When actor Alan Mingo Jr. landed the title role in the 50th anniversary revival of the Broadway musical “The Wiz,” he felt confident that he knew what would come next.
A national tour, a Broadway run, and then back on the road again, he was imagining himself doing basically the same show he’d loved since his boyhood in Maryland in the ’80s.
The first part of that unfolded as expected. The 2023 national tour of “The Wiz” moved to Broadway a year later, and returned to the road in 2025 on a run that plays Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa from Jan. 13-25.
As for being the same show Mingo has starred in three times before this? Not so much, he discovered.
Dana Cimone as Dorothy, Cal Mitchell as the Lion, Elijah Ahmad Lewis as the Scarecrow, and D. Jerome as the Tinman in the North American tour of “The Wiz” which plays Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa from Jan. 13-25. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel) Alan Mingo Jr. as the Wiz in the Northern American tour of “The Wiz,” which plays Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa from Jan. 13-25. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel) Cal Mitchell as the Lion, Dana Cimone as Dorothy, D. Jerome as the Tinman, and Elijah Ahmad Lewis as the Scarecrow in the North American tour of “The Wiz” which plays Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa from Jan. 13-25. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel) The ensemble of “The Wiz” in Emerald City. The North American tour of the classic Broadway musical plays Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa from Jan. 13-25. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel) Gregory Hamilton, Moriah Perry and Kameren Whigham as the Tornado in “The Wiz,” which plays Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa from Jan. 13-25. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel) Cal Mitchell as the Lion, Elijah Ahmad Lewis as the Scarecrow, Dana Cimone as Dorothy, D. Jerome as the Tinman, and Alan Mingo Jr. as the Wiz the North American tour of “The Wiz” which plays Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa from Jan. 13-25. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel) Show Caption1 of 6Dana Cimone as Dorothy, Cal Mitchell as the Lion, Elijah Ahmad Lewis as the Scarecrow, and D. Jerome as the Tinman in the North American tour of “The Wiz” which plays Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa from Jan. 13-25. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel) Expand“I’m thinking we’re still doing the original,” Mingo says of his initial response to the current show. “I’m sort of a revival purist, so I already came prepared. I’ve done this musical now three times – college, two professionally – I know these lines inside and out.”
Sure, writer-comedian Amber Ruffin had been brought in to freshen up the script of the original 1975 Broadway production, but Mingo figured that was just cleaning up dated ’70s slang, maybe adding a new joke here and there.
“I have no idea until I get into the production,” he says by phone from Minneapolis, where “The Wiz” was playing last month. “Then someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey, you read the new script?’ and I go, ‘New script?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, go home, read the script, come back tomorrow.’
“I read it, and I had my first professional nervous breakdown,” Mingo says, laughing. “Because they weren’t just taking out the slang. Amber Ruffin reimagined this.
“Backstories were different, the jokes were different,” he says. “Now, it was funny, but you’re talking to a purist. I went to school for theater. I’m a classical actor – what are you doing to my classic?”
In a panic, he called a mutual friend of director Schele Williams, with whom Mingo had starred in “Rent,” his first Broadway musical after finishing his master’s in theater at the University of California, Irvine.
“I’m going, ‘What do I tell the director – that I can’t do this? What they have done to my beloved musical?” he says. “She says, ‘If you were the director, you would want to know, so talk to her tomorrow.’”
Williams told Mingo that she’d changed the script to better reflect its messages for new viewers, such as her own teenage daughters.
“She goes, ‘I wanted them to understand that sometimes adults, especially the Wiz, should have redeeming qualities, and sometimes adults don’t. I need them to understand that sometimes adults will just outright lie to them and won’t try to make it better.’
“Once she said that, I had to go, ‘OK, I’m up for the task of making this version for a new generation,’” Mingo says. “She didn’t want any bullying in it. There were some updated cultural changes that she wanted to make. And that’s where Amber came in.”
The changes also allowed Mingo to step out of the shadows cast by André DeShields and Richard Pryor, who played the Wiz in the original Broadway show and 1978 movie adaptation, and make the role his own.
“I can’t unknow them, what they’ve done, but now that I’m saying different words by Amber, it allowed me to create my own version,” Mingo says. “My version is kind of like Samuel L. Jackson meets Willie Wonka with a sprinkle of RuPaul.
“We actually made it timeless, and [Ruffin’s] also married the movie with the Broadway version so that both audiences are happy and satisfied.”
The road to Broadway
Like Mingo, Dana Cimone, who plays Dorothy in this version of “The Wiz,” first saw the 1978 film version, which retells “The Wizard of Oz” from a Black American perspective.
Where the cast of the original Broadway show consisted of stage actors, the movie had stars such as Diana Ross as Dorothy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, and Richard Pryor as the Wiz.
“I first saw ‘The Wiz’ when I was about 10 or 11 with my mom at home,” says Cimone, who turned 21 while on tour with the show in June. “And it absolutely scared the crap out of me. [She laughs] But the music was beautiful. I was a huge Michael Jackson fan growing and the music always resonated with me, especially the song ‘Home.’”
And like Cimone, Mingo didn’t initially know there was a Broadway musical. For him, the world of “The Wiz” was only the film, a situation that lasted until he was cast in a college production of the show and discovered there were … differences.
“It wasn’t until I was cast as the Yellow Brick Road,” he says of the actors who portray the road and guide Dorothy to Oz in the musical. “I didn’t understand what that was. I’m playing a tree?
