The Wizard of Trinidad

When Director Geoffrey Holder was called in to rescue The Wiz during its disastrous pre-Broadway tour, he found that his biggest problem was the company's low morale. For Holder, a 6-ft. 6-in. Samson of a man from Trinidad, the solution was easy. He assembled the cast and crew onstage and asked them to pray while he exorcised the evil dispirit by burning incense given him by his father.

Holder used the right rite. Last week The Wiz--an all-black rhythm-and-blues adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz--won seven Tony Awards: Best Musical, Best Supporting Actor and Actress in a Musical, Choreography, Score, and two for Holder himself as Director and Costume Designer.*

Magic and fantasy, asserts Holder, are what this world is starving for, and he is clearly a man who knows his Munchkins. No witch doctor could have conjured up a more fantastical stewpot of sights for bored eyes. The tornado that sweeps Dorothy to Oz is a dancer whose headgear spouts 100 yards of black silk swirling to the rafters. The Yellow Brick Road is a quartet of lanky dudes in brilliant yellow brick-patterned tailcoats. An armor of beer cans and garbage cans makes the Tin Man. Originally scheduled not only to direct and costume the show but to do the choreography and play the Wiz as well, Holder had canceled out when he encountered "difficulties" with the management. The real problem, he says, was that "they began to have doubts that one man could do it all. And that was an insult to my energy."

His energy quotient is hardly open to question. The only time the voluble dancer/ choreographer/ designer/ painter/ singer/ actor/ author/ master chef is at a loss for words is when asked to identify his profession. "When people ask me, 'What are you?' " he shrugs, "I have to say I don't know."

Piano and Paintbrush. After arriving in the U.S. in 1953 with his own folk-dance company, Holder spent two years as a principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. He has choreographed works for the Alvin Ailey company and the Dance Theater of Harlem. His paintings, mostly lush impressionist nudes, hang in the Corcoran Gallery, the Barbados Museum and Historical Society and the homes of, among others, William Buckley and Barbara Walters. As an actor, he has appeared on Broadway (the 1957 revival of Waiting for Godot) and in films (Live and Let Die, Doctor Dolittle). He is the author of Geoffrey Holder's Caribbean Cookbook and the co-author and illustrator of Black Gods, Green Islands, a collection of short stories. He is also an "uncola" man and a "ring-around-the-collar" man of television commercials.

Holder, 44, attributes his multiplicity of interests to his father, a "salesman with brains" in Port-of-Spain who believed that "if you put the tools in front of the baby, the baby will walk up to the tools." Among the tools his father provided were a piano and a paintbrush, both of which were first taken up by Holder's older brother Boscoe. "From the beginning, I was high on Chopin and turpentine," says Geoffrey. He has studied none of his arts formally. Creativity, he explains, is mostly a matter of environment and exigency: "At Carnival, for example, every Trinidadian is a costume designer. I just grew up believing everybody could do everything."

In The Wiz, Holder was determined to convey "the full richness of black culture. Black lingo is beautiful." He adds: "I told the actors to speak it as if they were doing Shakespeare." He modeled the reunion of the Good Witches of the North and the South on a vision of "Josephine Baker and Lena Horne meeting in London after they hadn't seen each other in years."

Married for 20 years to Dancer Carmen de Lavallade, Holder relaxes by stirring up elaborate feasts for family friends. He finds cooking "so sexy, so sensual," in fact, that in addition to other upcoming projects, such as a film with Jeanne Moreau, Holder is planning to open a restaurant. On Sundays he will offer a special menu of Scotch and ice cream--"a fantasy for divorced fathers."

* Other winners: Best Play, Equus; Best Director of a Play, John Dexter (Equus); Best Actors and Actress in Plays, John Kani and Winston Ntshona (Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island), and Ellen Burstyn (Same Time, Next Year); Best Actor and Actress in Musicals, John Cullum (Shenandoah) and Angela Lansbury (Gypsy).

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