Wizard of Oz at Queensland University of Technology

I was excited to see a play at QUT. I always love seeing college performances. College students are enthusiastic performers with lots of passion for their work and a wonderful sense of exuberance. Also, their colleges usually fund them pretty well and they have plenty of practice time. I was also excited to see The Wizard of Oz because the last version I had seen of the story had been so awful that it made me want to bleed out of both eyes until I slowly lost consciousness.Not to mention that I had invested in a ton of Wizard of Oz scrapbooking materials and didn’t want to devote it all to that performance. I had been to see Oz: The Great and Powerful earlier that  year, but that was hardly enough to use all of the pages and embellishments that I had gone overboard in purchasing. So I was glad that another Wizard of Oz related event happened for me to use my scrapbooking stash on.When we walked in, the ticket taker told us to follow the yellow brick road, and sure enough, there was a yellow brick road! We had to walk through the set to get to our seats. On set, the cast of characters were dressed in Halloween-costume interpretations of the traditional outfits. They danced and romped around and horsed around and drank what looked like green punch. Each character was as cartoonish as their costume. Soon, the play started and the characters ran away backstage.The plot of the story was complicated, intricate and very symbolic. I won’t explain too much for spoilers but also because there was so much going on that only viewing it once, it’s impossible to know every little thing said and meant. But goddamn was it good. The story is a frame story that begins with an older woman who is in her trailer while a tornado is coming. She refuses to go to the shelter but instead starts reading the original Wizard of Oz book.Her trailer is swept away she emerges into Oz, to what she thinks will be her amazing journey, but discovers that instead of being Dorothy, she is now Toto. Dorothy is a fluffy young blonde woman who pretends not to understand “Toto’s” pleadings and continues about her journey with no concern for what “Toto” is trying to tell her. Also, the Wicked Witch of the West was a Lady Gaga-esque singer wearing amazing shoes.There was so much going on in the play that it was impossible to take it all in within just one sitting. But every element was a treat. The music was loud and powerful, the lights were brilliant and well-staged, the actors were strange, playful, sympathetic, bizarre, and scary, occasionally all at the same time. The plot was so twisted and the timing moved along perfectly.Also, there was swearing! Family-friendly dialogue was rotting my brain, when Toto screamed “Fuck!” the first time, I just wanted to weep for joy. The play finished with a shrieking climax. The entire cast threw themselves into their roles. And the props department threw themselves into clean up, after the play was finished. There was confetti, water, the Wicked Witch kicked down the walls of the trailer and there was other assorted mess.Overall, the performance restored my love and passion for theatre. I had such an amazing time that I wanted to stay and watch the play all over again. If it had been a movie, I would have restarted it and watched it until some awful time in the morning. Instead, we went outside and looked around at some of the messages that had been sprawled on the tents in the courtyard. I wrote “Oz is living!” Because it was. The theatre was alive and so was the entire country. I was living just to see it.