Putting on the iconic blue gingham dress, brunette pigtails and ruby red slippers is just a little bit intimidating for Cassie Okenka.

“There’s definitely a fine line you have to ride as an actor because you don’t want to make a replication of it and you don’t want to stray too far away from the character,” said Okenka, who plays Dorothy Gale in the touring production of “The Wizard of Oz.”

“You don’t want to stray too far away from the character and be different for the sake of being different,” she added in a telephone interview from a tour stop in Baltimore.

The creative team for the tour, which will stop at the Adler Theatre in downtown Davenport a week from today, Nov. 29, is from the United Kingdom, she said, and “it isn’t as much of a big deal there as it is in America.

“We had a little more freedom where we didn’t have to do things exactly like the movie,” she said. “We could put a little spin on things but still keep the tradition.”

Example: Her rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is “a little more innocent, more pure” than Judy Garland’s in the 1939 movie version, she said.

“She basically made the song what it is today and nobody can rival that,” Okenka said. “I just do the best I can for me.”

A 26-year-old native of Toledo, Ohio, Okenka got a national stage last year as one of the contestants on the MTV reality series “Legally Blonde: The Search for Elle Woods,” which had actresses compete for a part in the Broadway version of the Reese Witherspoon movie.

She said those who cast her in the tour were unaware of the stint in which she made the final 10.

“For me it was a great way to see how I compared to people in New York, how people think in auditions and make some fantastic business connections,” she said.

Okenka has shoulder-length red hair, which she has to tuck under Dorothy’s wig every night.

“It’s a part of the routine,” she said. “It takes me a good, solid hour to come in from the street, have a company meeting, get into wigs, get into makeup and get ready for the show.”

There’s also time for her to greet Dusty, the dog that plays Toto and has his own understudy.

In her second year on the tour, with a third possibly waiting at the end of the yellow brick road, Okenka said her favorite part of each night is “Jitterbug,” a dance number that was edited out of the 1939 movie.

“We create a whole thing that’s simply our own,” she said.