Oz News
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March 18, 2024: Second Man Charged in Theft of the Ruby Slippers; Slippers Go On Tour Before Auction
March 14, 2024: The Baum Bugle Winter 2023
January 30, 2024: Hinton Battle 1956-2024
Hinton Battle, the actor who first played the Scarecrow in The Wiz on Broadway, passed away today at the age of 67 in Los Angeles after a long illness. Battle was only eighteen years old when he made his Broadway debut in The Wiz in 1974, after having taken over for a sick castmate during previews on the road. That early success gave him many years to play other roles in other shows, including Dancin', Sophisticated Ladies, Dreamgirls, The Tap Dance Kid, Miss Saigon, and Chicago on Broadway, and Ragtime on tour. His movie credits include the film adaptation of Dreamgirls and, on television, Quantum Leap (as the evil observer Thames in the Evil Leaper trilogy), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as the demon Sweet in the musical episode "Once More With Feeling"), Touched By an Angel, the TV movie Child Star: The Shirley Temple Story as Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and the first pilot for the unproduced American version of the British comedy Red Dwarf as the Cat. Battle also directed and choreographed the Off-Broadway production Evil Dead: The Musical and released an album, Untapped, in 1986. He won Tony Awards for Sophisticated Ladies, The Tap Dance Kid, and Miss Saigon. He also won the NAACP Image Award and Fred Astaire Award for The Tap Dance Kid.
(UPDATE: To honor Battle and his career and influence on Broadway, all forty-one Broadway theaters dimmed their marquee lights on March 12.)
(Information courtesy of USA Today, Wikipedia, the Internet Broadway Database, the Internet Off-Broadway Database, the Internet Movie Database, and The New York Public Library. Image courtesy of The Oz Wiki.)
