Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 64, no. 1 (Spring 2020), pgs. 39–40
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Campbell, Nick. Review of Hit the Bricks, by P.J. Scott-Blankenship, Baum Bugle 64, no. 1 (2020): 39–40.
MLA 9th ed.:
Campbell, Nick. Review of Hit the Bricks, by P.J. Scott-Blankenship. The Baum Bugle, vol. 64, no. 1, 2020, pp. 39–40.
(Note: typographical errors have been left in place to accurately reflect the printed version.)
Hit the Bricks: Act 1
Released January 29–May 14, 2020
hitthebricks.com (obsolete)
The makers of Hit the Bricks describe it as “a musical radio-play in the tradition of the audio dramas and fairylogues that come before it”. In doing so, they invoke the Fairylogue and Radio-Plays that L. Frank Baum himself hosted in the early 1900s. While we now know the name is misleading, in retrospect, radio looks like the perfect medium for Baum—imaginative, populist but faintly mystical—and a natural home for his creations. Radio has long since lost its mass audiences to television, but perhaps the magic has moved from the wireless to the wi-fi device. Recent years have seen a boom in audiobook downloads, and of course the rise of the podcast. Three years ago, Crossover Adventure Productions began adapting Baum’s novels as audio dramas with an emphasis on political intrigue. Now Hit the Bricks, written and directed by PJ Scott-Blankenship (who also takes a lead role as Wallace Williams), has just concluded its first season of five episodes. But how can we be faithful to a fairylogue in 2020?
This listener did not find the pilot episode, “Lost,” an encouraging start. It’s here that we meet our protagonist, teenager Jessi Hugson, moving to Kansas from California after her parents’ divorce. In this prologue, she’s in the middle of nowhere, unsure how long she’s been walking. It’s quickly established that Jessi is dreaming; that, in fact, she is “wandering into a network of dreams.” With this in mind, she permits herself to be guided by a little pink clockwork bear, moving into ever odder terrain. It’s an intriguing opener, wryly self-aware, but dream narratives ask a lot of an audience and offer little in return. They make an especially poor setting for introductions and, as Jessi, Michelle Agresti is required to be so unfazed by her experience that she comes off as terminally flippant. Moreover, there’s something so cautious about presenting Oz as a “dream world”: it’s like a safety demonstration that reassures us the plane won’t actually leave the ground.
It was a relief to hear the first episode of season one, “When Are You Gonna Come Down” (released two years after the pilot) adopting a different approach. Time is taken to establish Jessi and her family—her mother, aunt, and cousin Wallace—before she visits the local ‘haunted’ farmhouse, encounters a ‘twister made of snow and light’, and finds herself (and Wallace) not in Kansas anymore. There’s an underground city made of glass, lit by orbs of many colours—and then they rescue a Scarecrow…
A powerful force has thrown Oz into disarray, a familiar friend is now a tyrant, and Ozma is gone. Jessi and Wallace must put things right before they can return home, and are soon gamely”‘hitting the bricks,” making friends along the way. They even have a merry song to help them on their way (“We’re gonna / Hit the bricks / Gonna hoof it till we make it . . .”). It may have been at this point, as our heroes began tap dancing down the yellow brick road – with the Saw Horse – that my feelings began to warm for this production (likewise, episode 5’s “Pessimistic Voices” is a work of genius). Perhaps because—like a Fairylogue—the queer land of Oz itself had licensed a greater freedom with form and genre, combining characters, from centuries apart, and a music style redolent of Steven Universe.
This freedom sometimes risks unevenness. Some songs feel artificially inserted and are apt to confuse the listener, or narrate too heavy-handedly. Likewise, some scene transitions in space or time leave us disorientated too long, and certain characters’ ages are hard to gauge. It may be that some of these choices are deliberately made to wrongfoot the listener; if so, overtly surreal sequences in later episodes do the job more successfully, going some way to justify the ‘dream’ elements that seemed so unnecessary in the pilot. These and a further subplot involving King Pastoria helpfully counterpoint Jessi’s more conventional quest.
Hit The Bricks is not only in the tradition of Fairylogues, but is also (as used to be said) ‘founded on and continuing the famous Oz stories of L. Frank Baum’. Self-evidently the work of a well-informed fan, it rejoices in the possibilities of its expanded universe, with a panoply of familiar characters who are true to their original appearances. Long-term Oz fans will enjoy appearances from, say, Ozga the Rose Princess (as well as little references such as the indie band, Aunt Jane’s Nieces), but it’s also clear that new listeners are equally welcome, for whom the world of Oz is fresh and new. This broad welcome to fans new and old is mirrored by an avowed “Commitment to Inclusivity,” striving to feature both characters and performers “who are people of color, queer, disabled, and as unique as every creative character from the world we know and love.” Whatever initial bumps encountered (and I encourage you to tap dance over them if you can), this seems to me a road that really will lead us somewhere. Not to compromise your love for the story, and not to leave anyone out of the audience, seems the most likely guarantee that the story will go on.
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