Few Broadway performers have impacted the musical theater landscape as indelibly as Idina Menzel. Her high-octane, piercingly pop-infused belt, fully unfurled in its compellingly harsh glory in her landmark turn as Elphaba in Wicked 20 years ago, influenced not only how young aspiring actresses train their voices but also how aspiring composers create their music. But despite that legacy, Redwood, a project that Menzel co-conceived with director Tina Landau, is only her second Broadway outing post-Wicked. And though she still sings, in the best way, like an icicle-tipped power drill, if the show is meant to be anything more affecting than a glossy showcase for her voice, she’s belting up the wrong tree.
Menzel’s Jesse is a gallery owner in New York who flees the city in the wake of a personal tragedy. Jesse isn’t sure where she’s heading, but the moment she enters Humboldt County’s redwood forests, she senses that the only way to heal her wounds is to climb those trees. This certainty proves deadly to the musical’s momentum: For over 90 minutes, Jesse’s primary objective is to spend as much time in a particular tree, which she names Stella, as possible. Jesse’s central relationship with Stella is entirely devoid of ambivalence or conflict—girl meets tree, girl climbs tree, girl sleeps in tree—but the show’s creators (Landau co-penned the book with Kate Diaz, who wrote the score) seem unwilling to branch out beyond the branches.
As a result, Jesse sings song after subtext-free song about how happy she’d be climbing trees and then about how happy she’s become climbing trees. There’s no surprise in her being exactly right about how she will feel when she ascends. “If I could get up there/To that open air/Leave the world below/Could I hide/In the sky?” Jesse ponders early on. When she finally climbs Stella, several songs about trees later, she sings, “Here I am, I’m up a mile high/But somehow I’m safer in the sky/’Cause it feels so right/I think I’ll kiss the world goodbye.”
It’s unclear if Diaz, who dutifully places all of Menzel’s many solos in the highest, loudest parts of her voice, is winking deliberately at Wicked fans or just knows that Menzel will sound good singing those words (“Up in the sky…Kiss me goodbye” is a central rhyme from “Defying Gravity”). Either way, that Menzelian déjà vu is indicative of a score that’s been retrofitted for the singer at the expense of character development and stylistic variety; the occasional gentle hip-hop backbeats make for a sort of Hamil-folk blend that never distinguishes itself.
Menzel has range but Jesse doesn’t, and that’s Redwood’s chief failure. One moment she’s gregariously chatty and wisecracking, the next caustically defensive. Then she’s half-deliriously humming “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid. She’s also prone to PTSD-like flashbacks and quasi-hallucinations that sear across the stage with jolting sound and lighting effects. Menzel plays each of these individual moments convincingly, loosely tracing Jesse’s growing understanding that she can’t hide from her grief, but the music is too repetitive, the lyrics too broad, and the structure too airy for Jesse’s idiosyncrasies to ever cohere.
And though Redwood keeps its monomaniacal focus on its protagonist, Menzel isn’t alone on stage. Two arborists (Michael Park and Khaila Wilcoxon) alternately enable and discourage Jesse from climbing Stella, given her lack of prior training. Jesse’s wife, Mel (De’Adre Aziza), leaves her various anxious voicemails. Their son, Spencer (Zachary Noah Piser), stalks the stage and Jesse’s flashbacks ethereally, and even if you haven’t seen this parallel device used in Next to Normal, it’s pretty obvious from the jump what’s up with him. All of the actors sing splendidly, especially Piser and Wilcoxon, though mostly also about trees.
But Redwood is still, at root, a solo show, and there’s nothing vital about Jesse’s interactions with others. At times, it seems like they exist only to buy Menzel time to don her safety harness: During Mel’s big ballad, there’s a fair amount of distracting clicking and snapping above Aziza’s head as Menzel gets ready to leap off a suspended platform in the next scene.
Because, oh, yes, she really does climb that tree. Giant proscenium-high curved panels, featuring exhilarating, if dizzying, video design from Hana S. Kim, swing around to become Stella’s trunk. Menzel straps in and goes up and up and up, sometimes swinging like a careful Tarzan and, at one point, belting upside down. (The “vertical choreography” is by the company BANDALOOP.) If this maximalism leaves little to the audience’s imagination, it may be because amateur tree-climbing plays better in the mind than on stage; it doesn’t help Redwood that those physical feats, rendered skillfully but not quite acrobatically, are ultimately underwhelming.
The inspiration for this show came from the true story of Julia Butterfly Hill, an activist who lived in a redwood for 738 days as part of a protest against a lumber company. Hill ultimately rescued that redwood from destruction. But compared to a woman saving a tree, there’s something less inspiring, or at least less dramatically engaging, about a tree saving a woman.
In the many heavy-handed metaphors doled out throughout—from the central heartwood of a redwood’s trunk being dead but keeping the tree alive, to redwoods staying upright because their roots intertwine with the trees around them—the show strives for depth. But when Idina Menzel is upside down belting, it’s hard to tell a story about anything other than Idina Menzel upside down belting. Redwood, in the end, can’t find the forest for the trees.
Redwood is now running at the Nederlander Theatre.
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