Stephanie Reif’s musical comedy “Left of Oz: Dorothy Comes Out!” is a lot like the classic 1939 film: There’s Dorothy, the Wicked Witch and Auntie Em. Only thing is, they’re all lesbians.
This queer take on “The Wizard of Oz” begins a three-week run July 2 at Berkeley’s Ashby Stage. Reif, 54, not only wrote the book, music and lyrics for this production, she also serves as producer and director.
And she plays Glenda Ellen, the Good Witch of Sonoma.
Like Reif’s original 1996 staging, the story borrows much from the film plot, with Dorothy, a young innocent from Kansas, coming to the Emerald City of San Francisco to find true love. This production, however, features 14 new songs and even a few new characters.
There’s Toni the leather butch lesbian and Jazmin the pot-smoking yoga teacher. No flying monkeys, but if there were, they’d be gay.
After surveying the Bay Area lesbian scene, Reif’s Dorothy finally meets the right girl, but she has to go back to Kansas for things to work out. Because there’s no place like home.
“People were talking to me about the show and were encouraging me to put it back on,” says Reif. “In the women’s community we do so much activism, so much for AIDS, marriage, animal rights. This is meant to give us some comic relief and laugh at ourselves.”
Songwriters Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg wrote the famous songs for the film version of “The Wizard of Oz.” Those two, like Gershwin, Kern and Rodgers, reigned during the Golden Age of Broadway. Their work inspired Reif, who grew up in Los Angeles loving musical theater and the singing of her cantor.
“I was a rare child,” she says. “I would go by myself on Friday nights to hear the cantor sing. I was mesmerized. I wanted to be a cantor, but my father was a Holocaust escapee, and the idea of [a female cantor] was not in the conversation.”
Her father was born in Vienna. Once the German army invaded, his family used their connections to escape, sewing jewels into their clothing and crossing the Alps on foot into Italy, then steaming to Costa Rica before settling in Los Angeles.
“All of that leads to my feeling that we must use our gifts,” she says. “In rabbinic teaching, God gave us these gifts, and we need to use them to make a more beautiful world.”
For Reif, that meant music. She studied acting, musical theater, dance and voice, performing with a variety of ensembles and theaters over the years. She also married “a rich Jewish man,” though it didn’t take long before she knew something wasn’t right.
“He was a great guy,” she says of her ex, “but I realized I was a lesbian and needed to follow that path. In 1976, with a guitar on my back, I moved to the Bay Area. I was naive, in that I believe in the good of everyone.”
Coming out took her parents by surprise, but the biggest surprise Reif remembers was her father’s reaction to the news that his daughter was a lesbian. “I expected my father to disown me, but he said, ‘If you found love, that’s all that matters.’ I was amazed.”
To support her music, she worked in the health care field, and today serves as a physician’s assistant. It was while caring for a friend dying of AIDS that she got the idea for “Left of Oz.” After hard days tending to her friend, she would come home and sketch out her ideas. “I would write to cheer myself up,” she recalls. “It simmered in the back of my mind.”
The 1996 production, staged in a Sonoma theater, benefited various AIDS and breast cancer charities. Reif says part of the proceeds from the new production will likewise go to the AIDS Emergency Fund and Breast Cancer Emergency Fund.
This show is extra special for Reif, who endured several surgeries on her hands and feet to treat delayed symptoms resulting from a childhood auto accident. She’s fine now and feels like celebrating.
“I’m a very lucky person, because I had lost the ability to walk and regained it,” she says. “When I got these abilities back I felt like I had to do something. From a Jewish perspective, I wanted to continue to do the work of God in creating a beautiful world.”
“Left of Oz: Dorothy Comes Out!” runs July 2 to 18 at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley.
$25-$50. Information: (510) 236-1930 or www.leftofoz.com.