Idina Menzel Returns To Broadway And Branches Out In REDWOOD — Review

Idina Menzel plays a type-A city mom escaping from recent emotional trauma in Redwood, her first Broadway outing since 2015. Directed by Tina Landau, who wrote the book and co-conceived the story with Menzel, every aspect of this production emphasizes momentousness to a fault, treating every beat as an exclamation point where a gentler phrasing might have been more impactful.

As it opens, we swiftly learn that Jesse (Menzel), a New York gallerist, has left her photographer wife, Mel (De’Adre Aziza), behind in an impromptu cross-country road trip. Ominous glimpses of their son, Spencer (Zachary Noah Piser), point to some form of tragedy surrounding him being the issue weighing on her. Once she lands in a California forest, she meets and immediately inserts herself into the business of Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon) and the hippyish Finn (Michael Park), two naturists studying the local redwood trees. Jesse feels communing with nature might grant her some peace and, despite Becca’s protests, begins to climb with them, eventually setting up camp in one’s platform.

The story has its obvious parallels to Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir about self-discovery along the Pacific Coast Trail, but its closest aesthetic relative, thanks to its wall-to-wall score, is the forced earnestness of Christian rock. The composer Kate Diaz has crafted a score which is tuneful but, at least under Tom Kitt’s music supervision, bursts with an endless barrage of jungle drums, handclaps and inspirational strings that ring hopelessly hollow after the third or so song. The lyrics, by Diaz and Landau with contributions from Menzel, are thus appropriately platitudinal; one number is built around the line “Big Tree / Religion saved me.”

Jason Ardizzone-West’s set features a central turntable that reveals a giant tree, surrounded by massive screens often displaying birds-eye views similar to Disney’s Soarin’ attractions. (Hana S. Kim handled video design, Scott Zielinski the lighting, and Jonathan Deans the sound.) The production succeeds in immersing us in the forest, but the hyper-realism created by the screens nixes a sense of humanity, leaping directly into extremes alongside the score.

Jesse’s family life is revealed piecemeal, though never satisfactorily fleshed out, and we learn equally null details about her new companions. Her focus – and, as soon as that tree is revealed, ours – is on climbing, and her sudden intense attachment to the tree is clumsily sentimental. When she finally does (Melecio Estrella, from the aerial dance company Bandaloop choreographed the “vertical movement”), her joyous bounces away from the tree have the giddiness of long-awaited liberation, but look awkwardly amateurish. This would be fine were this her first of many climbs, but the story and incessantly bombastic score mean for this to play as a climactic triumph, so while the upward-hoisting trio’s bicep and core strength are commendable, they simply don’t live up to the Pink-level acrobatics it promises.

While the musical never drags, very little of it lands. Part of this is due to the half-baked book, but also to Landau’s haphazard direction, which has her cast barreling through dialogue on their way to the next thunderous anthem. Certain beats, like Jesse video-calling Mel from a laptop positioned slightly diagonal to her, but speaking out to the audience, just feel lazy.

Menzel is a fierce actor with an often equally fiery voice, and she shines in the production’s too-few book scenes, as well as a mournful number, late in the show, that delivers rather than telegraphs genuine emotion. But years of stratospheric success belting Wicked battle cries and Frozen pyrotechnics seem to have boxed her into a vocal lane that is hardly sustainable, even throughout one performance. Song after song here demands a to-the-rafters explosiveness that becomes as harrowing to watch be attempted as it must be to deliver.

The talented supporting cast is massively short-shrifted. With impressive vocals and a fierce commitment to her part, Wilcoxon all but walks away with the show, but her character is saddled with being that most unfortunate of recent tropes: the no-nonsense Black woman who exists only to berate other characters about their incompetence, or shoe-horn arguments about race and gender. While others’ quirks are driven by personality, hers are annoyingly relegated to identity. It isn’t until we learn about her relationship to nature in the final 30 minutes that the show allows her to display any semblance of independent joy. (The piece has an overall eye-rolly relationship to race, making passes at hipness with references to Lil Wayne and saddling Piser with a truly dispiriting rap number.)

Redwood doesn’t feel like a disaster, nor did it have to be. There’s enough genuine passion in Menzel’s commitment, to the role and the overall project, to power a solid show. But none of its ideas or characters are given space to coalesce into anything meaningful, with blandly inspirational songs crowding out an ecosystem that would better thrive on more organic soil.

‍Redwood is in performance at the Nederlander Theatre on West 41st Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.