“Wicked” opens Wednesday at the Fox Theatre and runs through March 8.
::
EACH OF US HAS A GREEN GIRL somewhere inside of us, a green girl yearning for acceptance.
So declares the Wizard of Oz, or, in this case, the longtime entertainer playing the Wizard in this national tour of Wicked.
“Each of us feels alienated or ostracized by some group,” says John Davidson, the singer-actor and one-time game-show host. “Each of us can think of a club or a clique we wanted to belong to but couldn’t. That’s the green girl’s challenge. She’s struggling to be accepted for who she is on the inside. To an extent, we all have that green girl inside of us.”
That’s this Wizard’s theory anyway, and he’s sticking to it.
Davidson says he’s having the time of his life playing the role originated by Joel Grey on Broadway in 2003. It makes all the difference that Rhonda, his wife of 32 years (and his former backup singer), travels with him.
“I feel very much at the peak of my game,” says Davidson, 73. “I feel like I’m singing better than I’ve ever sung.”
Not that he has a lot of singing to do. He’s onstage for all of 17 minutes. Wicked, he reminds us, “is essentially the girls’ story” – referring to Glinda the Good, and her unlikely friendship with Elphaba, the misunderstood green one who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West.
It’s nice, Davidson says, “not to have the weight of the show on my shoulders.” He knows what that’s like. His smooth baritone and dashing looks have allowed him to play plenty of leads in shows across the country, from Curly in Oklahoma and Harold Hill in The Music Man to Don Quixote/Cervantes in Man of La Mancha. A personal favorite: the role of family patriarch Charlie Anderson in the Civil War-era musical Shenandoah. He was most recently on Broadway in 1996 as hog-loving patriarch Abel Frake in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s State Fair.
The Wizard in Wicked is “really a minor character, but it’s a great character,” he says. He also admires the show itself, how the storyline introduces nuggets of things we know from the iconic 1939 film and makes a lot of sense of loose ends. It also has a message of equal rights, acceptance and how we treat others.
PEOPLE MAGAZINE called Davidson “the dimpled darling of television” in 1980 when he headlined the “The John Davidson Show,” a variety show that had a two-season run. But the quick-witted Davidson first won hearts in the 1960s as a regular X and O man on “The Hollywood Squares.” In the 1970s he hosted the “$10,000 Pyramid.” In the early 1980s he co-hosted the reality show “That’s Incredible!” and, in 1986, became the host of “The New Hollywood Squares.”
“Those who know me mostly from ‘Hollywood Squares’ didn’t even know I could sing,” he says today. Yet music has always been his chief passion. He has a nightclub act and does concert tours. He plays guitar and banjo and writes songs. He has more than a dozen solo albums to his name, running the gamut from Broadway to country and pop. He also sings in French and Spanish.
A Pittsburgh native who grew up in Brockton, Mass., and White Plains, N.Y., Davidson has a six degrees sort of connection to the epic Oz feature film. Half a century ago and fresh out of college, he played the son in a musical called Foxy, which updated Ben Jonson’s Volpone to the Yukon gold rush of 1898. His father? Former cowardly lion Bert Lahr.
Foxy ran only three months on Broadway but did launch Davidson’s multifaceted career.
TV PRODUCER BOB BANNER (who helped bring Carol Burnett to TV from the musical Once Upon a Mattress) saw Foxy and saw something in Davidson. “He thought I sang beautifully,” Davidson recalls, “and told me I could have a career like Johnny Mathis or Tony Bennett – but that would mean I would just have a singing career. Instead of being a spear, which has just one prong, he saw me as someone who could be a pitchfork, with many prongs.
“He said let’s work on your comedy, your whole act. Let’s do Broadway, let’s do sitcoms, let’s make you into the best game-show host you can be. He set about developing me as a full package. He wanted to create the character of John Davidson as if it were a role.”
And now, in a full circle sort of way, he has returned to making music onstage.
“They talk about me for an hour and 15 minutes before I get to leave my dressing room – and I go out there with high energy, as if I’m going into battle,” Davidson says of playing the Wizard.
He sees the character as a con man. “I don’t think it’s any secret that the guy’s faking it, that he’s just that man behind the curtain fooling people. He’s a little like Harold Hill in The Music Man, who can’t play a note of music but has conned everyone and is just trying to save his ass.”
Davidson hopes to play the Wizard “for years and years.” One thing that keeps him motivated: “I’m still trying to do my best show ever.”
