Idina Menzel Returns to Broadway for the First Time in a Decade: “It’s Been Very Emotional for Me”

Idina Menzel is sitting in the same dressing room she did almost 30 years ago, when she made her Broadway debut as Maureen Johnson in Rent. This time around, though, her Nederlander Theater dressing room is larger—much larger. “I broke the wall down,” she says with a smile, quite fitting for the star whose big, bold original roles have held nothing back (think: originating Elphaba in Wicked and voicing Elsa in Frozen). “The boys would yell to us through the room and we’d all flirt with each other,” she says of her time spent backstage with the 1996 original Rent cast. “It was a beautiful, magical time in my life. I wanted the reminder of the joy and glee…. For most of us, it was our first real gig.” As soon as our interview is over, she’s planning to add a photo of herself with Daphne Rubin-Vega, her Rent costar, to her dressing room wall. “It’s been very emotional for me, the feeling of being home again and coming full circle.” Today, Menzel’s space is a serene escape, wallpapered with immersive greenery and woods.

“Welcome to my redwood forest,” she says, panning her Zoom camera around the room. “This is my favorite thing.”

Redwood, which opens on February 13, marks the return of Menzel’s name lighting up a Broadway marquee for the first time in 10 years. That gap was due to no shortage of offers for Menzel, who chose to focus on her music career and raising her son at home in Los Angeles. “If I’m moving to New York for a year, something really has to take me here.” That something is Tina Landau’s poignant new musical, which incorporates cutting-edge video installations and movement design, inspired by the story of environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill, who, in the late ’90s, spent two years living in a thousand-year-old redwood to save it from being cut down. Menzel first came across the story of Hill about 15 years ago and was inspired to approach Landau about collaborating on a musical. The two have been working on Redwood since. “I’ve always asked myself if I could do something extreme like that, and would I have that endurance, that fortitude,” she says.

Menzel plays Jesse, a woman who flees her life in New York City in an attempt to escape trauma. She drives across the country and ultimately ends up in the redwood forest in California. “We can try to run away…leave everything behind. But sometimes when you isolate yourself and go to a much quieter place, the silence grows louder, and your thoughts and pain become more potent,” she says. “Something about taking the loss in our lives and embodying it, not trying to push it away, is actually what will define us and make us stronger.”

Alongside Landau, Kate Diaz makes her Broadway debut with the music and lyrics. The show is Menzel’s first time working with an all-female creative team. “It’s a relief to be able to support each other in being extremely powerful, speaking our minds, and not having to apologize for that, while also being very sensitive and empathetic individuals who look out for each other.” It’s been a learning experience for Menzel. “I constantly feel like I have to apologize for my behavior, my directness, my frustration about something. And I’m learning from them that you don’t need to apologize for that. Certainly men wouldn’t apologize for that! There’s a trust that comes with knowing you can speak your mind and your truth, but there’s still a deep love for one another.”

Working with an all-female team is not the only first for Menzel with Redwood. Singing upside down, suspended in air? Yeah, that’s a pretty big first. Over the past few years, Menzel has been training with the “vertical dance troupe” Bandaloop, known for their dances on the sides of mountains, trees, and buildings all over the world. She’s learned how to climb, and all about harness safety, carabiners, and ropes. On her very first excursion with Bandaloop, the troupe’s idea of a baby step was going 20 feet up a redwood tree in Oakland, California. When Bandaloop brought Menzel to a building to practice vertical dance, she assumed they’d be starting from the ground up. Nope, they started from the top of the building instead, working their way down. “I kind of didn’t want to do it, but I didn’t want to accept defeat,” she says. “I’m very competitive.” Still, Menzel has fallen in love with the technique. “I’m learning things that I never thought I could do, and I’m singing while doing them. I’m using muscles I’ve never used before,” she says. “It’s very freeing, and it returns me to an innocence. It can be very childlike.”

Menzel is adamant that singing Wicked’s “Defying Gravity” in the aughts night after night, flying through the air, in no way prepped her for the mid-air singing she’d come to perfect in Redwood. “That was an optical illusion. I got to stand on my two feet on a little plank…. You’re buckled in and it’s computer-generated. It doesn’t move unless it’s locked,” Menzel recalls. She says that being on a rope is completely different: “I’m still learning—refining and figuring out more ways to use my body and feel free, buoyant, and liberated…. And you have to look comfortable so the audience isn’t worrying about you.”

While Menzel fights off the flu currently going around New York (“I have to navigate as a singer all the guck sitting in my chest and nose…flying upside down doesn’t really help”), she’s readying herself for opening night. “It’s a great sense of pride when I think about being a little girl and my dreams of being on Broadway…. But along with that comes wanting to fill all the seats and knowing that I’m responsible for the success of the show. It’s on my shoulders, and that’s really scary.” But just like her character Jesse, and all of the characters she’s played before, Menzel will undoubtedly triumph. “The whole idea of this woman doing something heroic and beyond what I thought I could possibly do has come to life.”