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"The Wizard of Oz" coming to Icon of the Seas


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Royal Caribbean Productions on FB announced auditions for the Broadway style show on Icon. It's The Wizard of Oz. It's unclear if this means the Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber version of Oz, but the copy mentions a "brand new production", so perhaps not.

The Wizard of Oz is being reimagined like never before in this brand new production, get ready to walk the yellow brick road and follow the brightest of Rainbows! There’s no place like Royal Caribbean.

Zero people are upset that it will be for a third installment of The Effectors.

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5 hours ago, Ampurp85 said:

I'm sure this will be an original take. I love the wizard of oz, prefer the Wiz, so I'm excited about the prospect. I hope the original production is like Columbus.

I don't know. They call it an original production, but that can mean more than one thing: either an entirely new thing from the ground up or a new staging of something that already exists. For clarity, they should have called it a new musical if it was the former. 

That said, I think it's probably the ALW show that would be the least costly for them to acquire as it never made it to Broadway but it also has huge name recognition. Given that Phantom is closing this year on Broadway, I wouldn't be surprised to see that pop up on a RCI ship in the future as it has huge name recognition and it has been a consistent crowd pleaser. 

I do think that being on Broadway is the stopper for Wicked's availability. Usually the rights holders for musicals lock that down when it's still playing on Broadway, the one exception I can think of is Chicago when that ran, but nothing can kill that show. 

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Starting in 2019 at least one Oz book has entered the public domain every year.  There remain several that are not public domain yet, nor is the 1939 movie, but with twenty eight Oz books now in the public domain they can probably make a production based on one of the items that is public domain to avoid the tens of millions of dollars that a popular Broadway production would cost to license.  

I also think that an Oz production works well for a family cruise line.  Many Broadway productions would struggle to be appealing to a multi-generational audience of all ages.

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I definitely meant along the lines of what @twangster means. I didn't say the wizard of oz would be an original production as @JoeC thinks but an original take. As in similar storyline/characters with Royals spin on it. I just like the songs better in the Wiz, which is a black take on it. They could come up with great songs.

But it also mentions a production show. Columbus is the production show on Oasis and my favorite, others have been meh. I'm hoping the one they come up with on Icon is fun and funny.

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I’m not sure how licensing works for these types of productions, but I would be very surprised to find that Royal is licensing another ALW production given the continuing mess they’ve had with Cats.  I think Royal has learned its lesson re: licensed productions.  They’re nearly impossible to get rid of or modify (not to mention, expensive).  The new format seems to be private productions that they can control and modify (think Effectors).  I do suspect (just a guess) that in order to use the phrase “The Wizard of Oz” there will be a license of some kind to somebody.

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Given the art that the Royal Caribbean casting call used, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an adaption of the Royal Shakespeare Company version that first was staged in 1987. It is a faithful adaptation of the film and uses most of the songs from it. That would be much cheaper than the ALW version. 

https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/65772/the-wizard-of-oz-rsc-1987

 

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