After watching all the super talented would be Dorothys on Over The Rainbow earlier this year, I can’t wait for the full blown Wizard of Oz musical to start up in London next March.
Danielle Hope won the casting competition of course, so she’ll be the big attraction leading the show as Dorothy, but if you were one of the many hundreds of thousands of fans who wanted Sophie Evans to win then that’s brilliant because you will get the chance to see Sophie as Dorothy on Tuesdays in the Wizard of Oz in London. So I think that this new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is going to be every bit as popular as his others if not more so for people from all over the UK going on theatre breaks in London. The rehearsals start in December this year I believe, and there’s going to be an extended period of technical rehearsals because the stage set is said to be particularly ambitious. They are even restoring the twin turntables at the London Palladium theatre! I don’t know who is going to be cast as the tin Man or the bashful lion yet, nor the Wizard of Oz himself come to think of it, but it is known that Lloyd Webber has been sneaking in to see Wicked recently, so let’s sit tight and wait for some interesting announcements.
I wonder if some people will get the wrong idea and think that the Wizard of Oz is a only a kids show? Most of us will have seen it as children ourselves, because of the popularity of the film version of the show, and because it’s so old that the musical script will have gone out of copyright which makes it economical for amateur dramatic societies to stage as a family show. But with the new West End version, the intended audience is surely going to be targeted as right across the whole spectrum of age ranges. Tim Rice is collaborating on writing the new songs with Andrew Lloyd Webber, and that’s a team which produced Evita. Joseph and a whole host of other hit musicals, so expect a serious amount of attention to matching the music and lyrics for an all round Wizard of Oz theatre breaks in London experience for young and old alike.