News Ticker

Michael Park

Redwood

February 24, 2025

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. [more]

Tuck Everlasting The Musical

May 8, 2016

The problem with the new show with a libretto by first timers Claudia Shear and Tim Federle now at the Broadhurst Theatre is that it is all so bland - which is not true of the novel which had grit as well as many surprises. The new prologue pretty much gives away the secret of the Tuck family’s discovery of the fountain of youth. The score by Chris Miller and Nathan Tysen (who wrote the Off Broadway musical 'The Burnt Part Boys") is pleasant but innocuous. Director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw who currently has the more flashy "Book of Mormon," "Aladdin" and "Something Rotten!" simultaneously running on Broadway has created a low-key production, atypical of his usual style, which seems a bit lost on the big Broadway stage. This might have worked better in a smaller Off Broadway house. [more]