Costume designs for The Wiz (1978).

Costume designs for The Wiz (1978). The Wiz is a musical, but there’s nothing jolly about it. It’s a sinister film. Dorothy and her companions travel through a strangely abandoned, urban Oz; and whenever they do encounter other characters, they are often hostile in a quiet but persistent way, casually cruel and colorful, like bizarre survivors of a nuclear holocaust (the nightmarish Subway Peddler, above, is one of those characters). It seems like it’s Sunday for most of the time, about 6 o’clock in the evening: it’s dusk, dim, the sky is overcast, the streetlights are on, though they light the way for nobody.