Musical theater lovers are gearing up for NBC's live-stage performance of The Wiz tonight, a rock musical retelling of The Wizard of Oz that promises to be great fun for the whole family—except for the racists on Twitter who don't understand why it features an all-black cast.
Let's ease on down the road of embarrassment:
While all you sweet things might think this is just the world and the way things are on the Internet, home to mean ol' racists everywhere, there's an extra component to this absurdity: The Wiz is actually a 40-year-old musical done by an all-black creative team including Charlie Smalls and Luther Vandross. The movie was produced by Quincy Jones and starred Diana Ross, Lena Horne, and Michael Jackson.That's right. I don't wanna bring you no bad news, angry white people, but if you're gonna complain about why NBC's version is doing what every other performance of this musical has done since 1978, you're running just a little bit late.
But even with the lack of musical theater history on their side, Twitter's confusion is understandable. After all, it's not like all-minority musicals retelling previous stories has ever been a thing before tonight, right?
...Oh, wait.
Thankfully there's still a reason to rejoice—the prejudiced voices on Twitter have rapidly been drowned out by hours and hours of subsequent ridicule from the rest of the Internet.
There's an easy solution to this problem, and that's to look inside our hearts to find a world full of love, like yours and mine—like the year 2015, where black people can do things without it being a big deal. If you believe, within your heart you'll know that no one can change the awesomeness of the original L. Frank Baum story—not even the all-white cast we had to put up with in 1939.It's almost like you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.H/T Buzzfeed | Screengrab via Movie Clips/YouTube
