Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on Stage and Screen to 1939, and: L. Frank Baum, Creator of Oz (review)

Among the handful of volumes that appeared to mark the hundredth anniversary of L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz (1900) in its centennial year and after, Mark Evan Swartz's Before the Rainbow is not only one of the most attractive, but one of the few to break new ground. Boasting a larger-than-average format, it reproduces a rich array of photographs—both in black and white and color. It pays homage to the little-remembered fact that Baum's book had a long run on the American stage and numerous screen adaptations before the perennially popular MGM movie of 1939 became a television staple. Beginning with a 1902 musical extravaganza staged in Chicago that traveled to Broadway, Baum's Wizard of Oz has been—and still is—reinterpreted for each new generation of viewers, giving weight to Swartz's assertion that Baum's "contribution to the world of American popular culture is almost unequaled" (3). In Before the Rainbow, Swartz illustrates that "the infiltration of the Wizard of Oz story into our cultural bloodstream was not an overnight process" (x).

Swartz frames his narrative with an Introduction and Epilogue and tells the story in two sections: Part 1 covers the development of the stage musical of 1902 and its long touring history through 1918; Part 2 chronicles the silent film versions of the Oz story from 1908 through 1925. The Introduction provides the necessary background, summarizing Baum's life and writing career and exploring the critical interpretations of the Wizard of Oz. Swartz demonstrates that Baum's lifelong interest in theater manifests itself in the "many visual and theatrical elements" of his book (24). Baum himself was the first to adapt his American fairy tale for the Chicago stage in 1902, and he started his own film company in Hollywood in 1914 to make silent movies of Oz books. Many of the elements of the story that we now take for granted—the farm hands in the movie, for example—actually came from the early stage or film versions and not from the book itself. Swartz convincingly demonstrates that the iconic story of the Wizard of Oz as it resonates through our culture today is the sum of all its adaptations.

The first section of the book makes unparalleled use of the Townsend Walsh materials at the New York Public Library. As financial manager and promoter of the 1902 extravaganza and its touring companies, Walsh saved theater memorabilia, letters, and business records from which Swartz creates a meticulous history of the first stagings of the Wizard of Oz. Swartz also employs the diary of Baum's first collaborator, Paul Tietjens, to tell the story of Baum's own attempt to dramatize his novel. It was not Baum's playwriting ability, however, that brought the Wizard to Broadway the first time around. Instead, it was director Julian Mitchell's influence that transformed Baum's universal story into a barely recognizable romantic and political tale in which Toto became a cow named Imogene and the wizard performed comic routines. Still, Baum's Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, portrayed by Fred Stone and David Montgomery, were the stars of the show.

For the nontheatrical scholar, the detail lavished on the various stagings and touring company performances of Before the Rainbow in Part 1 can become a bit tedious, but the diligent reader finds rewards in unexpected glimpses into Baum's personality. For example, Baum appears at the Chicago premier "dressed in an ordinary business suit" and "very nervous" but trying not to show it. Afterward, calls of "Author, Author" lead him to compare the play to a "plum pudding" for which he had provided only the basic flour (65). Disappointed at the...