A Whiz of a Wiz if Ever There Was

by RICK DANLEY // April 4, 2019

Perhaps the most immaculately acted theater event you’ll see this year, Iola High School’s musical version of “The Wizard of Oz” runs tonight and tomorrow at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center from 7 to 9 p.m.

I’ll spare you the plot. “The Wizard of Oz” rests with such Biblical heft upon the American imagination that to have never heard of it would surely mark you out as a Martian among us. And this is doubly true for we meager citizens of Kansas, whose state receives such mixed press in this modern-day fairy tale: On the one hand, a frightened Dorothy spends much of the musical trying to get back to Kansas, because, as she exclaims more than once, “There’s no place like home.” On the other hand, Kansas is gray, the people of Kansas are gray, Aunt Em is gray, Uncle Henry is gray, the outlook is gray, the sky is gray. Kansas is a place from which to escape, while Oz is full of color and life.

 

It doesn’t matter that Oz’s creator, L. Frank Baum, only ever visited Kansas once, “The Wizard of Oz” has become a Sunflower State story whether we want it or not. It was thrust upon us, and now it’s ours. And we’re not allowed to forget it.

See, for any Kansan who happens to blow like a hayseed into one of the world’s major metropolises and announce proudly, with his thumbs in his suspenders, the name of his home state, he should be prepared for his urban counterpart, with the gleam of someone convinced of their own originality, to respond with a reference to “The Wizard of Oz”: “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” Or something like that. This is what passes for big-city wit these days. I know, it’s a shame. And yet we’ll laugh at their stale joke and we’ll be polite. Because, well, we’re Kansans.

 

BUT THERE is no false praise or polite acclaim in recommending IHS’s version of “The Wizard of Oz.”

We’ll leave to the philosophers the question of why Iola, of all places, turns out so many fine young actors. We’ll just point out that this cast is stacked top to bottom.

Decked out in pigtails and a pleated gingham dress Lexie Vega, as Dorothy, leads a cast of nearly 30 student-actors that includes River Hess as the straw-stuffed Scarecrow in search of a brain, Henry Lohman as the weepy, stiff-jointed Tin Man in need of a heart, and Jake Andersen — who appears to be channeling the sad-eyed comic spirit of the late Bert Lahr — as the Cowardly Lion in pursuit of a spine.

What these three creatures lack in essential faculties, Hess, Lohman, and Andersen make up for in charm. True to the 1939 film, the three IHS actors deliver their lines in a broad sort of Brooklynese and imbue their creations with the physical wit of the day’s great vaudevillians.

But for all the gray that pervades “The Wizard of Oz,” the moral coordinates of this contemporary American myth are about as black and white as they come, a fact that finds its purest expression in the characters of Glinda the Good Witch, played with a quality of glowing kindness by Haley Carlin, and the deliciously venomous Wicked Witch of the West, played by the excellent Isabella Duke.

Parker Smith plays the great and powerful Wizard of Oz, whose true scale is revealed to Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion by virtue of a simple peek behind the curtain, but whose final lesson is the more powerful for being delivered in human form: whatever long road awaits you, you should always remember these three items — a brain, a heart, and some noive.