Redwood

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With the same preternatural gusto she brought to Wicked and If/Then, Idina Menzel is back on Broadway in Redwood to, once again, confront musicalized trauma, this time as Jesse, a middle-aged art gallery owner from New York who, after her twentysomething son Spencer (Zachary Noah Piser) dies of a drug overdose, manically speeds across the country to climb an exceptionally tall tree. Coinciding with the show’s deterministic title, that’s where grief pulls Jesse: to a California redwood to grapple high above the ground with soul-crushing sorrow while having nothing to hold onto except for the healing virtue of a trite metaphor. Though it’s, of course, easy to sympathize with Jesse’s brutal ordeal, unfortunately the creative team responsible for Redwood never takes Jesse as seriously as her suffering, instead relying on Menzel’s soaring vocals to defy gravity despite the burden of a leaden score and book.

A dedication precedes the script for Redwood, indicating a genuine sense of mourning influenced the musical, which makes it a deliberate work of catharsis not only for the audience but also for the artist. That’s a brave and noble use of theater. But agony and art don’t necessarily always combine to soothe our pangs, especially when the former doesn’t endow the latter with enough truth. The book, from the show’s director Tina Landau, is a litany of unwieldy exposition, silly contrivances, and self-help bromides about the ameliorative aspects of ecological wonder, which Landau then repeats in utterly forgettable lyrics written with Broadway newcomer Kate Diaz. Regrettably, while wearing the composer’s hat too, Diaz cannot string together enough compelling notes to make her other effort more palatable.

The original green-painted witch in Wicked, Menzel’s fearless ability to sing in a harness remains unmatched, though as the co-conceiver of Redwood with Landau, she can’t be let off the hook for the show’s failings, especially since the entire theatrical endeavor quickly devolves into a means of simply proving the upper limits of Menzel’s prodigious decibel range. In this regard, Redwood succeeds over and over and over, until the evidence is near bludgeoning, causing one to yearn for a bit of tranquility. Supposedly, that’s what Jesse wants, too: an eye in the psychic storm to ruminate about love and loss.

But Jesse seeks this respite without her wife Mel (De’Adre Aziza), a decidedly earthbound photographer, along for the arboreal ride. It’s a curious if not unforgivably selfish decision, two of many possible judgments Landau and Diaz ignore as they stack the relationship deck against Mel, who begs Jesse via cell phone from New York to return home, so they can rejoin couple’s therapy to discuss Spencer’s death. In her big solo number, “Looking Through This Lens,” Mel even bizarrely takes responsibility for being responsible with the lyrics, “Maybe you were right/When you left that night.” Oh, Mel, she wasn’t.

Frustratingly, Mel’s feelings are far less important to Redwood than the towering white panels curved around Jason Ardizzone-West’s bland, matchy-matchy set. Displaying video designer Hana S. Kim’s panoramic interpretation of a forest, they are meant to be astonishing enough to take the place of thoughtfulness. That trade-off is further aided when a giant, three-dimensional conifer emerges from Kim’s two-dimensional forest, much like Chekhov’s gun, to give the audience little choice but to accept what’s going to happen next: for every Hallmark Channel reason fueling her behavior, Jesse will absolutely end up at the top of that majestically fake redwood, with nothing to suggest she’s capable of being there other than her insufferable New York moxie.

It’s lucky a couple of environmentalists are around to do some sciencey stuff in Jesse’s favorite tree. More fortuitously, after they discover Jesse asleep in the forest sans any camping gear, one of them, Finn (Michael Park), a hirsute nonconformist, sees the “inspirational” potential of letting a stranger facing an obvious mental health crisis scale a redwood to its tippie-top for a multi-night stay. Meanwhile, Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon), Finn’s assistant and a grade-A spoilsport, is angrily opposed to helping the depressed and untrained Jesse do something so irresponsible. But, as the plot requires, Becca’s prudence quickly loses out to Finn’s apparent indifference to being charged with negligent homicide.

Instead of hightailing it out of there at the very real possibility of eventually becoming Finn’s co-defendant, Becca halfheartedly goes along with the plan to let nature work its hocus pocus on Jesse’s fragile mind, whose unsettled state is fitfully depicted by a garish combination of lighting and sound design from Scott Zielinski and Jonathan Deans respectively. The weak explanation for the buckling of Becca’s cool-headed resolve is her own fraught backstory: a forest fire burned down her childhood house, so now she has a compulsion to protect trees, and that grants her some appreciation for what Jesse is doing. Let’s just be generous and call that nuance, which would be the closest Landau and Diaz ever come to it.

Ineluctably, Jesse and the redwood share their own fiery crucible. With Kim’s projected trees ablaze, Menzel makes a final musical stand (against a forest fire?), but, if the accompanying lyrics from Landau and Diaz are their most memorable–“Trying so hard not to feel/But maybe I have to if I wanna heal?”–it’s only because they come so late in the show. After the proverbial flames have passed, Jesse demonstrates gratitude to the redwood for an inexplicably transformative experience, wrapping her arms as far as she can around the musical’s second most important character. Touching; now, Jesse should go home and hug the other woman who lost a son.

Redwood (open run)

Nederlander Theatre, 208 West 41st Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 866-302-0995 or visit http://www.redwoodmusical.com

Running time: one hour and 50 minutes without an intermission