‘Like you’re seeing it for the first time’: ‘Wizard of Oz’ reborn on downtown SF stage

When you’re off to see ‘The Wizard of Oz,” you might think you have a pretty good idea what to expect.

But the wild, flamboyant version now onstage at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater promises to blow away expectations like a farmhouse in a tornado.

“Everybody in the world knows ‘There’s no place like home,’ ‘Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore,’ all of those things,” says Danny Scheie, who plays the Scarecrow. “It’s deep inside of us. And this production I think excavates it fully and makes it completely new. It will feel like you’re seeing it for the first time, because nothing will be tired and familiar.”

With a stellar and diverse lineup of almost entirely local actors, ACT’s staging is directed and choreographed by Sam Pinkleton, the Tony-nominated choreographer of “Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812.” He also choreographed “Soft Power” next door at the Curran Theatre and the musical adaptation of “Amelie” that premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre directed by Pam MacKinnon, now ACT’s artistic director.

“As soon as she took over, we started talking about doing a musical that really turned that theater into a party and a radically welcoming space,” Pinkleton says. “Because honestly, I’m not a serious director of plays, at all. And for about two years, I worked with ACT and with all kinds of collaborators in the Bay Area to create this giant intergenerational, wacky party version of ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ to be in what was then the Geary stage. And we were to start rehearsal on March 17, 2020.”

After those plans were thrown awry by the pandemic, they decided to go in a different direction.

“I was like, ‘Wait a second. Why haven’t we been doing ‘The Wizard of Oz’ from the beginning?’” Pinkleton says. “Everybody has a ‘Wizard of Oz’ story. It’s fundamentally about home. It’s about chosen family. It is something that you can bring kids to, which ‘Rocky Horror’ wasn’t. And it happens to be my favorite thing of all time. So it felt like this amazing continuation of the work that was done pre-pandemic in a bigger, crazier, more loving way.”

There have been many stage adaptations of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” including very loose adaptations such as “The Wiz” (which is coming to SF’s Golden Gate Theatre in January) or “Wicked” (which premiered in 2003 at the Curran). It first became a Broadway musical in 1902, with a book and lyrics cowritten by Baum himself.

Surely the best-known and beloved version of the story is the 1939 MGM motion picture with its unforgettable songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg.

“I grew up in a very tiny industrial town in Southern Virginia,” Pinkleton recalls. “And the VHS tape of ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ was, to me, the portal to a better world.”

The film itself has been adapted for the stage a few times, including a 1942 version with several new characters and songs, and a 2011 West End musical adding new songs by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

ACT is using the popular 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation by John Kane that hews closest to the movie. A touring production of it came through S.F.’s Orpheum Theatre in 1998 starring Eartha Kitt and Mickey Rooney.

Though the script closely follows the film, Pinkleton’s production is much more reinvention than re-creation.

“It does not look or feel like the movie at all,” he says. “But I hope it has the same heart. I’m looking at a room full of inflatable dinosaurs and wrestling mats and pompoms and hula hoops. I think it’s going to feel less like a proper musical on stage and more like a joyously chaotic takeover of the Toni Rembe Theater.”