ABSTRACT
The Wiz was rescued the day after opening night by an infusion of $100,000 by Twentieth Century-Fox for publicity. The studio gave the producers a month to save the show based on their belief that the show had tremendous audience-building capacity. The studio saw The Wiz as highly viable and particularly suited to attract new audiences. Its celebratory nature spoke to the pride of urban Black Americans, but the low sales forced this musical into the all too familiar category of Black narratives that had to go above and beyond to reach out to Black audiences when White theater goers failed to show up to the box office. The television commercial for The Wiz brought the Black musical into suburban living rooms where children, and their ticket-buying parents, who loved the MGM film, The Wizard of Oz, saw something very familiar but also completely new using the sound of Motown.
