How it’s New York: The main character is from New York.
How it’s Irish: Ogham/Tree‑veneration: a tree becomes a text, or an ogham you read with your ribs. Trees are magical in this world too.
Redwood by Tina Landau (“SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical”) and Idina Manzel (“Wicked”) has big tall ambitions.
Glorious like a 1000-year old tree it is not, however. Honestly, it’s not even a hardwood. It’s kind of limp.
Idina Menzel! Tina Landau! This had such promise! But it just does not deliver.
Instead it has the hallmarks of a vanity project: book by Tina Landau, music by Kate Diaz, lyrics by both of them, with additional contributions by Idina Menzel, who stars. Oh and did we mention it was conceived by Landau and Menzel?
More people needed to be involved in the conception and creation of this one that could have or that wanted to say “no.”
No, let’s not tell a story about a woman so stricken with grief over he son’s death that she didn’t even cause that she abandons her wife and goes west.
No, let’s not center a story on how two researchers let her go up in a tree because they feel sorry for her, liability be damned.
No, let’s not make every song do the work of the plot.
Because what we have here is a one-woman show with foils: other characters and exist and have songs, but there’s only one story that matters: the story of Jesse. Played by (of course) Menzel.
It’s a simple story. In the wake of a tragic car accident, Jesse (a woman, though the name is spelled the masculine way) hits the road, as you do, driving west and west and west, leaving her wife Mel (De’Adre Aziza) behind.
Eventually she gets to a Redwood forest.
Here she cons/cries the team doing research on the trees, Finn (Michael Park) and Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon) into letting her go up on the platform and spending a night in the tree.
This is so ridiculous I heard snorts in the audience. The liability issues alone are beyond.
It’s never clear who is funding the research of what it’s for.
The characters talk about The Overstory by Richard Powers, and the story of Julia Butterfly Hill, the activist who lived in a Redwood for a year, whose story inspired the best section of Powers’ book.
Now that would make a glorious musical.
Wilcoxon has a great sing, and Park has a pure, even sweet voice. Their songs are not memorable though.
But Jesse gets to literally hug a tree and have a transcendant experience. Menzel is game and winning, even charming, as she allows herself to feel joy. There is even some aerial ballet, choreographed by Melecio Estrella/BANDALOOP.
And we can understand that joy because the tree, designed by Jason Arizzone-West, and the video, by Hana S. Kim, are awe-inspiring, helped by Scott Zielinski’s lighting. The stage is a cyclorama of bright white panels on which we see different projections and which are incredible when we go high up the tree. You might even feel vertigo.
Think IMAX.
If only the show itself matched that grandeur.
