Geoffrey Holder’s
The Wiz
The Wizard of Oz illustrated the polarities of good and evil in lavish technicolor, solidifying itself as a metaphor for America’s purity complex. Thirty-five years after its release, a man named Ken Harper was set to stage an all-black interpretation of Dorothy’s journey to Oz. The Wiz (1975) doesn't veer too far off from its predecessor’s plot; it is still a story about a young girl coming of age and going through the necessary turmoil to meet and tether herself to the world. But in this iteration, the story mutates - The Wiz is a groovy new interpretation about what is inherited and what is learned. At the helm of the wonderful world of The Wiz, is Geoffrey Holder.
Ken Harper worked as a Music and Public Affairs Director for WPIX (now PIX11) in New York. He originally wanted to make a television special based on the same concept. When that direction fell through, he quit his job and started a funding campaign for a musical production of a Black Wizard of Oz. For Harper, this was a strictly commercial idea for a production that would make money over and over. He explained his reasoning in a 1976 issue of Black Enterprise: “I wanted to do a contemporary show with black music as its focus [...] If you examine the charts today, at least four or five of the top ten songs are black. So, I felt if we had a show with good black music, it would go over. I ended up using The Wizard of Oz because it was in the public domain and hadn’t been revived since the 1939 Judy Garland film.” Harper understood the play’s potential to be a commercial success, spawning albums, sheet music, movie rights, and more. But what would it look like to stage an all black production of The Wizard of Oz? He hadn’t been able to convince executives of the show’s money-making abilities. At least, till he told Geoffrey Holder about the whole thing.
Geoffrey Holder grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. It was a taut environment, living under British colonial rule and constant sanitization; but Geoffrey knew who he wanted to be when he was seven - he wanted to be like his older brother Boscoe Holder. Boscoe was a dancer, pianist, and a painter. Geoffrey lept, swung, and flung himself like Boscoe. He learned how to paint just by watching Boscoe and sneaking into his brother’s cadmium paints illicitly. Their parents encouraged and facilitated their creative pursuits, giving both sons a generous appetite for beauty, movement, and connection.
Boscoe moved to England with his dance company, making sure to shirk his younger brother out of his shadow. In his own right, Geofrey blossomed, nervy and fast. By the time Geoffrey and Ken Harper met in 1973, he had a pedigree and a lively portfolio: He had been a principal dancer for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, which led to a long time collaboration with Josephine Baker. He was a choreagrapher with Alvin Ailey and his dance company. He met and married fellow dancer, actress, and choreograp her Carmen DeLavellade, with whom he had a son name Leo. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and masterful painter. He danced, acted, designed, and choreographed on Broadway and in blockbuster movies; his most notable performance to date is his fanciful Baron Samedi in the Bond film Live and Let Die. Among the hip and artsy cloisters of late-century New York, Geoffrey was well known for his encompassing warmth, varying talents, and deep baritone.
Geoffrey Holder was enamored by Ken Harper’s idea for a musical production of a black Wizard of Oz. He thought the show needed a different name: “If it’s Black, it must of course be called The Wiz.” After this cannonization, he went home and visualized the production from start to finish; in forty drawings, complete with costumes and movement, Holder designed a new and wonderful world of Oz. Harper was enthusiastic about Geoffrrey’s interpretation; it finally gave a vivid body to his production. Harper wanted Geoffrey to direct the production as well as design the costumes. With Geoffrey’s illustrations in tow, he prepared a pitch for Twentieth Century Fox, and returned back to New York with $650,000 to stage a production of The Wiz.
Upon his return, though, it was clear that Harper’s benefactors did not trust Geoffrey to do the work that he had set out to do; they thought he was not mainstream enough although he had directed, choreapraphed, and designed his own productions in previous years. Twentieth Century Fox, and Harper to an extent, believed that Geoffrey needed a co-director; someone with an accessible conventionality and a mainstream notoriety. Geoffrey was dejected and weary, not a stranger to being passed over in favor of more noticeable faces. He told The New York Times in 1975 “...Harper asked me to recommend a black director and choreographer. Well, I was a little taken aback by that because I am a director and choreographer — I have always choreographed my own dances and directed actors in movement. But that is the story of my life. People know I'm an actor, too, but they call me and ask for James Earl Jones's telephone number. Anyway, what could I do? I recommended Louis Johnson, who had directed ‘Purlie,’ and Donald McKayle, who did ‘Raisin.’”
Geoffrey focused solely on the show’s costumes while Harper hired Gilbert Moses to be the director. George Faison oversaw choreography, and Charlie Smalls wrote the score.
