Wizard Of Oz Muny Script Pdf. Facts Wizard Oz. The Wizard of Oz is a musical commissioned by the St. Louis Municipal Opera (The Muny). The script was adapted by Frank Gabrielson from the novel and uses most of the songs from. Create a book Download as PDF Printable version.

Wamego #73 June 3, 2016 MEET ME IN ST. LOU-OZ!: ANOTHER OP’NIN! AN OZZY SHOW! [Above: That vast expanse shows the spread of the stage and a portion of the eleven-thousand-seat audience capacity of The Muny Theatre in St. Since 1942, they’ve offered eleven different productions of a “live” version of THE WIZARD OF OZ, featuring all the beloved songs from the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion picture.

This month, they mount OZ for the twelfth time – on a scale that has to (and should!) be seen to be believed.] In 1901 -- a year after he first published THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ -- L. Frank Baum himself wrote the first prospective stage adaptation of his successful children’s book. But THE WIZARD OF OZ didn’t reach the stage until June 1902, and by that time, director Julian Mitchell and producer Fred Hamlin had reworked and reconfigured Baum’s simple fantasy into a madcap combination of extravaganza, comic opera, and vaudeville. There were new characters, wild subplots, and songs by a half-dozen different composers and lyricists. Dorothy appeared as a young woman who travels to Oz with her pet cow, Imogene. The Oz poet laureate – Sir Dashemoff Daily – immediately falls in love with her.

(With Dorothy; not the cow.) Pastoria, the ex-king of Oz who’s been working as a Topeka streetcar conductor, is blown back to the Munchkin Country by the same cyclone that transported Dorothy, and he’s traveling with his buxom, ever-hungry, and ever-saucy girlfriend, Trixie Tryfle. Meanwhile, there’s ongoing political rivalry for the throne of the magic kingdom, involving Pastoria, the Wizard, and Sir Wiley Gyle. The poppy field, as played by a phalanx of beautiful girls in flower costumes, enchants Dorothy and her companions; even with all the foregoing action, she’s found time to meet a Scarecrow, Tin Man, and (briefly) Lion. They’re quickly saved by the Good Witch, who summons frost and a snow storm to nullify the power of the posies. And that was just Act One.

Of three acts. Yet for all its remodeling, the Mitchell version of THE WIZARD OF OZ was a phenomenon of the early- twentieth-century American musical stage: a recurring triumph on Broadway (to which it periodically returned from the road) and the basis for two national touring companies. OZ crisscrossed North America for seven seasons before finally leaving the boards in spring 1909; thereafter, it was taken up by several stock and regional theaters. Other adaptations followed, most notably a non-musical, Junior League Play script by Elizabeth Fuller Goodspeed (1928), which reembraced Baum’s basic story and proved perfect for performance by community and children’s theaters across many years. For twenty-six weeks in 1933-1934, Jell-O sponsored a thrice-weekly, fifteen-minute radio program over NBC, which retold several of Baum’s Oz books – including THE WIZARD -- for that medium. [Above left: A poster for the second national company of THE WIZARD OF OZ, circa 1906.

The fame of the musical – and that of its original break-out stars, Fred A. Stone and David C. Montgomery (who played The Scarecrow and Tin Man) – was such that the show could tour with a substitute cast and still dazzle the environs.

Right: Twelve-year-old Nancy Kelly voiced Dorothy for the Jell-O/NBC radio series, where she was joined by such stalwarts – early on in their careers -- as Agnes Moorehead (later Endora on BEWITCHED), Parker Fennelly (later Titus Moody on Fred Allen’s radio show, as well as the Pepperidge Farm spokesman on TV commercials), Ian Wolfe (the pastor in SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS and Mr. Neely of Disney’s POLLYANNA, among countless other roles), and announcer Ben Grauer. Kelly herself, however, made the quantum leap, gaining Broadway and Hollywood immortality as suicidal mother Christine Penmark, both onstage and in the film adaptation of THE BAD SEED.] But it took Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Judy Garland, composer Harold Arlen, lyricist E. Harburg, orchestrator Herbert Stothart and his staff, multiple scenarists, and almost countless creatives and technicians to produce the ultimate musical/theatrical treatment of THE WIZARD OF OZ. In the last seventy-seven years, nothing else has come close to equaling the power of that motion picture, its score, and its script.