Idina Menzel was sitting on a bench in a California redwood grove, yearning for silence. It was late one autumn afternoon, and I had been trying for months to get her to meet me in a forest where we could discuss this musical she’d been working on for 15 years about a woman in a tree, and now here we were. But also, there was a wedding party walking by, and an unleashed dog that knocked over her hibiscus tea, and an aircraft buzzing overhead.
No matter. On the drive to the forest from a dance studio where Menzel had been practicing singing upside down, because yes, this musical requires her to dance and sing while scaling a giant tree, she had been thinking about what she wanted to tell me about why she was making a show that is outwardly about redwoods — it’s called “Redwood” — but also about a grieving woman’s search for sanctuary.
“I’m a little reticent to say, but I think I have a lot of noise in my own head as a person,” she told me as we settled in at Oakland’s Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park. “The idea of escaping and freeing yourself from your own pain or loneliness or confusion is very healing to me.”
In an entertainment industry where actors are lucky to have one career-defining role, Menzel already has three: Maureen, the rabble-rousing performance artist in “Rent”; Elphaba, the green-skinned who-are-you-calling-wicked witch in “Wicked”; and Elsa, the ice-conjuring queen in Disney’s animated “Frozen” films. Those characters have many strengths, but serenity is not one of them.
“I had to audition for all of those roles. I didn’t choose them — I needed a job. And yet, maybe somehow I attract them to me,” Menzel said. “They’re fierce women, but I’m not afraid of making them very fragile at times. They’re also women — especially Elphaba and Elsa — who are afraid of their power. They’re afraid that they’re too much for people, and that their power will hurt people. And I think I feel that way in my life a lot. I’m too big. Too loud.”
“Redwood,” which is in previews on Broadway and is scheduled to open Feb. 13, tells the fictional story of an anguished New York gallerist, named Jesse, who embarks on an unplanned road trip and winds up near Eureka, Calif., where, awed by the soaring redwoods, she befriends a pair of canopy botanists and persuades them to let her stay on a platform high in a tree. The musical, first staged last year at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, not only features climbing, but it is also technologically ambitious, with more than a thousand LED panels enveloping the stage, offering panoramic forest vistas.
“It’s not like a National Geographic show — it’s poetic, and has an abstract aesthetic, where everything is done from the perspective of Jesse’s mind,” Menzel said. “So we climb, but we also dance, whatever that means in the trees.”
To make the climbing realistic, she has been working with Bandaloop, a dance company based in Oakland that specializes in “vertical performance” — dancing on the sides of buildings and bridges and walls. The company, credited with vertical movement and vertical choreography for “Redwood,” has worked with entertainers before — including the singer Pink — but this is its first theater venture.
Love Letter to Redwoods
On the day I met Menzel in California, we started at Bandaloop Studios; when I arrived, she was suspended a few feet in the air, with a black-and-red harness strapped over her bluejeans and gray half-zip hoodie, and she was practicing spinning her body while parallel to the floor. It was hard to control her movement, and at one point she accidentally kicked Bandaloop’s artistic director, Melecio Estrella, in the groin.
“I just want to remember how to do the thing I knew how to do!” she said with frustration.
Light streamed in from the street, motorcycles roared by, and instructors offered encouragement. “That’s it!” “You’re doing great!”
Menzel beamed as she executed a solid spin, but then reminded herself that was just the start. “And then sing really high notes!” she said.
The challenge of figuring out how to flip around on the side of a tree while singing was an appealing one. “To give me something physical to do is very healing for me, and it gets me out of my head,” she said. “It keeps me present. Otherwise, I’m going to fall down.”
Menzel, who is 53 and last appeared on Broadway a decade ago, is deeply involved with every aspect of the show. She had the initial idea that became “Redwood,” contributed to the writing, stars in it, and her company, Loudmouth Media, is among the lead producers.
“Redwood” opens at a particularly challenging time for new musicals, when a sharp rise in capitalization costs means that vanishingly few such shows become profitable on Broadway.
