Idina Menzel: still defying gravity. Twenty-odd years after Wicked, the indomitable diva won’t stay earthbound on a Broadway stage. But instead of wowing Oz astride a broomstick, Menzel’s strapped into a climbing harness, vaulting off the trunk of a mammoth redwood, twisting, twirling—and tickling the stratosphere with E-flats. As always, Menzel is pure magic. The show around her? So wooden.
I don’t care how balsa-weak that joke is (will I be the 14th hack to use it, or the only one lacking self-restraint?). Redwood rhymes with deadwood, the derogatory term for people or things that no longer serve a function. Menzel has plenty to give. She could be the greatest squandered resource on Broadway in decades, which makes this well-intentioned misfire more frustrating: they are literally hanging Menzel out to dry.
Co-conceived by the star and writer-director Tina Landau, Redwood is an arboreal fable about trees and grief, an everywoman’s quest for healing. The opening is a rather a blur of clunky exposition, as Landau serves up a scrapbook montage that “tesseracts” memories: New York gallerist Jesse (Menzel) dates art photographer Mel (De’ Adre Aziza); they get married; raise a son (Zachary Noah Piser); quarrel a lot and lose the son to a drug overdose—after which Jesse, in a fit of desperation, drives West to Northern California in search of…something? She falls asleep in redwood forest and the next morning a pair of bewildered canopy botanists discover her, like a princess in a fairytale. Jesse has found her purpose! To scale hundreds of feet up a trunk and commune with nature. Our hero stalks the scientists, hoping to rappel like them.
In her first outing on Broadway, composer and co-lyricist Kate Diaz sets the extended opening sequence to a synth-heavy number called “Drive,” the lyrics of which are often hard to make out. When you finally grasp a few lines— “I’ve never had the chance to dance in rain before. / And I’ve never had the chance to breathe an air so pure. / Under a boundless sky, I ask myself why…”—you realize the extra ear strain was in vain. This kind of factory lyric-writing is for cannibalizing on TikTok, not deepening character. Diaz assembles less of a score than an album of made-to-order soundalike tracks tailored for Menzel’s girlish vibrato and powerful belt—but the vocal writing is often muddy, the melodies derivative. Here’s a scoop of Taylor Swift, now a chunk of Coldplay, maybe a slice or two of Bruno Mars.
Some songs come close to gaining traction as musical-theater numbers: Playing a grizzled but kindly botanist, Michael Park makes a meal out of the rollicking, bluegrass-flavored “Big Tree Religion.” As Park’s young Black colleague, the magnetic Khaila Wilcoxon has a gorgeous soprano to rival Menzel; in “Becca’s Song,” she sings movingly about rebuilding our broken environment. Of course, Menzel gets ample opportunities to shine: the ecstatic anthem, “Great Escape,” a defiant ode to grief called “No Repair,” and “In the Leaves,” where our multitasking leading lady swings in harness, flips upside down, and teaches the birds a lesson in warbling.
The performers are appealing and there are one or two funny lines (“I don’t want a pity climb,” Jesse protests when the scientists learn she’s grieving her son). But too often the songs are generic and static, matched by the book’s quick-sketch characters and pop psychology. In building the central drama of a mother mourning the sudden death of her adult son, Landau has said she was inspired by the drug-related death of her nephew. Unfortunately, Landau writes with all the raw anguish of a concerned aunt with an eye for good material. We get zero sense of what Spencer was like, except that he delivered a birthday rap to his mom as a kid and was work-averse. When Jesse tells Becca the story of how Spencer died, it sounds like two overworked mothers had a mentally disturbed son with a drug problem, gave him $2,000 and packed him off to Los Angeles. You feel guilty? Maybe you should. Characters are allowed to be difficult and flawed—monstrous, even—but their arcs to closure and peace only satisfy if we truly care about them. When Spencer’s cheerful ghost drops in to absolve Jesse, the gesture is hollow as a thicket of bamboo.
The nearly two-hour run time suggests storytelling problems. Either the team couldn’t find 20 minutes to trim, or didn’t think they could get away with an intermission. Can’t believe I’m saying this about an eco-musical but thank goodness for technology. Video designer Hana S. Kim fills the eye with acres of luscious leaves and trunks, some of it captured on video in redwood forests, others composited through CGI. Set designer Jason Ardizzone-West arranges more than a thousand LED panels to accommodate this verdant bounty, screens that fan around the playing space and create (from the orchestra, at least) an IMAX-y immersion in the green world. One massive semicircular screen rotates to reveal the detailed trunk of a redwood. When the video POV sails over the canopy of trees or pans up and down the vertiginous scenery, you may reach for the Dramamine. Kim conjures up a climactic forest fire in artful waves of reds and oranges and swarms of black ashy particles rising in the sky. Scott Zielinski’s nimble lighting design (no doubt tricky to balance with ambient projection) melds abstract mood with times of day; he sends warm shafts of sunlight between set elements to endow this world with needed depth. The airborne stunts are by Melecio Estrella and the company BANDALOOP. They did a great job: nobody fell. Seriously, the perpendicular traversing of surfaces (“perp walk,” anybody?) is very cool: aerial poetry.
Had it been imagined as a pop oratorio with Nat Geo imagery, Redwood might have succeeded. You’d still need finer songs and richer language. For a structure as large and complex as a Broadway musical to stand for a whole season in this degraded cultural ecology requires a deeper and broader root system. You want to leave shivering with the majesty of nature; instead, it feels like 110 minutes staring at a potted plant.
Redwood | 1hr 50mins. No intermission. | Nederlander Theatre | 208 West 41st Street | 1-800-714-8452 | Buy Tickets Here
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