NEW YORK — Stephen Sondheim famously said that Broadway is about surprise. You pays your money and, ideally, you are amazed, or at least intermittently jolted, by what you find there.
But there’s little ideal about “Redwood,” a wholly unsurprising new tree-hugging musical (and I mean that literally) written and directed by Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member Tina Landau, with songs composed by Kate Diaz and with a starring role and a formidable vocal challenge for Idina Menzel.
The Broadway star plays a middle-aged lesbian from Long Island who suffers the loss of her son (while still in his early 20s) and, grieving, finds her way to a redwood forest in Northern California, where she seeks healing among the giant, majestic trees, one of which occupies much of the footprint of the Nederlander Theatre as characters rappel all the way up into the flies, up and down its bark.
Menzel’s character, Jesse, has a partner, Mel (De’Adre Aziza) but she’s underwritten and mostly confined to phone calls asking when Jesse is coming home. The dead son, played by Zachary Noah Piser, makes appearances too, recalling the show “Next to Normal” as he talks to his broken-hearted mom.
But for most of the show, Jesse interacts with two tree-loving naturalists whom she finds working in the forest. One, Finn (Michael Park), is a gentle, fatherly type who helps his visitor (and thus the audience) learn about redwood trees. The other, Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon) is more abrasive and her role in the show is mostly to complain about Finn’s caring for this grieving soul when he should be getting on with his work with the trees. This she does over and over again, as if we are all back in the musical “If/Then,” which also happened to star Menzel.
The systemic problem with this new show is that the moment Jesse first hugs the tree, which she calls Stella, you think to yourself, huh, she’s going to find healing in the beauty and longevity of that majestic tree and that is precisely what happens pretty much in the way you knew it was going to happen from the moment she enters the forest. You know this Becca will soften. You know wise Finn will reach his learning goals for his needy student. You know Jesse will find a way to go home, a little more able to face the future.
I’ve no wish here to cast shade upon what the Japanese call Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, wherein one finds therapeutic balm by walking among trees and seeking to commune with a calming natural environment. I’ve sought that out myself. I’m team tree in all kinds of ways and exploring our connection to our current gasping environment, especially out west, is a perfectly valid idea for a musical. Aptly, this one originated at the La Jolla Playhouse in California.
Most great musicals are about death in some way and “Redwood’ strives to comfort us with the timeless idea that humans who leave us don’t cease to exist but merely metamorphize into a different form that will always remain with us. If we didn’t have that basic plot, we wouldn’t have Broadway; heck, we would not have pretty much our entire canon of drama. That’s all fair enough, but, wow, is this clunky show on the nose with all that stuff.
The visual aspects of “Redwood,” which has a tech-heavy, video-and-tree design from Jason Ardizzone-West, is both cool in the colloquial sense and overly cool to the touch, at times overly IMAX-y of gestalt. The tree-climbing mechanism used in the show has a certain level of brio, especially as everyone shimmies away from the tree on their ropes, allowing Menzel’s fans to relive “Defying Gravity,” a comparison from “Wicked” that the show leans into without apparent worry. “Frozen,” too. There’s even a line about a Disney princess.
For my money, this self-aware stuff pulls you out of the show although it might be a recognition that the show’s prospects lie almost entirely with existing Menzel fans. She was in fine voice on the night I saw the show and gamely clambers her way through more than a dozen musical numbers, a bigger assignment than is typical in Broadway musicals and an achievement in and of itself. Many of the numbers in a score mostly dedicated to the search for healing are pleasing to the ear; “A Dream” and “Roots” both take admirable flight. Menzel’s musical fanbase will find songs to enjoy. And Menzel will have new material for her concerts.
But “Redwood” keeps repeating itself and thus running away from its own potential as a rare enviro-musical, which is surprising given Landau’s formidable capabilities as a theater artist. Here, she gets trapped in some early ideas that don’t work as she tries to dramatize and physicalize what it means to grieve, or be around someone going through that pain. I suspect she wanted to emphasize fragility and uncertainty to draw as firm a contrast as possible with the timeless stature of the show’s anchoring tree but we go in and out of the forest while “Redwood” struggles to climb above its own constraining canopy.
At the Nederlander Theatre, 208 W. 41st St, New York; www.redwoodmusical.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
