Pipe up, fans! The Sing-A-Long Wizard of Oz is one show where costumes and mid movie outbursts are encouraged.
By BABITA PERSAUD
Published November 7, 2003
It has been said that at least every 24 hours, someone around the world utters a reference to The Wizard of Oz.
Next week, the prophecy comes true at the Tampa Theatre, as Sing-A-Long Wizard of Oz whirls into town for the first time.
The traveling show is part movie, part stage performance.
Here's how it works.
The audience dresses up. Lions and scarecrows and tin men. Oh, my.
Subtitles flow across the screen.
A master of ceremonies, Alan Ball, who tours with the show, entices the crowd to sing the favorites - Over the Rainbow, Follow the Yellow Brick Road, We're Off to See the Wizard - hiss at the Wicked Witch, exclaim, "Oh Auntie Em" and chant, "There's no place like home."
He also leads the onstage costume parade before the show. The most creative win prizes.
Audience members will receive a bag of props - a "Perform-A-Long fun pack," which includes a kazoo, "mystical" bubbles, a noisemaker and magic wand.
The Sing-A-Long Wizard of Oz tops an already long list of Oz tributes started in 1900, when L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a story he had told to his sons about a farm girl named Dorothy Gale.
He went on to write 13 more Oz installments - including The Road to Oz and The Emerald City of Oz - before other authors began contributing to the series.
The story has since spun its own legend. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is said to parallel the movie, though the band denies it. Others have surmised the story is an allegory about politicians and their undelivered promises.
The MGM movie was slow at the box office when released in 1939 and lost the Academy Award to Gone With the Wind. (Judy Garland lost the best actress Oscar to Vivien Leigh).
Now, Oz fans number in the millions.
At the book's centennial celebration in Indiana in 2000, one attendee, a 68-year-old orthodontics professor, dressed as the wizard and rode to the event in a hot-air balloon.
The sing-along phenomenon started in 1999 in London, with the Sound of Music. Since then, groups have made sing-along versions to ABBA videos and the film rendition of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat - the one with Donny Osmond.
The Sing-A-Long Wizard of Oz - produced in association with Nederlander Presentations, Clear Channel Entertainment and Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures - premiered in Chicago in January. It stops in the United Kingdom before landing in Tampa.
Sing-A-Long Wizard of Oz appears at the Tampa Theatre, 711 Franklin St. Show times are 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Nov. 14; 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 15-16. Tickets are $15 for adults, $10 for seniors and students, and $5 for children 12 and younger. For information, call 274-8981 or visit www.tampatheatre.org
