effect on people. Between its original Broadway run, starring a young Stephanie Mills, from 1975 to 1979; Sidney Lumet's 1978 movie adaptation with Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor; and countless stagings in school auditoriums everywhere, to know its inspired, all-Black retelling of L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it seems, is to cherish it.

The Wiz's leading actors have grown close offstage.

That's certainly true for the people behind its new revival, now on a much-celebrated national tour. (After engagements in San Francisco and Los Angeles this winter,