Schele Williams on the first day of rehearsals for "The Wiz." (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)
This passionate director, once a performer in ‘Aida,’ returns at the helm of a revised production, as well as of ‘The Wiz,’ bound for Broadway and a new generation.
The word revival, according to Schele Williams, means to give new life. But in order to give something a future, one must be willing to fully unpack and understand the meaning of its past.
Williams, a busy actor, director, and author, has recently been tasked with giving new life to two beloved Broadway classics, Aida and The Wiz. As a member of the original Broadway cast of Aida, and growing up on the story of The Wiz, Williams understands the weight these stories hold in the Broadway canon, and especially in the context of Black culture. She is passionate about continuing the tradition by passing down these tales to the next generation, but she is aiming to ensure that both of these new iterations resonate with audiences as they once did with her.
The Aida revival, currently running at AFAS Circustheater in Scheveningen, the Netherlands, was to have a developmental lab in the spring of 2020, but when COVID paused the rehearsal process, Williams used the time to rethink how the story would land with audiences when theatres reopened. “We went back into the show and said, okay, this is different,” Williams said. “The world is different. We have shifted. We’re better artists now. Let’s break the show open and do a full rewrite.”
That rewrite, which involved original book writer David Henry Hwang, consisted of new research into Nubian and Egyptian history that Williams said was absent from the original staging. She is weaving this throughout the set, characters, costumes, and script—without making you feel like you are in a history class. “It’s not a documentary,” she said. “It’s still an Elton John musical, but are there moments in history we can glean and use to actually tell something that is unexpected?”