"Every person that was in the show last night has been invited to come to Broadway. It's a matter of if they want to and how much time they can give us," Zadan told . Of newcomer Shanice Williams, who has received glowing reviews, Meron said they would bring her back "in a heartbeat."
"We'd love for her to be on Broadway in The Wiz but that's to be worked out," he said.
"Right now the plan is to have The Wiz on Broadway a year from now in partnership with Cirque. The entire cast of The Wiz Live knows about the Broadway plans but we didn't make it a prerequisite when casting them. But over the past couple of weeks, a lot of members of the cast have been sniffing around doing it in the theater," continued Meron. The production is co-produced with .
With increasing talk among viewers about the need for a live studio audience, the duo said that they stand by their decision not to have one. "We still would like to honor the tradition where this genre was given birth and that's in the '50's," commented Meron. "We know that it's taken a while for the audience to get used to it, but in the three years we've been doing it, there's always a cry for live audience but that's not [that] special. What's special is [to] do these on a soundstage and live in the moment without that audience and to allow cameras to come in and get up close and personal and have the audience at home be the live audience."
NBC's third annual live television event brought to life the Tony-winning Broadway musical The Wiz with a cast that featured , Queen Latifah, , , , Amber Riley, Elijah Kelley, Ne-Yo, Common and 19-year-old Williams.
The producers commented on the significant ratings increase this year, attributing a lot of the success to the major support from the black community. "People like Tyler Perry and others said The Wiz is [a] cultural phenomenon for the black community and wanted it to succeed, and everybody rallied to make sure there was an audience who watched it," said Zadan.
THR also asked Meron and Zadan about which titles they were considering for the next live event, to which they replied that nothing was yet set in stone, though many options were being discussed. "We have tossed many titles around and batted them around with NBC Entertainment president Bob Greenblatt but we haven't settled on what's next," said Meron.
"Since we changed the playing field for ourselves this year in the way we did everything 鈥� and the whole technique of doing the show is different 鈥� we set out on a path that has changed the way we do them," added Zadan. "That's going to inform what the next show is going to be. We don't want to go back to the way we did Peter Pan or The Sound of Music; we want to keep moving forward." .
