Oz with Orchestra Special Attraction Tours

One of the most beloved films of all time, The Wizard of Oz, can now be seen and heard in a magical new production. John Goberman, Emmy-Award winning producer of Live from Lincoln Center, and the creator of the acclaimed A Symphonic Night at the Movies, presents Oz with Orchestra.

The Wizard of Oz was a technical marvel for the MGM studio in the late 1930s. Today, MGM has stunningly re-mastered this timeless classic.  The brilliantly restored images are accompanied by full symphony orchestra playing entirely new transcriptions of Harold Arlen’s brilliant lost scores. Hearing Judy Garland’s original 1939 studio recordings, backed by lush, live orchestration, will transport children and adults alike. With this version of The Wizard of Oz on the big screen, moviegoers will be treated to the Oscar-winning film as it has never been seen before.

In summer of 2005, the program premiered to sold out crowds at Wolf Trap and the Ravinia Festival. Claire Marie Blaustein of The Washington Post declared, “It was an exciting evening, and the grander message of this event was truly something I found in my own back yard – the five children sitting next to me…who had never seen the movie before. There were as enraptured at their first sights of the Emerald City as I was seeing it with new eyes.”  Watch for this special event coming to a city near you in 2006.

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Insured for $1 million, the 66-year-old slippers are one of four pairs remaining from the 1939 film that launched Garland's career. They are owned by Hollywood memorabilia collector Michael Shaw, who had lent them to the Grand Rapids museum for 10 weeks this summer, as he did in 2004. Shaw, who personally transported the delicate slippers, saying he always wears gloves while handling them, had planned to arrive in Minnesota on Friday to pick them up. "People knew this was going to be the shoes' last week at the museum," Shaw said by telephone from Hollywood. "That's why I feel somebody might have been planning this a long time." Nothing else was taken, but this was no Munchkin-sized heist. One of the remaining pairs of ruby slippers was auctioned for 666,000 dollars, five years ago.The slippers, stuffed for decades with tissue, are too delicate to be worn, said Shaw, who once tried to have a sequined seam restitched, but found the shoes too fragile. He is convinced Garland is the only one who wore them. If the form-filling tissue is removed, the shoes could fall apart, he said. As the most famous symbol of a movie seen by more than 3 billion people, the slippers "are the pinnacle of Hollywood," said John Kelsch, director of the 11-year-old Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids.

"We're devastated," Kelsch said. "No one was hurt, no one was killed, no fire was set to the museum. And there's no reason to explain why anyone would do something like this -- except maybe to prove it could be done."

The slippers, locked in the museum Saturday night, were discovered missing by museum assistant Kathe Johnson at 9:45 a.m. Sunday, Kelsch said. Johnson noticed an odd signal from a security control panel. An emergency exit had been tampered with, Kelsch said. If the museum only had a vault. Actually, it did last summer, but the vault was as misleading as the wizard's bellowing voice. The slippers were never locked in the on-loan bank vault, Kelsch said. "It was all for show," he said. This summer, there was no vault on display. Grand Rapids police were investigating an anonymous call that Kelsch received at 9:50 a.m. Monday, from an informant who named a collector supposedly responsible for the burglary, Shaw said. But Shaw, who said he received a note last month warning that "someone's going to rip them off," said he doubted the informant had any credibility.

Shaw would not say what he paid for the slippers and other "Wizard of Oz" collectibles at an MGM auction more than 30 years ago, other than "it was the deal of the millennium." Often, he said, people tell him, "I'd give anything to own them." Or, "I've got to have them." But to Shaw, who said he lends the slippers to benefits to help orphaned children come together with prospective adoptive families, or for AIDS benefits, the slippers are priceless.For Grand Rapids, the community 200 miles north of the Twin Cities where Garland lived until she was 4, the slippers were the footprints of a tourist legacy.

Garland's cradle, the first professional photograph she ever appeared in, her father's golf clubs and the largest selection of Oz memorabilia in Minnesota can be found in Grand Rapids, said Lilah Crowe, director of the Itasca County Historical Society. The mystery continues...

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