“Eventually, I was like, ‘Oh, OK, that makes sense. Whoops!” he laughs.
Years after that college production, Mingo returned to “The Wiz” for a pair of potentially Broadway-bound productions that never made it out of tryouts in California.
In 2006, for a revival at the La Jolla Playhouse, Mingo was cast as the Head Funky Monkey and understudy to David Alan Grier as the Wiz.
In 2019, Mingo played the Wiz in another Broadway-hopeful production, this time at the Music Circus in Sacramento.
“After ‘The Wiz Live!’ [TV broadcast], we thought it was a good idea to take their costumes and put them on theatrical actors,” Mingo says. “So I’m wearing Queen Latifah’s huge cape with Swarovski crystals all over and we thought that was going to Broadway. It clearly didn’t.
“Then when I got the call for this, I go, ‘Guys, I’ve seen people try to make this work; thank you for the offer, but I don’t think you’re going to make it to Broadway.’”
The team putting together this national tour with Broadway in its sights insisted they would, and so Mingo reconsidered.
“This is my sixth [national] tour, so I don’t mind going on tour,” he says. “Let’s see what you can do. But in the back of my mind, this show was not going to make it to Broadway.
“I would not believe it until I stepped on the Broadway stage. When it finally happened, I was like, ‘Oh my God. All these years.”
Breaking barriers
As a boy, Mingo says he was thrilled to see Black actors on TV when he watched “The Wiz,” though it wasn’t until many years later that he realized the significance of that aspect of the musical.
“I was also a fan of a lot of the movie musicals back then,” he says of his life before seeing “The Wiz” for the first time. “You had ‘Grease’ and ‘Xanadu,’ and none of them had any Black characters.
“But back then, I didn’t know I needed representation,” Mingo says. “I’m too young to really understand. I just know that there’s no one that looks like me, yet I’m singing these songs, walking around the house.”
When he finally saw the movie, it felt familiar. His mother played Diana Ross albums all the time. Mingo loved the music of the Jackson 5. And even though he was too young to hear Richard Pryor’s act, he’d sneaked around and heard a few of his comedy concert records.
“It was another movie musical, but everybody looked like me,” he says. “It was not an out-of-this-world experience, but just like, ‘Wait, what?’ Back then, any time a Black person was on the television, it was something everybody talked about. So for me it was a big impact.”
That impact still ripples through the decades, Cimone says she has learned.
“People that come to the show are connected to this generationally,” she says. “I love when I go to the stage door, and I have people come up to me saying, ‘Last time I saw the show I was 16 years old when Stephanie Mills was doing [Dorothy] and you remind me so much of her.’
“Or having parents come and say, ‘I saw the show when I was 9 years old, and now I’m here with my kids and my grandchildren, and introducing them to it.’
“I love how this show has such an impact on every generation, [every] Black generation,” Cimone says. “And now I have a chance to be an eye-opener for the younger generation to get invested into this storyline and draw a connection to the audience.”
Like a dream
The Wiz and Dorothy are canonically different generations, and Mingo and Cimone as actors fit that archetype, too.
“This is her first national tour,” Mingo notes. “But wow, I think she has an incredible voice, an incredible instrument.
“Schele, our director, wanted someone who plays a true teenager,” he adds. “I’m sure you know the drama between Stephanie Mills and Diana Ross when Diana Ross did the movie. [Mills was 17 when she originated the role of Dorothy on Broadway; Ross was 33 when she played Dorothy in the film.]
“With Dana, we found someone who plays like a teenager,” Mingo says. “It actually reads better. It reads younger, fresher, but she has a voice that’s quite incredible.
“So when she goes to meet her heroes, you sort of see these pre-adults find their tribe, and then you find people like me [as the Wiz] and Evillene [the Wicked Witch of the West], adults not doing the things they should be doing.”
Like Dorothy to Oz, Cimone’s journey to “The Wiz” began in a dreamlike state.
“I was actually in a very deep slumber a week after the final auditions when they called me,” she says of how she learned she’d won the role of Dorothy. “The casting team was like, ‘How do you feel?’ I said, ‘Honestly, I don’t know how to process this yet, but when I do process it, I will make sure to send an email.’
“I actually convinced myself for a whole two weeks after I booked it that I made up that phone call due to how sleepy I was,” Cimone says. “I was like, ‘No, no, no, I think I made that conversation up.’
“I told my mom, and she was super-excited, but then I would always backtrack all my words and be like, ‘But was I talking to them or was I sleeping? I don’t know. Until the email came through and I was like, ‘I definitely did not make this conversation up.’
‘The Wiz’
When: January 13-25
Where: Segerstrom Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa
How much: $44 to $149
For more: See scfta.org/events/2026/the-wiz
Related Articles
Ben Platt surprises LA crowd with Demi Lovato during residency show at the Ahmanson South Coast Repertory to develop a new version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ Review: ‘Scrooge! The Musical’ freshens up the holidays in Anaheim 5 Southern California theaters offering holiday deals beyond Black Friday Where to see ‘A Christmas Carol’ and other holiday shows in Southern California
Hence then, the article about the wiz brings updated enchantments to segerstrom hall in costa mesa was published today ( ) and is available on The Orange County Register ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( ‘The Wiz’ brings updated enchantments to Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa )
Also on site :