IT is hard to keep up with theatre director Josette Bushell-Mingo OBE, whose story takes in Broadway, Birmingham, Leeds and… Sweden.

Her production of the New York musical The Wiz has just transferred from Brum’s New Alexandra Theatre to the West Yorkshire Playhouse, where it will run until July 16, but when The Press called her last Tuesday, Josette was in Scandinavia.

“I had to close my offices in Sweden while I’ve been doing The Wiz, but I’ve gone back to Stockholm for a short trip, as I’m artistic director of The Silent Theatre in Stockholm, working in sign language,” says Josette, who flew into Leeds the next day to complete preparations for The Wiz’s move north from the Midlands.

The Birmingham company and West Yorkshire Playhouse already have established a working practice for their big winter shows, under which they swap productions over a two-year span. The Wiz, a soul-musical variation on The Wizard Of Oz, takes the symbiotic relationship a stage further: the co-production moves immediately from one city to the other rather than a year later and shares design teams.

“I proposed this idea a year ago to Rachel Kavanagh, who runs the Birmingham theatre, and then met artistic director Ian Brown from the Playhouse, and what excited them was not only the capacity of the show but also the talent of the casts involved,” says Josette.

She is working with a core company of seven professional actors, bolstered in each city by a community chorus: of 15 in Birmingham and now 16 in Leeds. “When they met up in Leeds, it was a new lift for the professionals, having done the show in Birmingham, and a new lift for the chorus, who had been waiting to work with them,” says Josette.

She is drawn to universal stories, mostly in this case because “here was the chance to tell through another’s eyes”.

“I’ve made some transformations, like making Dorothy belong to us. I’ve changed her so that she came from Birmingham and now she comes from Leeds. That makes the story belong to us; she’s a shadow for us; she’s our Dorothy, who comes from here, wishes to escape her dull and dreary life in the north, goes to America but comes back to Leeds at the end,” says Josette, who has cast the 27-year-old 2010 X Factor finalist Treyc Cohen as Dorothy.

“All I’ve done with my interpretation is be mischievous, as I didn’t want to do a version of the film,” she says. “Maybe I’m being too clever for my own boots, but it’s not patronising people. It’s just a fresh look.”

• The Wiz runs at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until July 16. Box office: 0113 213 7700 and wyp.org.uk

• Did you know?

Josette Bushell-Mingo is artistic director of Push, an organisation set up for the promotion and development of black British theatre. She was nominated for Best Actress in a Musical in the 1999 Olivier Awards for her performance as Rafiki in The Lion King.