Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Halfway through Redwood, a new musical conceived by Idina Menzel and director Tina Landau, Menzel—playing Jesse, a woman on the run from her own grief—is suspended on a platform midair, belting a personal-breakthrough song about clarity and new possibilities. Unavoidably, this recalls her performance of the Act I finale of Wicked, in which Menzel’s original Elphaba was also midair and belting a personal-breakthrough song about clarity and new possibilities. This time, however, gravity wins. Even as Menzel's Jesse climbs to new physical heights, the lumbering Redwood brings her down.
Jesse is a capable, cosmopolitan Jewish woman paralyzed by sadness about the recent death of her college-age son (Zachary Noah Piser). Her desperation literally drives her up a tree: She leaves New York City—where, of course, she owns an art gallery—and motors to California, where she persuades a pair of environmentalists, Finn (Michael Park) and Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon), to let her join them in scaling an enormous redwood for science. Can “nature’s remedy” help this neurotic city gal find her bearings? Naturally, it can.
Redwood | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
The arc of Jesse’s healing is long—nearly two hours without intermission—and it bends toward banality. The subject matter cries out for inventive nuance, but Landau’s book charts a familiar route to exactly where you know it’s going, with rest stops for mostly blah songs (music by Kate Diaz, lyrics by Diaz and Landau) that tend to eschew drama by narrating stories from the past or treading thematic water in the present. And the show’s eco-pedagogical elements are spelled out to a wearying extent. “Hear the secrets in their silence, / The ancient wisdom of the giants,” Finn sings in sloppy rhyme. “The trees’ most important lesson / Is that like the roots, we need connection.”
Mourning becomes Idina here: Her singing is as strong and distinctive as ever, and she looks terrific in an impressively physical performance that often finds her climbing and bouncing while strapped into a harness. But her earnest journey into the heart of the forest is terminally sappy. (“Can the stars lend their light to me? / Can they shine through and brighten my dreams?”) The thin supporting characters fare even worse. As Jesse’s girl—the photojournalist wife she leaves behind in New York—De'Adre Aziza is saddled with the show’s worst song (“Looking through this lens, I see a version of me…”). Park’s bearded adventurer gets an up-tempo number, at least. But Wilcoxon, who has a gorgeous voice, is forced into multiple clichés of wokeness as a character who is not only Black (she has shaved her head because helmets don’t fit black hair) and Jewish (she has a song explaining tikkun olam) but also an academic rebel who says things like, “95% of California’s old-growth forests were cut down so generations of white cis male corporations could make their billions off indigenous land.”
Redwood | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Where Redwood really shines is in the physical. As she proved with the underrated SpongeBob SquarePants, Landau has a fine sense for spectacle, and much of this show is lovely to look at. Hana S. Kim’s video design, rendered on tall and curved LED columns, has a vertiginous majesty, and the gigantic central tree, designed by Jason Ardizzone-West and lit by Scott Zielinsky, is a wonder. As in 2018’s unfortunate King Kong, the colossal title character of Redwood (which Jesse christens Stella) is the best thing about this musical, even though—or maybe because—it doesn’t sing. But arboreal splendor can’t compensate for the blandness that surrounds it. The show is all bark and no bite.
Redwood. Nederlander Theatre (Broadway). Book by Tina Landau. Music by Kate Diaz. Lyrics by Diaz and Landau. Directed by Landau. With Idina Menzel, De'Adre Aziza, Michael Park, Khaila Wilcoxon, Zachary Noah Piser. Running time: 1hr 55mins. No intermission.
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Redwood | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
