‘Wizard of Oz’ reimagined is latest Las Vegas show

If only by default, I have become a historian “Wizard of Oz” during my last 30 years of journalism.

My inauguration for this destiny of the yellow brick road occurred in September 1993 when I was a 23 -year -old Cub journalist transported by a luxury bus for the coach for O’Hare airport in Chicago to cover the arrival of 14 “little people” (many of them smoking chain smoking), of which 10 years had appeared in the cinema of 1939 mgm original with Judy Garland of 16 years.

Les Munchkins were the annual guests honored at the Wizard of Oz Festival in Chesterton, a popular Midwest event which lasted from 1981 to the last year of 2013. During the last two decades, I was charged in the Pays de l’Oz press room, like another Munchkin Coroner Munchkins.

Quick advance until August 2025.

For my birthday at Lion The Lion this month, my older sister Pam convinced me to join her for a quick trip 24 hours a day in Las Vegas to discover “The Wizard of Oz at Sphere”, an entirely immersive experience promising to transport the audiences of this famous yellow brick road with Dorothy and Co.

It is the same beloved film that we still remember with our older brother Tom, 58, and sister Carol, 71, remembering when they watched this film for the first time on a color TV. The first television broadcast by “The Wizard of Oz” took place on November 3, 1956, winning notes of viewers so high that it has become an annual tradition around Thanksgiving. While our family had only a black and white television in the late 1950s, our mother’s mother, our Green grandmother, who lived in Wheatfield, had a color TV. Our brothers and sisters describe to see the country of Oz vibrant to be something that looks like “out of this world”.

These were my expectations for “the Oz assistant to Sphere”, shown in the configuration location of the main bowl. Now improved, the original film with film screens from the 1930s can fill the interior display plane of Sphere to conclude, above and on the sides of the public. The final result is to create a fully immersive visual and sensory experience. I am told that it took more than 2,000 people, artists, engineers, technicians, musicians and researchers from around the world in two years at a cost (on the budget) of around $ 100 million.

At the price of basic seats at $ 100 a ticket, the film Sphere is now a 77 -minute film compared to the 102 -minute original, with the latter representing original cutting scenes like “The Scarecrow Dance” and “The Jitterbug Dance” added.

Presented as “4D” and an entirely immersive experience, the public in the sphere is treated with special interior effects created by Sphere Studios in collaboration with Warner Bros. Discovery, Google and Magnopus.

After the opening evening of August 28, there are now at least three projections per day at 11 a.m., 2 p.m. and 5 p.m., with the “The Wizard of Oz at Sphere” shows only using the 10,000 sensory “haptic seats” of the place, compared to the 20,000 seats used for space concerts.

Customers of all ages enter the place by an elaborate enveloping atrium where foods and drinks on the theme of OZ are waiting, as well as kiosks of goods dispersed in a landscape which includes the recreation of Dorothy’s Kansas, the chambers of the assistant in the emerald city, and even the Wicl Witch of the west of the messages of the West.

In collaboration with Google and Magnopus, “The Wizard of Oz at Sphere” was to use the latest AI generating technologies alongside traditional visual effects to create a final visual that adapts to a 16K sphere resolution media from the scheme of the 160,000 square feet.

Due to the need to cut scenes and dialogue, the sphere version is ransage and sometimes disjointed, which is distracting in history.

As expected, deception and environmental effects are outside this world. The effects of the Twister tornado are created with three high power fans, 20 fog units and nine mist machines, all mixed in gusts interspersed with flywheel leaves in the wind high enough to drop a baseball cap of a suspicious head.

There are floating butterflies, flying foam apples (people in the sphere say that they have a stock of more than 25,000 spongies red apples so that angry screens launch 500 orbs by mounting in the audience), snowflakes generated by 38 snow machines, several winged monkeys with acts in real size and eight units of the flame to simulate the wizard and the wizard and the wizard. Guardian from the Wizard range and Wizard and Wizard Wizard and Wizard Wizard and Wicked Witch of the West’s Powery.

I did not detect any aroma or fragrance floating on the environment during the film.

A large part of the film is lively and vibrant with landscapes without renunciation before such as the endless corn field of Scarecrow and the unlimited Lion and large -scale forest. Some strange Oz animals are thrown, but feel unnecessarily random given the story of the characters, such as a herd of deer outside the emerald city and a painful white tiger on the forest fringe, illustrated only for an ephemeral moment.

The most disturbing are the scenes that have great interactions of the crowd, such as the arrival in Munchkinland and later Emerald City. Many tiny faces are at best vague and strangely unrecognizable. Some of the same faces are replicated by AI more than once in the same scene and spare strange zombies that look at zombies or appear outside the scale with other identities of surrounding characters.

“The Wizard of Oz” has been a theme of fantasy for a long time that has been at home in Las Vegas.

MGM Grand Casino and neighboring hotel, which opened its doors in 1993, originally devoted a large expanse of Hall space from Casino and Hotel to “The Wizard of Oz”, with the brand image that included “The Oz Buffet”, a large -scale promenade recreated the Land of Oz with the road Yellow Brick, with animated and real costumed characters. Even the Casino carpet wore giant red poppy flowers like a floral wink on the film’s spells. All of this was removed with reshaping in 1996.

I think that “the sorcerer from Oz to Sphere” with another fine adjustment will have a much longer lifespan than the tribute to the previous MGM property. I do not see any bucket of tickets threatening water, given that from Friday, more than 215,000 tickets were sold, the film which was to continue at least until March 2026, according to www.thesphere.com.

In a tasty tribute to the Renaissance of interest for “The Wizard of Oz”, this recipe for “Emerald Green Split Pea Soup” is actor Bert Lahr, who played the loose lion in the emblematic film. Georgina Motts was her longtime cook, and her daughter Jane recalled this recipe among family favorites.

The columnist Philip Potmpa published four books of cooking and is a weekly radio host on Wjob at 12:30 p.m. Send an email to philpotempa@gmail.com or send your questions: from the farm, po box 68, San Pierre, ind. 46374.

Extended pea soup from the emerald city

Make 8 portions

1/2 cup of dried split pea

1 liter in cold water

1 ham bone

2 tablespoons of butter

1 tablespoon all use

1/2 teaspoon of salt

Pinch of black pepper

1 cup of milk

Instructions:

Soak the dried peas during the night and drain.
Add the hambon and cold water to a pot and simmer 4 hours or until the meat is soft to remove.
Remove the bits of meat and return to a power jar and throw the bones.
Rub the softened peas through a sieve, set aside.
In a skillet, melt the butter and add flour to make red, season with salt and pepper and slowly add the milk.
Add the pea mixture prepared in the roux and mix until smooth before adding to the tablet.
Simmer an additional 10 minutes and serve hot.