The Wiz had its off-Broadway debut on October 21st 1974 at the Morris A. Mechanic Theater in Baltimore, and it was an instant flop. Director Gilbert Moses took to the stage before curtain rise to explain to the audience that one actor had fallen ill, another had been replaced, and the actors were not able to have a technical rehearsal prior to the show. The Wiz was panned by critics, while Black theater-goers did not connect to the reinterpretation of the story. Critics cited directorial and technical hitches that rendered the all-black adaptation “feeble at every turn,” and Moses was fired as the show’s director. Just after two months since its opening - and a few weeks before its Broadway debut - The Wiz was set to close. Ken Harper was forced to return to the drawing board - namely, Twentieth Century Fox and Geoffrey Holder.
Miraculously, Harper was able to convince Twentieth Century Fox to invest an extra $150,000 in the show, to be spent on a massive television ad campaign that would prove extremely lucrative. The extra funding also came with the stipulation where all actors agreed to royalty cuts until production costs were recouped. Even with a lofty new budget, the show still needed a director - Ken Harper was forced to return to Geoffrey and ask if he would direct The Wiz. This wasn’t a desperate bid to re-ignite the spark that got him funding in the first place - in fact, Geoffrey was still not his first choice. Harper had reached out to different directors, producers, and well known Broadway wizards, such as Harold Prince, Don McKayle, and Patricia Birch - they all refused to touch The Wiz. Geoffrey said, “With pleasure.”
With Geoffrey Holder at the helm of “The Wiz,” everything started to pull into focus. Geoffrey was a vast man, but he had an ethos of generosity rooted in his vastness. His first order of business was to throw a party; he was aghast to find out that there had never been a party for the cast and crew. How were they supposed to be of one accord if it wasn’t practiced? In the 2005 documentary Carmen and Geoffrey he explained, “When there is negativity inside a production, you have to take a bent thing and make it straight. It was the first time the performers all broke bread and had a unity and a drink together. All of a sudden, we became a family. You have to use all types of psychology - you have to have one trick more than a monkey.”
In a room at the Holiday Inn, over buckets of chicken and cheap rum, he communed with the people he worked with, allowing them space to let out steam and get to know each other. These cast and crew parties were a mainstay during his tenure as director.
Geoffrey made other changes after Gilbert Moses’ exit. He reassigned the role of the Scarecrow to a background dancer after the original actor asked to be let out of his contract. He cut out songs that belabored the plot and he cut out a character called “Queen of Mice.” Geoffrey made several costume changes, most importantly switching Dorothy out of pants into her iconic flouncy white dress. He reinstated original scenes that had been cut out by Moses, such as the titular tornado ballet scene - which featured dancers waving tails of black French silk, a reference to death tails in Haitian folklore.
Gilbert Moses had been an amazing director on the rise; before working on The Wiz, he had garnered a Tony Award nomination for his debut Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death in 1971. But Moses wasn’t like Geoffrey Holder. Geoffrey was not clinical about theater; he rather approached it with a multitudous eye, understanding that “one thing was just as good as the other.” He was serious about maintaining the symbiosis between costume and choreaography, the body and its movements. He was starkly unconventional, sometimes giving in too much to pageantry, but he was also a theater professional; he approached storystelling with diligence and familiarity. It was his drawings, after all, that finally began to give real bloody to this idea of a Black Wizard of Oz. And they weren’t just costumes that were plug and play, they were interpretations rooted in the show’s themes of American blackness, tradition, and autonomy. In Geoffrey Holder’s The Wiz, Caribbean folklore meld with sounds and artifcacts from contemporary everyday Black American life to banish all stringent and sanitized notions of performance, of theater. In The Wiz, all appetites are satiated.
The Wiz won seven Tonys in 1975: Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Featured Actor, Best Featured Actress, Best Direction, Best Choreography, and Best Costume Design. It was nothing but sheer victory for Geoffrey, who snagged two of the show’s seven Tonys. Ken Harper’s dream of making a commercially successful production was realized; the rights to The Wiz were sold to Universal Pictures and a blockbuster adaptation was almost immediately put in the works, with direction by Sidney Lumet and Diana Ross as a 24-year old Dorothy. Various actors from the original production reprised their roles; Ted Ross as Lion and Mabel King as Evilene. The Wiz movie was released in 1978 featuring a star-studded cast; however, its initial reviews were less than favorable. That’s a whole other story.
Geoffrey would continue adding on to his colorful repertoire; on the heels of his Tony wins, he went on to direct, choreograph, and costume design a 1978 revival of Kismet! called Timbuktu and featuring Eartha Kitt. He kept painting and indulging in various mediums of visual art, publishing a book of photography in 1986. He acted and voiced illustrious characters in cult classics such as Boomerang and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Geoffrey Holder died in 2014 at the age of 84 - a booming man whose absence has been deafening. When asked about his vastness, his multiple selves, he said, “Never do I sit and wait for things to happen. I have many avenues of expression and I enjoy travelling a lot.”