But new musicals have been at the heart of Menzel’s stage career. She said she doesn’t feel like others see her as a good fit for revivals of classic works, but she also obviously revels in the messy process of artistic creation, saying, “There’s a lot of stories still to be told, you know.”
This musical is, in part, a love letter to redwoods. Menzel’s character sees them as sentient. “The redwoods signify everything I think we strive for as human beings,” Menzel said. “Their roots clasp hands with each other and sustain each other and hydrate and fuel each other and hold each other up.”
In preparation for the show, Menzel and her sister took a road trip to the Avenue of the Giants, a scenic forest drive in Northern California. I asked her how she feels when she’s surrounded by towering trees. “It can make you feel completely alone, or like a part of something astounding at the same time,” she said. “That’s what I love about it.”
“Redwood” has its origins in the story of Julia Butterfly Hill, an environmental activist who in the late ’90s spent 738 days living in a 1,000-year-old tree, called Luna, in an effort to prevent it from being logged. (The timber company backed down.)
Menzel approached Tina Landau, a theater director for whom she had once unsuccessfully auditioned (for a 2001 revival of “Bells Are Ringing”), and suggested they collaborate. “She called me out of the blue, and said, ‘Can we meet for coffee?’” Landau recalled. “And she tells me, ‘I’ve been obsessed with this woman Julia Butterfly Hill.’ And I said, ‘That’s funny, because I’m a little obsessed with trees,’ and I had a thing about people in trees.”
Menzel was drawn to the theme of bravery; Landau was more interested in why people retreat into nature. Nothing came of it. Menzel called again; she had been writing shards of songs and story. But they were both busy.
Then the pandemic hit. Landau, idled as a director, was focusing on writing, and now they got serious. They decided they didn’t want to make a musical about environmental activism; whatever they did would be fictional and psychological, about a woman’s journey into the redwoods and up into a tree. But why was she there?
Life, or rather death, tragically suggested a story line. That spring, Landau’s 23-year-old nephew, to whom she was quite close, died of an accidental drug overdose. The director found herself home in Connecticut, seeking solace while contemplating trees. And soon, their woman-in-a-tree show had its back story: The character would be unmoored by her son’s drug-related death. (In the musical, that drug is fentanyl.)
Landau, who then drove to California and visited the redwoods, began to think of the trees as exemplars, as teachers, as guides. She was thinking, too, about Menzel. “I wanted to create a role that would stretch her and expand her and invite her into other territories,” she said, “raging in a different way, and erratic in different ways.” Also: The character would be funny. Menzel has a wry sense of humor, and Landau found herself taking notes during their conversations, turning snippets of Menzel’s patter into dialogue.
Going for ‘Big Notes’
They still needed a songwriter. Menzel wanted someone with a contemporary pop sound; Landau knew she wanted a fresh voice from outside musical theater. “I just didn’t want to go to anyone I knew,” she said.
Scouring the internet, Landau identified eight promising young women, and reached out to them cold, inviting them to write two songs on spec. Kate Diaz, a songwriter from Chicago, stood out; she had released acoustic albums and was working in Los Angeles on film and TV scores. Diaz was just 23, and her music immediately appealed to Menzel and Landau. “She has this really organic, soulful, melodic sound,” Menzel said.
Diaz set about studying Menzel’s voice, listening to the cast recordings of “Rent” and “Wicked” as well as solo albums. “I remembered ‘Let It Go’ — how could you not?” she said, referring to the blockbuster, Oscar-winning “Frozen” song. “She can be so powerful but also be so internal,” Diaz added. “There are so many parts of her voice to write for. I wanted her to have those big notes, but also she has such a raw, emotional lower register, too.”
Menzel has been nurturing that voice for a long time. She performed as an adolescent on Long Island, singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs. “Rent,” which opened Off Broadway in 1996 and then transferred to Broadway that same year, was her first professional job after graduating from N.Y.U., and after that all she really wanted to do was sing.
