Why Dorothy Needed to Be From Kansas AND From Us by Jayla

Why Dorothy Needed to Be From Kansas AND From Us by Jayla - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

When I was cast as Dorothy in a production of The Wiz, I thought my research job would be simple. Learn the notes, learn the lines, watch the movie. Instead, I found myself stuck on one question that changed how I think about musical theatre entirely: why did a team of African American artists in 1975 need to rebuild The Wizard of Oz from the ground up, and what would playing Dorothy honestly require of me?

That question pulled me into the biggest research project of my life so far. I started with the history. The Wiz opened on Broadway in 1975 with an all African American cast, music by Charlie Smalls, direction by Geoffrey Holder, and went on to win seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical. I read about how Holder built the show's look out of African diaspora aesthetics rather than the familiar emerald fantasy of the 1939 film. I listened my way through the score next to the songs that surrounded it in the mid 1970s, and I noticed something: the music did not just retell the story, it translated it. "Ease on Down the Road" is not a replacement for "We're Off to See the Wizard." It is a different idea of what a journey is, less marching and more groove, less obedience and more survival.

The deeper I dug, the more my question grew. Dorothy in The Wiz is a girl from Kansas, but she is also a Black girl learning that the power she is searching for has been in her hands the entire time. That is what "Home" is about, and it is why the song lands differently in this version. When I rehearsed it, I stopped thinking of it as a ballad about missing a place and started playing it as a realization about self worth.

This project deepened my understanding of my subject in a way I did not expect. I used to think of dramaturgy as homework, something you do before the real work of performing begins. Now I understand it as part of the performance itself. Every choice I made as Dorothy, from how I held my posture when the Lion first threatened her, to how I let her confidence grow city by city, came out of that research. My curiosity about a single question made me a better performer, and it made me a better student, because it taught me that understanding a subject means asking the questions the material seems to be hiding.

The project also changed how I plan to work for the rest of my training and career. Before every role now, I write my own research question first. For a production set in the Harlem Renaissance era, I asked what the performers of that time would want an audience to know about how they were living. For a contemporary musical, I asked what has changed about who gets to tell the story since the shows I grew up on. I am a musical theatre major, so people assume my favorite part of the craft is performing. It is. But I have learned that the performance starts in the library, and that the best homework is the kind that makes you proud to stand up and prove it.