To a Californian redwood, human life is but a blip. The tallest trees in the world, reaching over 360ft (110 meters) into the sky, they can live for 2,000 years or more. The ones that still stand on California’s coast have survived wildfires and rapacious logging; they’ve witnessed the forced removal of Indigenous people and the establishment of US land preservation. Their roots are remarkably shallow but vast, forming an underground network of communication.
All these facts and more are folded into Redwood, a new Broadway musical that admirably attempts to capture the grandeur of the silent giants – if you’ve ever seen one, you know they are genuinely spectacular, breathtaking, deserving of all respect – in human-sized theater. It’s easy to wax poetic about trees, less so to sing about them. Nevertheless, Redwood, with music by Kate Diaz, endeavors to connect the trees’ wisdom to our capacity for healing.
If that sounds a bit … shallow for a concept, well, yes. Redwood, directed by Tina Landau, would simply not be on Broadway if not for the presence of Idina Menzel as its lead, Jesse, a New Yorker who finds solace from crushing grief in the shade of one very tall tree. At 53, Menzel is a respected veteran of Broadway who already possesses several career-defining roles – Maureen in Rent, Elphaba in Wicked and Elsa in Disney’s animated kids smash Frozen. The show’s selling point is her return to Broadway after more than a decade, since the mixed bag of If/Then, and Menzel has admirably chosen the rare original musical. She is the driver of this new star vehicle – she conceived of the story over 15 years ago, contributed to Landau’s book and is a co-producer (with her company, Loudmouth Media).
And fittingly, she begins the show abruptly, in a mock car, for a song called Drive – Jesse has fled her wife, Mel (De’Adre Aziza), and the specter of her 23-year-old son, Spencer (Zachary Noah Piser), for a rashly conceived break – that is an unfortunate harbinger of things to come. The song is constructed for Menzel’s famous voice – low, beseeching verses, abrupt high notes, sustained belts – that, even after one song, seems difficult for her to maintain. Menzel has always possessed a crystalline musical theater voice, that has hardened into something more akin to glass – more piercing, fragile and flat than it should be. There was a palpable feeling of deflation after the first number, a sense of trepidation that did not ease for the remainder of the show.
Not that Menzel was helped by the material, which feels woefully inert for such grand natural wonder. Jesse is a peculiar character hounded by traumatic flashbacks to happier times with her late son; she summarily crash lands on the forest floor, literally tosses her phone and submits to natural wonder. (The show, developed at San Diego’s La Jolla playhouse, maintains a lingering feeling of California-ness [derogatory]). She is helped by scientists Finn (Michael Park), a hippie type, and Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon), a Black conservationist in a field traditionally hostile to them, saddled with the role of explaining to a pushy and borderline rude Jesse – who literally speaks to her manager to override her decisions – all that she does not know, only to be taught that she, in fact, does not know everything. Wilcoxon, with the most sumptuous vocals of the cast, at least gets two welcome opportunities to showcase them.
The main thrust of the plot, that Jesse will learn to confront her grief via climbing the tree – a difficult and technical task – does provide for unique harness-and-belay choreography heretofore unseen on Broadway, by far the most dynamic element of the show. But Redwood is otherwise hampered by a pervasive sense of artificiality – songs about cathartic wonder devoid of it, surface-level characters, with insight that goes no farther than “grief is horrible and mutable but you can adapt” (with lyrics such as “I’m a believer / that trees can heal ya”). The titular tree itself is the backside of a cylindrical screen, some of over a thousand LED panels, which, as technically accomplished the set-up may be, fails to convey the grandeur of the forest or the majesty of a 37-storey-tall redwood, more in the lane of CGI desktop background or VR headsets than nature.
Still, there are so few shows not derived from IP now, and the challenge of mounting anything so steeply uphill, that is difficult to root against what is ultimately a tough sell. Menzel, once a prize fighter of Broadway, takes a lot of swings and only connects some of them. The whole enterprise has the air of chasing ghosts, but there are moments – in a moving track about the impossibility of full healing, or an anxious breakdown – where the magic flickers again. Not enough, though, for a subject as monumental as a redwood, nor to convert New York audiences to, as one song puts it, Big Tree Religion.
