REDWOOD
Book by Tina Landau
Music by Kate Diaz
Lyrics by Kate Diaz and Tina Landau
Conceived by Tina Landau and Idina Menzel
Additional Contributions by Idina Menzel
Directed by Tina Landau
Nederlander Theatre
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
Prelude 1
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal (more so in the current political climate than ever). However, I still haven’t quite hugged the concept that I reached senior-citizenry five years ago. And I have the same contradictory reactions of many of my similarly matured colleagues and peers to the current cultural climate. Which is, while I’ve witnessed the growing pains of a whole helluva lot of social progress, and celebrate the majority of it, and encourage dramatized works that promote it in a manner that seems organic to the given piece’s inherent agenda…I reflexively pull back from any work or treatment of a work that hammers at it. Especially by conspicuously imposing it.
And here’s another confession. Clearly, there are many who are captivated by the new musical Redwood, and goodness knows, there are some captivating things in it, including some breathtaking scenic effects and passionate performances delivered by a talented cast, all more-than-capably directed.
So this review isn’t to say YEA nor NAY about Redwood, but to give you some insight as to whether or not you’ll say YEA or NAY. Absolutely colored by my opinion. But you’ll still find your answer. I think.
Prelude 2
I wish with all my being that the term “woke” hadn’t been so corrupted as to be a right-wing buzzword, because in my lexicon—and that of many liberals I know who perhaps skew a bit older—it means something quite different. And because of the difference—and because even this interpretation is a far distance from the original meaning (a contemporary African-American shorthand for increased socio-political awareness)—this opening use of the word will be my last here, by way of recognizable touchpoint…and I’m going to migrate from it to a new term of my own, so the intended meaning is literal rather than symbolic.
Hyper-accommodation.
Which mortally wounds just about any art it touches.
There is a sense, I suppose, in which it just had to occur. Society had to get to a point where everybody can play fairly. Or anyway fairly enough. (In particular now that all the progress of over half-century is under threat. Which is a complete freaking nightmare. Woke? Wake me up!) And I’m old enough to have watched, almost from the beginning of televised coverage/exposure/example, the struggles, breakthroughs, and eventual explosion of marginalized groups into the mainstream of society. And dramatized storytelling. Where once characters of color were pointedly so—to cite just one marginalized category as a stand-in for all—we moved to characters who just happened to be of color, and from there to an insured proportion of characters of color…to an insistence that historically-defined non-ethnic characters be pointedly redefined as characters of color, often at the cost of verisimilitude–or requiring an adjustment to verisimilitude.
Said adjustment can be learned, insinuated, enforced…can by made by both audiences and creatives…and can move in either direction…and no one condition is necessarily exclusive of the other. It’s complicated. Personally, my threshold shifts on a per-case basis. Sometimes I can roll with the adjustment easily. Sometimes I have to work at it a bit.
And sometimes…sometimes…
The third category comes either when an aspect of beloved pop culture is gutted and distorted in the repurposing…or, as in the case of the new musical Redwood, when it seems as if hyper-accommodation is all there is.
The Review
Our heroine is Jesse (Idina Menzel), a gay, Jewish urbanite of California who, without prior notice to anybody or planning, has put on hold…her career…and her relationship with her African-American domestic partner, Mel (De’Adre Aziza)…to run off on what telegraphs itself as the proverbial voyage of self-discovery. Starting with a need to grieve by herself. The triggering incident: the death of her young adult son, Spencer, seen in flashbacks (Zachary Noah Piser): an accidental overdose of drugs laced with fentanyl. Her random flight has taken her deep into a redwood forest. There, she encounters a pair of professional arborists: Finn (Michael Park) an old hand (also an old white guy) who takes a platonic shine to Jesse, and leans toward allowing her to accompany and participate in their work; and his work-partner Becca (Khalia Wilcoxon), an outspoken black woman, a generation younger than Jesse, who is adamantly opposed to enabling the self-indulgence of a social runaway. No surprise, Becca’s objections are overridden. (As they must be or: story over.)
The Final character (of course) is a gigantic redwood tree. With which (whom?) Jesse will (also of course) have a different kind of deep communion. And ultimately (of course) find herself.
Count ‘em down with me. Top of the pops.
Jewish lesbian businesswoman on the run.
Leaves behind her African-American partner.
Son has died of an overdose. Not just any overdose. Fentanyl.
The most ecologically teeming setting possible. A forest. In California.
Its guardians: an old white guy with final-word authority and his female African-American second who nonetheless has nearly equal agency.
And in lieu of a naval to gaze at, a literal tree to literally hug.
Beyond that, nothing in the way of actual plot. It’s all internal journey. Via Jesse’s communion with the tree, she’s able to confront what haunts her. None of which is unpredictable or unfamiliar. But it is extravagantly packaged: via projections and mechanism, much illusion of height to create the euphoria of its vantage point (so much that I started to think of the midair suspensions as Flying by Oy, though it’s really by Melecio Estrella of BANDALOOP). The dialogue (book by director Tina Landau, with “additional contributions” by co-conceiver Menzel) is therapy standardl; the lyrics by Landau and composer-orchestrator Kate Diaz are basically all soul-baring, nothing much in the way of subtext; and commensurately, the music supporting them is attractive but rarely as cathartic as intended, over-emphasizing notions of primal release, with melismas and money notes galore.
The saving grace—and this is where you may discover the camp in which you’ll find yourself—is that at least Redwood’s creative team are delivering a story, however derivative, of their own devising. They’re not foisting all this upon a property that doesn’t need hyper-accommodation and doesn’t want it. For whatever it’s worth, this is their storytelling universe to do with as they please; to populate with as many group-representative characters as they please. More power to that kind of freedom. But it has as much potential to distance as to attract.
I can’t claim my reaction is generational. I was near equally senior citizens—women, which may be relevant—who loved Redwood. They may have experienced points of identification I only recognized. By contrast, the senior citizen with me—also a woman, likewise liberal—despised it. Redwood is something of a Rorschach Test in that regard.
I can only tell you that my personal test results saw hyper-accommodation delivering a super-conventional scenario in an ultra-high-tech theme park. And that yours may be completely the opposite. If Ms Menzel’s theatrical flight trajectory symbolizes anything, it’s a pendulum swing. Follow your instinct.