Now the rest of the world can test Doyle's opinion. After devoting 18 months of weekends and evenings to the project, he has completed the orchestral score, which approaches 600 pages. (The Ring of the Wizardlungen, he calls it.) He and Maxine have also finished assembling a piano/vocal score for the show. They did it entirely by e-mail and AOL Instant Messenger, without once hearing the sound of each other's voices. The first time they spoke was also the first time they met, when Doyle visited Maxine in California last August.
Their project will see print later this year. Hungry Tiger Press is publishing the performance version of the script and piano/vocal score, with copious photographs, scrapbook excerpts and notes explaining both the show's history and technicalities. Doyle's orchestral score will also be available for rental.
Steve Lowry
James Doyle: Compared to that of some modern Broadway shows, the original music from The Wizard of Oz "kicks ass."
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In the meantime, one offshoot of their restoration project has already hit the market. In November, Hungry Tiger Music released the CD Before the Rainbow: The Original Music of Oz, featuring selections from five of Baum's plays and one of his silent films. The credited performers, the Utensia Ensemble -- named for a land in Oz inhabited by sentient kitchen utensils -- consist solely of Doyle, a Yamaha XG synthesizer module and other gizmos. Maxine based the cover design on a poster from The Wizard of Oz.
The book won't mark the end of the collaborators' involvement with each other or with The Wizard. Both are speaking at the Oz Centennial conference at Indiana University next July. Doyle will discuss the process of restoring the show, while Maxine will give a slide show reconstruction of the first act. They're also hashing out the logistics to record a concert performance of their reconstructed Wizard. No stage performances are in the works yet.
Doyle has already jumped into two other Baum restoration projects. He's replacing a lost score for a one-act play titled The Uplift of Lucifer or Raising Hell. ("We're talking Orange Julius devil costumes!" he says with a laugh. "We're talking reformers coming to hell!") He's also rescoring another Baum silent film, The Magic Cloak of Oz. And he's expanding his salvage efforts to include other hits of the early 20th century, which he sees as a grossly overlooked period of American musical theater history. His next CD, Perfect Nonsense, is spotlighting "Mikado rip-offs that hit Broadway," including the one that introduced the prototype for all pseudo-Egyptian music, The Maid and the Mummy.
As with Before the Rainbow, Doyle will digitally record Perfect Nonsense right onto his computer, the same tool that assisted him in reclaiming the Wizard of Oz musical. It's strangely fitting. Technological innovations initially helped propel the Wizard into the limelight 100 years ago; now they're part of retrieving it from the shadows.
"This project was largely made possible by the sudden democratization of technology," muses Doyle. "The people who came to see the 1902 Wizard more likely than not arrived in something pulled by a horse. There's sort of a weird bridge sitting at the two ends of the century."
Before the Rainbow: The Original Music of Oz($16.99, plus $3.50 shipping and handling) is available by mail order from Hungry Tiger Press, 1516 Cypress Avenue, San Diego, California 92103.
