The Wizard of Oz

After its 1902 tryout in Chicago, the stage play with songs by Paul Tietjens and Baum opened on Broadway in January 1903, running 293 performances before hitting the road, and returning to Broadway for four or five months in 1904. It then toured until 1911, when Baum permitted a host of amateur companies all over America to stage the play. In many areas, it became an annual event.

As Mordaunt Hall noted in his rave review in The New York Times, this version is not based on Baum's 1900 novel but on his 1902 stage musical. Many of the strange changes and eliminations in both the story and the characters were made by Baum himself. In fact, aside from the obvious enlargement of Larry Semon's role with the addition of a goodly number of comic routines, this movie is a pretty faithful transcription of the play.

True, some of the best jokes (the business with packing cases, for example), are worked to exhaustion. The main problem I find, however, is not that the stage play and movie have been converted into slapstick, but that the movie without the songs is often rather dull, despite the best efforts of Oliver Hardy and Charlie Murray.