‘It's Dorothy!' Review: ‘Wizard of Oz' Protagonist Gets a Deep-Dive Cultural Analysis in Wide-Ranging if Overstuffed Appreciation

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A favorite nugget of Wizard of Oz lore for many of us is the sublimely funny TV guide blurb written for a 1998 TCM airing of the MGM classic: 'Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.' The inclusion of amusing oddities like that is what pulls It's Dorothy! back whenever it threatens to go from exhaustive to exhausting, from dissection to dissertation.
Welcome humor comes also from new discoveries — at least to me — like the bizarrely kitsch spectacle of eliminated contestants on BBC talent search show Over the Rainbow removing their jeweled slippers and handing them to Andrew Lloyd Webber on a throne before being carried off the set on a cutout moon. WTF? The winner — or survivor — of that Brit reality TV horror, Danielle Hope, went on to star in London as Dorothy Gale in Lloyd Webber's 2011 stage musical adapted from the 1939 film that starred Judy Garland and the 1900 children's novel by L. Frank Baum, on which it was based.
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Hope is one of five former Dorothys from film, TV and the stage who speak with disarming tenderness about the experience — the ways in which the character intersected with their own lives at the time; their connection to the search for home that was fundamentally a search for herself; and the influence the Kansas farm-girl runaway had on their place in the world.
One interviewee notes of actors who have played Dorothy, whether in a school production or a big-budget movie: 'When they put on the slippers, there's some sense of self that gets cracked open that maybe they couldn't see before.'
There's almost too much to savor in writer-director-editor Jeffrey McHale's archivally loaded Dorothy-pedia. But it's the emotional transparency of the women personally touched by the character at formative times in their lives that gives the doc its big-hearted infectiousness.
I could have listened for hours to the captivating Shanice Shantay — cast as Dorothy in the 2015 NBC special, The Wiz Live! — talk with candor about the highs of that one-and-done performance and the plummet back to real life that followed. Nichelle Lewis, who made her Broadway debut in the 2024 revival of The Wiz, gives a touching account of the way Dorothy's escape into fantasy mirrored her own coping mechanisms when she lost her father at age 9.
Lovely input also comes from Fairuza Balk, in an audio interview, looking back on her screen debut at age 11, playing Dorothy in 1985's unofficial sequel, Return to Oz, which explored a much darker side of Baum's fiction series. Despite the film's underwhelmed reception as a 'sad downer,' Balk has fond recollections of people approaching her for years afterwards to praise her performance and share how the film provided an escape from whatever bad things life had thrown at them.
Comparable responses have met countless versions of the story in its extraordinarily durable 125-year lifespan, whether on the page, in illustrated editions, cartoons, features, television or musical theater.
While the literary property had generated a 1902 Broadway musical and three silent films before Victor Fleming's canonical screen retelling, McHale devotes much of the first half to the MGM movie, particularly in terms of the blurred lines separating Garland from Dorothy. He also makes clever use of clips from across Garland's entire filmography to enhance key points, meaning the actress is as much the core of the film as her most iconic character.
Gregory Maguire, author of the revisionist novel on which Wicked was based, says, 'L. Frank Baum gave us a foundational myth for America that I do believe won't die as long as America is a country. Dorothy still has a great deal of energy and power.'
A wide range of commentators weigh in on the central theme of yearning for something just out of reach that made generation after generation identify so strongly with Dorothy. She is given no physical description in the novels, allowing readers to imprint themselves onto the character — whether that's young girls at a transitional moment in life or queer communities finding kinship in a character being denied some innate need.
The yellow brick road itself is an essential part of the queer narrative. It encapsulates a journey to which many LGBTQ people at any given time can relate, the flight of the outsider away from small-town isolation to the big city in search of an identity.
There are conflicting opinions about when 'friend of Dorothy' became a coded term to refer to gay men, just as there are debunked myths built around the close timeline proximity of Garland's death to the Stonewall riots, which marked a turning point for gay rights. But one commentator makes the valid point that it doesn't really matter what's true and what's not when it comes to Dorothy's significance in queer culture.