“I left ‘Rent’ and I had a big record deal and I thought I was going to be the next Alanis Morissette, so I just focused on being a songwriter and being a rock ’n’ roll star and making albums,” she said. “And then I got dropped from the record label and I didn’t sell any records. I had to start all over again.”
“Wicked,” which opened on Broadway in 2003 after a run in San Francisco, was that new start — Menzel won a Tony Award for her performance, and it cemented her stardom.
In the years that followed, she moved to Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, Aaron Lohr, an actor turned therapist, and a teenage son, Walker, from her first marriage, to her “Rent” co-star Taye Diggs.
Menzel has returned to Broadway just once, in the 2014 production of “If/Then,” but she has also worked Off Broadway (most recently in a 2018 play, “Skintight”), on television (she played Lea Michele’s mother on “Glee”) and in film (she made two movies opposite Adam Sandler, including “Uncut Gems”) and she has an active concert career. A cringey moment when John Travolta mistakenly called her “Adele Dazeem” at the 2014 Academy Awards redounded to her benefit. President Biden presented her with a National Medal of Arts, with a citation saying she had “empowered millions of Americans of all ages and backgrounds to be strong, use their voice, and lead with their hearts.”
She is still uncomfortable with being seen as a role model. “It feels phony sometimes to represent empowerment and self-esteem when, you know, there are days when I can’t get out of bed,” she told me. “But I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished and I’m really proud of how it’s been multigenerational and that I made these fans from ‘Rent,’ and now they have kids, and now their kids watch ‘Frozen.’ And I feel like we’ve all grown up together.”
Those fans are devoted to her. They packed the first preview performance of “Redwood” on Jan. 24, giving her sustained applause just for walking onto the stage, and when a technical issue forced the show to take a sizable pause (not unheard-of in early previews), she came onstage to banter with the audience, fielding questions about “Rent” and “Wicked,” greeting children in the front row (she gently informed them that this show has cursing) and leading the crowd in singing “Happy Birthday” to a few celebrating theatergoers.
‘Like a Homecoming’
“Redwood” is being staged at the Nederlander Theater, which has enormous significance for Menzel: It’s where she made her Broadway debut 29 years ago in “Rent.” “Honestly, it’s been very emotional, like a homecoming, and it’s causing me to reflect a lot on who I am and where I’ve come from,” Menzel told me when we met in her dressing room nine days before that first preview.
That dressing room is the same one she shared during “Rent,” although it has since been expanded, and this time she has it to herself. She hadn’t fully settled in, but she was planning to cover the walls with images of redwoods, and sparkly wallpaper near the vanity, “just to embrace my theater diva.”
She had spent part of that morning atop the huge tree at center stage (Jesse names the tree Stella), and while the creative team worked on technical elements of the show, Menzel sang bits of Glinda’s soprano numbers from “Wicked,” explaining that she and Kristin Chenoweth, who originated that role, have long fantasized about a benefit concert in which they swap parts.
How does she square her considerable accomplishments with her persistent angst? “I’m getting a little tired of my self-deprecation,” she said. “In a way, it’s been a crutch. It’s a way of naming a shortcoming in my life before someone else can say it. But I also recognize that it makes me vulnerable, and that being vulnerable is so important to being a great performer and being able to connect with your audience. Making mistakes and being fallible are the things that draw people to you.”
So, yes, she is proud of her career, and happy to have enough financial security that she can be selective about what parts she takes. She said she expects the stage to remain important in her career, in part because, “the theater will always welcome me,” adding that “there are better roles for older women in theater, as opposed to worrying about your beauty and your age in Hollywood.”
I asked her again about her quest for quiet, which seems like it must be so hard to find in Times Square, at tech rehearsal, while shouldering a Broadway show. But Menzel said she was loving it all. “I walk into what I feel is a sanctuary — the rehearsal room, or the theater — and I feel at one with myself, and comfortable,” she said. “I think of it as my home, and where I feel closest to my truest self.”
