The musical “Redwood,” which opened on Thursday at the Nederlander Theater, features two great stars. One is an awe-inspiring force of nature. The other is a tree.
The force of nature is Idina Menzel, who sings in 13 of the show’s 17 songs, of which seven are essentially solos. Has anyone ever belted so much, so tirelessly and hair-raisingly?
But the size of the role is nothing compared with its emotional complexity and the depth of Menzel’s immersion in it. Her Jesse is a walking panic attack, an avoidant overtalker, an entitled princess and a grief-stricken mother. More astonishing, she is all of these at once, and right from the start. We meet her speeding westward from New York City with a terrible loss in the rearview mirror and no idea where she’s going.
We know, though. The musical, by Tina Landau (book, lyrics and direction) and Kate Diaz (music and lyrics), with additional contributions from Menzel herself, is not named “Redwood” idly. Soon Jesse comes upon a grove of the giant trees near Eureka, Calif., and we meet our other star. She — for Jesse not only genders her but also names her Stella — is 14 feet wide and 300 feet tall and centuries if not millenniums old.
I am sure redwoods are awesome in real life; I have never seen one. But the tree that Landau and her designers have put onstage is among the most beautiful and wondrous theatrical creations I can recall.
Like Menzel’s Jesse, Stella is multifarious. Her trunk rotates into place like an animated Richard Serra sculpture (scenery by Jason Ardizzone-West). Spectacular video by Hana S. Kim renders her towering swirl of branches on a series of 1,000 immersive LED panels. A canopy of flickering sunlight and star shine (by Scott Zielinski) along with a soundscape of rustles and soughs (by Jonathan Deans) give her what feels like an inner life. At times she even seems to dance — and yes, she sort-of sings.
If this is beginning to sound a bit woo-woo, well, welcome to “Redwood,” which does not try too hard to avoid the clichés of wonderment. Still, it corrals them within an unusual story. In fevered flashbacks along the road, we learn that Jesse is a gallerist whose wife, Mel, a photojournalist, is her emotional opposite. (Mel, played with great warmth by De’Adre Aziza, says she has her “feet on the ground,” while Jesse has her “head in the clouds.”) Together they raised a son, Spencer (Zachary Noah Piser), whose tragic death at 23 (we don’t learn the details until late in the show) has thrown their marriage into disarray.
It is in the days immediately preceding the anniversary of that tragedy that Jesse bolts. She is, at first, both pitiable and unlikable. When she comes upon the canopy arborists Finn (Michael Park) and Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon) she pesters them mercilessly and cluelessly about Stella, which they more prosaically refer to as No. 237. Seeing them climb the enormous trunk to continue their survey of the tree’s upper reaches, Jesse decides and then demands to climb it too.
Her instinct that peace and rest may be waiting in Stella’s branches is something that I would ordinarily find totally loony. Yet there is something in the way Menzel builds the character (and in the way Landau builds the tree’s) that makes the proposition hard to question. Like the bewitching underwater environment Landau honchoed for the “SpongeBob SquarePants” musical in 2017, the canopy in “Redwood” is welcoming yet otherworldly, and the vertical choreography by Melecio Estrella, involving rigging and carabiners and eye-popping upside-down midair arabesques, is breathtaking. But of course not for Menzel, who sings throughout.
This is not mere ostentation. As you delight in Stella’s calm dignity, you understand and almost forgive Jesse’s constitutional lack of it. She is, at least, on to herself. Advertising her fitness for the ascent in a song called “Climb,” she sings: “I can hold a tree pose. I can do a downward dog, / ’cause I did yoga once at my old synagogue.”
It also helps that she has the arborists as foils. Though Park makes of Finn a charming, ex-hippie mountain man, indulgent of Jesse’s quest because he’s found solace in the redwoods from a tragedy of his own, Becca, having perhaps too conveniently also faced tragedy, counters with a passion for protocol. With the help of Toni-Leslie James’s telegraphic costumes, they make a nice if neat contrast of warm and woke. It is a feat almost as startling as the show’s aerialism that Wilcoxon somehow makes lines like this one — “95 percent of California’s old-growth forests were cut down so generations of white cis male corporations could make their billions off Indigenous land” — tolerable and even amusing.
There is less the actors can do about the script’s overreliance on Wikipedia dramaturgy, that bald expedience in which facts deemed useful to the story are only partly digested as dialogue. “Did you know that redwoods are one of the most fire-resistant species in the world?” Finn asks Jesse, adding that they don’t die from the fire, but need it. (Fire opens their cones to let seeds out.) Later we are taught that their roots are surprisingly shallow, but that they intertwine and “lock together.” At times, this sort of dialogue gives “Redwood” the feeling of an anthropomorphic Discovery Channel documentary run through a Hallmark wringer.
I’m not saying the metaphors aren’t apt, for the characters and for us. Like Stella, Jesse must learn to use fire — in her case the fire of grief — instead of dying from it. Doing so will involve reattaching herself to the community of other beings, arboreal or marital. Good lessons surely, but ones that a show might better deliver, as the trees do, silently.
Except that we don’t in fact want silence from a musical, and “Redwood” would make a dreary play. Happily, whenever its book drifts into familiar tropes of the genre, the songs pull it back to its wild and unsettled heart. Diaz’s rangy, propulsive music has immediate curb appeal but with a scary, questing quality that provides the necessary big endings without pat resolutions — a combination that hits Menzel’s sweet spot over and over. The other characters also get strong defining numbers, all beautifully sung.
And you have to admire the guts it takes to have put a deeply serious show about trauma and resilience on Broadway right now. At the start of what may prove to be an escapist era, “Redwood” dares to be both interior and cosmological, taking the soul and the world quite seriously. Luckily, it offers great pleasure along with its factoids. And if it has faults, at least they are not in its evergreen stars.
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