An Introduction.
Good evening, I’m Reilly Bresnahan. I’m one of the storytellers selected to bring you at home
on a journey with us the porter players as we present the Wizards of Oz. I welcome you on
behalf of my co-student director, Emma Forbes, and our faculty directors Dr. Gilbert and Ms.
Musich. Before we step aside so that you can enjoy the songs and dances from
The Wizard
of Oz, The Wiz,
and
Wicked
, Aidan, Brooke, Amelia, Sam, Bella, Jersie, and I would like to
pay homage to the 120 year old children’s book series that has inspired countless actors,
musicians, technicians, and of course, student-artists.
Starting his work as an author at the age of 40, L. Frank Baum wrote fourteen books
chronicling Dorothy Gale's multiple trips to the merry old land of Oz. The books were
written and published while Baum and his family lived in Chicago, Illinois. Prior to
becoming the best selling children’s author in the country, Baum was struggling to make
enough money to keep his family out of poverty. In fact, he moved them from New York to
Chicago in the 1880s because he thought the barren midwest of America was the land of
opportunity.
L. Frank Baum set out to create entertaining, joyful books for American children who at the
time read only European literature. European fairy tales were frightening, cautionary tales
with obvious moral messages. And although Baum didn’t make it through more than a few
years at his east coast boarding school, and didn’t graduate from school, he thought that by
the turn of the twentieth century the American education system took care of teaching
morality and citizenship, so books for children could simply be fun.
Here is the introduction that Baum wrote for his first book
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
published in 1900.
Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for
every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous
and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more
happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.
Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as
"historical" in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer "wonder tales"
in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible
and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale.
Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in
its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incidents.
Having this thought in mind, the story of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was written
solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the
wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.
1