Hilarious commentary from John Waters and Margaret Cho expands on that connection, while Lena Waithe eloquently straddles the queer perspective and that of a Black woman. The latter becomes more central once The Wiz fully enters the conversation, first as a Broadway hit that seemed doomed when it opened but went on to dominate the 1975 Tony Awards, and later in Sidney Lumet's critically reviled 1978 movie adaptation, which nonetheless became a cultural touchstone for multiple generations of Black Americans.
Diana Ross, who controversially played Dorothy as an adult in that version, does not participate in the doc, but McHale makes effective use of relevant passages lifted from her audiobook memoir. The Luther Vandross song written for the show, 'Brand New Day,' is an anthem of freedom and liberation contextualized in the Black experience, which plugged into a transitional phase in Ross' career. She credits the movie with giving her strength as a woman and a performer. An uplifting illustration of that is footage of her storied 1983 Central Park concert, which shows her joyfully performing in pouring rain in an orange sequined bodysuit and billowing coat.
Gorgeous archival interview clips with the young Stephanie Mills, Broadway's original Dorothy in The Wiz, underline the gulf between audiences' love for her and the unkind barbs of critics at the time.
R&B star Ashanti, who played Dorothy first in the 2005 TV movie The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (always fun to see Miss Piggy throwing shade at a female co-star) and four years later in a limited New York run of The Wiz, also makes thoughtful contributions, recalling her first exposure to the Motown-produced Lumet film around age 7, and the huge inspiration she drew from Ross' performance.
McHale clearly adores Garland, and there's so much here — both widely known and freshly insightful — that he could easily have made the entire doc about the Judy-Dorothy symbiosis, and the enduring resonance of the MGM star's signature song, 'Over the Rainbow.'
Extending his insatiably curious gaze far beyond that brings many illuminating observations — not to mention fabulous clips from both well-known and obscure versions as well as pop-culture nods from Family Guy, The Simpsons, South Park and Dora the Explorer, to name a few — but it also results in some elements feeling shoehorned in for the sake of comprehensiveness.
The wrap-up section on Wicked seems almost an afterthought; glimpses of wacky merchandizing and commercial tie-ins are too quick to appreciate; and self-described 'Dorothy Gale enthusiast' Rufus Wainwright deserves more time, both singing 'Over the Rainbow' and addressing the current resurgence in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric: 'We really are being pursued again by this dark force that wants us dead and wants to eliminate us and wants to steal our ruby slippers.'
Perhaps the most rushed section is an account by Baum's great-granddaughter Gita Dorothy Morena, first of being introduced to the novels as a child, and later, traveling with her mother to different places where the author had lived. A stop in South Dakota, where Baum was editor of a Dakota Territories newspaper, yielded a shocking discovery for Morena. Her great-grandfather had penned an 1890 editorial stating that the only way to ensure the safety of Americans was to continue the wrongs done to the country's Indigenous people for centuries and wipe 'these untamed and untamable creatures' from the face of the earth.
Morena and another descendant later returned to South Dakota to issue a formal apology to the Native population. Writer and academic Roxane Gay adds that such discoveries don't mean we can never watch our favorite movie again, but that contemporary audiences can benefit from some foregrounded context: 'That way people know a human being made this art, and human beings make mistakes all the time.'
All of this is fascinating stuff, even if the material might seem more suited to a limited series that would allow the many distinct parts more breathing space and a few more song interludes that aren't just fragments (more of Lewis singing 'Home' on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, please). It's more reverential and consequently less playful than McHale's Showgirls reappraisal, You Don't Nomi. But it's smart, analytical and stacked with magical visuals, not least of them the enchanting transition from B&W to color in the Garland film.
Now, time for therapy to address my childhood deprivation of the LEGO Wizard of Oz set.
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