We take a look at what is being said about Idina Menzel’s return to the Broadway stage….
The Guardian: “The whole enterprise has the air of chasing ghosts, but there are moments – in a moving track about the impossibility of full healing, or an anxious breakdown – where the magic flickers again. Not enough, though, for a subject as monumental as a redwood, nor to convert New York audiences to, as one song puts it, Big Tree Religion.”
Variety: “But in the end, the show rises or falls on whether the audience is carried along — or even cares about — Jesse’s private journey of salvation. Menzel’s stunning performance, in all its variant colors and shades, gives them good grounds. So is this comforting call to nature.”
USA Today: “It’s too bad, because when “Redwood” has the good sense to take its own advice and just sit in the silence, Menzel is fantastic. The actress endearingly conveys Jesse’s gung-ho attitude and naivete as she tries to rough it in the great outdoors, forging an unlikely friendship with the no-nonsense Becca.”
New York Theater.me: ” Through the set, projections, light and sound, the designers envelope us in the tree’s majesty, a work of stunning stagecraft that for a few moments even elicits something close to the sort of ineffable feeling of awe one gets in actual Nature.”
Vulture.com: “Jesse’s son (Zachary Noah Piser), who appears to her in memories and visions throughout the play, may eventually offer her absolution, but for true catharsis, we need to have felt something, have risked something, and for all its soaring vocals and vertical movement, Redwood leaves us stubbornly grounded.”
Observer.com: “Had it been imagined as a pop oratorio with Nat Geo imagery, Redwood might have succeeded. You’d still need finer songs and richer language. For a structure as large and complex as a Broadway musical to stand for a whole season in this degraded cultural ecology requires a deeper and broader root system. You want to leave shivering with the majesty of nature; instead, it feels like 110 minutes staring at a potted plant.”
Theatre Mania.com: “In the end, Redwood does get us back on the ground with an important message to cherish the ones we love while they are with us. Maybe that’s worth the climb.”
Time Out: “Mourning becomes Idina here: Her singing is as strong and distinctive as ever, and she looks terrific in an impressively physical performance that often finds her climbing and bouncing while strapped into a harness. But her earnest journey into the heart of the forest is terminally sappy.”
The Wrap.com: “There’s a lot of rappelling up and down Stella, courtesy of set designer Jason Ardizzone-West. This aerial derring-do is far less impressive than Hana S. Kim’s video design. In “Wicked,” Elphaba ascends to sing “Defying Gravity” at the end of Act 1. Kim’s gorgeous images of trees achieve the same uplifting effect in “Redwood” without the help of hydraulics.”
Talkin’ Broadway: “Much is made in Redwood of the nature of a tree’s “heart,” its “strongest part” we are told. If only we knew more about Jesse’s heart, then perhaps our own hearts might be more fully engaged with her plight and with her high-in-the-air healing process.”
New York Stage Review: “Redwood might have been more effective with a powerful score, but the songs, composed by Kate Diaz and featuring lyrics by Diaz and Landau, all have a similar power-ballad sheen that quickly proves repetitious and unmemorable. That’s not to say that Menzel doesn’t sing the hell out of them, which she does. But her powerhouse vocals can only do so much with numbers that aren’t exactly “Defying Gravity” or anything from Rent, in which she appeared in the same theater nearly three decades earlier. The performer sings and acts her heart out, but you still leave the theater humming the projections.”
Entertainment Weekly: “with her Broadway return, Menzel herself is striving towards a goal she has already proven capable of, time and time again: seizing the spotlight, and blowing the crowd away with a powerhouse performance.”
To find out more about the show visit: https://www.redwoodmusical.com/