(Browse photos of the performance here.)
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 fairytale: 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.
Lexie Vega in The Wizard of Oz.
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, 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 his own originality, to respond with a reference to ?The Wizard of Oz?: ?Toto, I don?t think we?re in Kansas anymore.? This is what passes for big-city wit these days. It?s a shame. And yet we?ll laugh at his stale joke and we?ll be polite. Because, well, we?re Kansans.
Isabella Duke, as the fiendish Wicked Witch of the West confronts Haley Carlin?s Glinda, the good witch, in ?The Wizard of Oz.?
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.
