Why not simply use this American fairytale as fodder for a send-up of the previous twenty-five years of musical extravaganza? It had everything. Mitchell wasn’t interested in Baum and Tietjens’s operetta. But Mitchell wanted to set out on his own and was looking for a suitable subject. Mitchell had staged a few shows for Hamlin and was best known for his work in New York with Weber and Fields, for whom he created lampoons of the musical stage-hits of the day - the Saturday Night Live! of the early 1900s.
Hamlin showed the material to up-and-coming stage director Julian Mitchell. Legend has it that Hamlin took a chance on the show because it had “Wizard” in the title and his family’s fortune had been made with Hamlin’s Wizard Oil - a cure-all medical tonic. The proposal eventually made its way to Fred Hamlin, producer of the Grand Opera House in Chicago.
