To a Californian redwood, human life is however a blip. The tallest bushes on the planet, reaching over 360ft (110 meters) into the sky, they will stay for two,000 years or extra. Those that also stand on California’s coast have survived wildfires and rapacious logging; they’ve witnessed the pressured removing of Indigenous folks and the institution of US land preservation. Their roots are remarkably shallow however huge, forming an underground community of communication.
All these info and extra are folded into Redwood, a brand new Broadway musical that admirably makes an attempt to seize the grandeur of the silent giants – when you’ve ever seen one, you recognize they’re genuinely spectacular, breathtaking, deserving of all respect – in human-sized theater. It’s simple to wax poetic about bushes, much less so to sing about them. Nonetheless, Redwood, with music by Kate Diaz, endeavors to attach the bushes’ knowledge to our capability for therapeutic.
If that sounds a bit … shallow for an idea, properly, sure. Redwood, directed by Tina Landau, would merely not be on Broadway if not for the presence of Idina Menzel as its lead, Jesse, a New Yorker who finds solace from crushing grief within the shade of 1 very tall tree. At 53, Menzel is a revered veteran of Broadway who already possesses a number of career-defining roles – Maureen in Lease, Elphaba in Depraved and Elsa in Disney’s animated youngsters smash Frozen. The present’s promoting level is her return to Broadway after greater than a decade, because the combined bag of If/Then, and Menzel has admirably chosen the uncommon authentic musical. She is the motive force of this new star automobile – she conceived of the story over 15 years in the past, contributed to Landau’s ebook and is a co-producer (together with her firm, Loudmouth Media).
And fittingly, she begins the present abruptly, in a mock automotive, for a tune known as Drive – Jesse has fled her spouse, Mel (De’Adre Aziza), and the specter of her 23-year-old son, Spencer (Zachary Noah Piser), for a rashly conceived break – that’s an unlucky harbinger of issues to return. The tune is constructed for Menzel’s well-known voice – low, beseeching verses, abrupt excessive notes, sustained belts – that, even after one tune, appears troublesome for her to keep up. Menzel has all the time possessed a crystalline musical theater voice, that has hardened into one thing extra akin to glass – extra piercing, fragile and flat than it ought to be. There was a palpable feeling of deflation after the primary quantity, a way of trepidation that didn’t ease for the rest of the present.
Not that Menzel was helped by the fabric, which feels woefully inert for such grand pure surprise. Jesse is a peculiar character hounded by traumatic flashbacks to happier instances together with her late son; she summarily crash lands on the forest ground, actually tosses her cellphone and submits to pure surprise. (The present, developed at San Diego’s La Jolla playhouse, maintains a lingering feeling of California-ness [derogatory]). She is helped by scientists Finn (Michael Park), a hippie kind, and Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon), a Black conservationist in a area historically hostile to them, saddled with the function of explaining to a pushy and borderline impolite Jesse – who actually speaks to her supervisor to override her selections – all that she doesn’t know, solely to be taught that she, in actual fact, doesn’t know every part. Wilcoxon, with probably the most luxurious vocals of the forged, a minimum of will get two welcome alternatives to showcase them.
The principle thrust of the plot, that Jesse will be taught to confront her grief by way of climbing the tree – a troublesome and technical job – does present for distinctive harness-and-belay choreography heretofore unseen on Broadway, by far probably the most dynamic ingredient of the present. However Redwood is in any other case hampered by a pervasive sense of artificiality – songs about cathartic surprise devoid of it, surface-level characters, with perception that goes no farther than “grief is horrible and mutable however you’ll be able to adapt” (with lyrics similar to “I’m a believer / that bushes can heal ya”). The titular tree itself is the bottom of a cylindrical display screen, a few of over a thousand LED panels, which, as technically completed the set-up could also be, fails to convey the grandeur of the forest or the majesty of a 37-storey-tall redwood, extra within the lane of CGI desktop background or VR headsets than nature.
Nonetheless, there are so few exhibits not derived from IP now, and the problem of mounting something so steeply uphill, that’s troublesome to root towards what’s in the end a troublesome promote. Menzel, as soon as a prize fighter of Broadway, takes a variety of swings and solely connects a few of them. The entire enterprise has the air of chasing ghosts, however there are moments – in a transferring monitor concerning the impossibility of full therapeutic, or an anxious breakdown – the place the magic glints once more. Not sufficient, although, for a topic as monumental as a redwood, nor to transform New York audiences to, as one tune places it, Massive Tree Faith.
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