Broadway Review: Redwood

Someone In a Tree

BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE

Idina Menzel can sure belt out a song. And she can do it suspended in mid-air. I’m not just talking about “Defying Gravity,” the performance that secured her Tony in Wicked in 2003. Two decades later she’s just as powerfully shaking the rafters of the Nederlander Theater at the end of her rope in the new musical Redwood.

Menzel has one of the great, pop-inflected voices of the contemporary musical theater, one that’s inspired a generation of little girls to imitate her to the frustration of countless voice teachers. Menzel’s unique gift can be thrilling in the right vehicle.

Unfortunately, Redwood is not that vehicle. It’s a rather ponderous, coping-with-grief saga of a neurotic and selfish woman who retreats to the redwood forest of California to find healing.

Jess, a successful gallerist in New York, has lost her son Spencer to a drug overdose. Gutted with sorrow as the first anniversary of his death approaches, she thoughtlessly abandons her wife Mel, who is also grieving, and with whom she raised Spencer since the age of 3, with no warning or communication. Arriving in California, Jess forces her way into a tree-research project (I think; it’s not really that clear.), plays the dead son card and gets the older scientist Finn to allow her to climb the tree and even sleep on the platform. This despite the fact, as Finn’s colleague Becca notes, that this breaks protocol and jeopardizes their grant—a particularly poignant point in the current political environment. Jess doesn’t seem to care, and Finn folds. Later, Jess endangers everyone as a fire encroaches, then, having survived that, begs Mel to take her back. (Mel, who seems to have some level of mental health replies, “We’ll see.”)

Ultimately, Jess, is an annoying, unsympathetic character. She thinks of no one but herself and has no awareness of the hurt she causes. Her attempts to connect to others, such as Becca, are inauthentic and manipulative.

In the end, we go through all of that to get the “big emotional reveal:” live every day—“trite” doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s also unearned, dramatically. Jess was only thinking of herself at the outset, and she’s still completely self-focused at the end. It’s disappointing.

It’s all the more disappointing because the damage is largely self-inflicted. The piece is billed as being “conceived by” director, book writer and lyricist, Tina Landau with Menzel. Menzel provided “additional contributions,” and the music is by Kate Diaz who shares lyricist credit with Landau.

As for the score, it’s mostly a collection of power ballads. While this is Menzel’s forte, the sheer number of them grows quickly tiresome. Used judiciously (Think “Defying Gravity” again.), these can be dramatic tours-de-force, but when it’s all at a high pitch, the impact is diminished, and all the songs start to sound the same, as here. Diaz’s music is generic and unremarkable, and as performed by the cast, the lyrics are often unintelligible.

The cast, though, does the best they can with this. It is only Menzel’s astonishing stage presence and star power that makes Jess tolerable, but she’s still a difficult character to take. (The only legitimate laugh she gets is a meta reference to Frozen.) De’Adre Aziza as Mel, on the other hand, is sympathetic. She fully inhabits the character—her frustration and disappointment—and it is through her that we see how Jess’s solipsistic behavior is so destructive. Aziza has a wonderful voice, though her one song “Looking through a Lens” is cliché-ridden. Khalia Wilcoxon sings magnificently and does a good job with Becca, particularly in her healthy skepticism of Jesse, and she even manages the ponderous, predictable story of her life with sufficient grace, despite the virtue signaling of its labored “wokeness.” For instance, she is saddled with lines 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.” Michael Park as Finn has a big beard and a warm heart, but he’s too easily taken in by Jesse, and the story of his own son is a gratuitous narrative device. Zacharay Noah Piser as Spencer and others is fine. It’s not his fault that Spencer’s appearance as a ghost near the end to absolve his mother’s guilt is overdone.

The real star of Redwood, though, is the set. It’s been more than 40 years since Ming Cho Lee’s set for K2dominated a stage with a natural object. There it was a mountain—the soaring peak on which climbers were stranded. In Redwood, that set piece is the tree designed by Jason Ardizzone-West. In fact, the proportions of the tree seem like one of the few truly authentic things in the production. I should note the physicality of climbing required of Menzel, Wilcoxon, and Park is impressive, and, as noted, for Menzel to do it while singing, is awe-inspiring.

Beyond the tree, Hana S. Kim’s video design is jaw-droppingly marvelous. The set is surrounded by screens, and the gorgeous images and motion creates a uniquely immersive feel for a proscenium stage. It’s the kind of effect one sees in theme park rides and is likely to influence theater design moving forward.

It surely is impressive to look at, but one can’t help feeling when we’ve finally gotten through all this that the characters have spent the last two hours lost in the woods and looking for a story to take root.

Redwood
Nederlander Theatre
208 West 41st Street, New York
Tues- Fri 7 p.m.; Sat 8 p.m.; Weds, Sat, Sun 2 p.m.
$79 & up
Broadway Direct
1 hour 50 minutes, no intermission

Posted, February 18, 2025

All photos:  Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for Murphy Made