We’re Doing The Wiz podcast review — how a stage musical shook up a performing arts school

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In the early 2000s, audio producer Ian Coss attended a school of performing arts in Massachusetts. It was a rural school that had no computer labs and where the gymnasium had been painted black to turn it into a theatre. To boost student diversity, it had recently introduced a busing programme which brought in Black students from a nearby city. But when a class dress-up exercise on the theme of America’s gilded age led to a student dressing in Ku Klux Klan robes, an outcry ensued. Parents protested, TV news crews arrived and school assemblies were given over to discussions about race. Early the following year, the teachers announced that the next high school musical would be a production of The Wiz, the African-American musical retelling of The Wizard of Oz. 

The newest addition to the coveted Radiotopia Presents strand, home to limited-run series by independent producers, We’re Doing The Wiz features Coss and his ex-classmate Sakina Ibrahim reflecting on the staging. Ibrahim, who was cast as Dorothy, had transferred to the school in the middle of the academic year and, to her discomfort, was thrust into enforced discussions about racism with her peers. “I was there to chase my own dreams, not to pick up the pieces of a mess I didn’t create,” she recalls. 

We’re Doing The Wiz is about a liberal-minded performing arts school’s reckoning over race along with the legacy of a cherished musical that opened on Broadway in 1975 and was later made into a film starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. “The Wiz is sacred for Black people,” says Ibrahim. We don’t hear much about how the original 1970s show and film came into being, and their impact at the time as Coss opts to keep the focus on the school and the show’s impact on this small Massachusetts community. 

Coss is practised at creating semi-autobiographical podcasts, having made the terrific Forever is a Long Time, in which he invited members of his family to talk about their failed marriages. But, as the creator of We’re Doing The Wiz, he is the nervous onlooker, never sure when to make his presence felt. The reason for his hesitation is made clear: as a white ex-pupil, he doesn’t want to drown out the Black voices — in which case, why not have Ibrahim tell the story solo? But there is also a sense with this series that, after a propulsive first half, he doesn’t quite know where to go with it.

In the event, it culminates in the final school performances of The Wiz. What is a formative experience for the cast members proves anticlimactic for the listener. Clearly, you had to be there. Nonetheless, the news that, as a choreographer, Ibrahim now regularly stages productions of The Wiz for her students leaves a warm glow after the credits have rolled.