Idina Menzel was sitting on a bench in a California redwood grove, craving for silence. It was late one autumn afternoon, and I had been attempting for months to get her to fulfill me in a forest the place we may focus on this musical she’d been engaged on for 15 years a couple of girl in a tree, and now right here we had been. But in addition, there was a marriage occasion strolling by, and an unleashed canine that knocked over her hibiscus tea, and an plane buzzing overhead.
Irrespective of. On the drive to the forest from a dance studio the place Menzel had been practising singing the wrong way up, as a result of sure, this musical requires her to bop and sing whereas scaling a large tree, she had been occupied with what she wished to inform me about why she was making a present that’s outwardly about redwoods — it’s known as “Redwood” — but additionally a couple of grieving girl’s seek for sanctuary.
“I’m just a little reticent to say, however I believe I’ve numerous noise in my very own head as an individual,” she informed me as we settled in at Oakland’s Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park. “The concept of escaping and liberating your self from your personal ache or loneliness or confusion may be very therapeutic to me.”
In an leisure trade the place actors are fortunate to have one career-defining position, Menzel already has three: Maureen, the rabble-rousing efficiency artist in “Hire”; Elphaba, the green-skinned who-are-you-calling-wicked witch in “Depraved”; and Elsa, the ice-conjuring queen in Disney’s animated “Frozen” movies. These characters have many strengths, however serenity is just not one in all them.
“I needed to audition for all of these roles. I didn’t select them — I wanted a job. And but, perhaps someway I appeal to them to me,” Menzel mentioned. “They’re fierce ladies, however I’m not afraid of creating them very fragile at instances. They’re additionally ladies — particularly Elphaba and Elsa — who’re afraid of their energy. They’re afraid that they’re an excessive amount of for individuals, and that their energy will damage individuals. And I believe I really feel that means in my life so much. I’m too huge. 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 highway journey and winds up close to Eureka, Calif., the place, awed by the hovering redwoods, she befriends a pair of cover botanists and persuades them to let her keep on a platform excessive in a tree. The musical, first staged final 12 months at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, not solely options climbing, however it’s also technologically bold, with greater than a thousand LED panels enveloping the stage, providing panoramic forest vistas.
“It’s not like a Nationwide Geographic present — it’s poetic, and has an summary aesthetic, the place the whole lot is completed from the angle of Jesse’s thoughts,” Menzel mentioned. “So we climb, however we additionally dance, no matter which means within the timber.”
To make the climbing sensible, she has been working with Bandaloop, a dance firm primarily based in Oakland that makes a speciality of “vertical efficiency” — dancing on the edges of buildings and bridges and partitions. The corporate, credited with vertical motion and vertical choreography for “Redwood,” has labored with entertainers earlier than — together with the singer Pink — however that is its first theater enterprise.
Love Letter to Redwoods
On the day I met Menzel in California, we began at Bandaloop Studios; once I arrived, she was suspended a number of toes within the air, with a black-and-red harness strapped over her bluejeans and grey half-zip hoodie, and he or she was practising spinning her physique whereas parallel to the ground. It was onerous to regulate her motion, and at one level she by chance kicked Bandaloop’s creative director, Melecio Estrella, within the groin.
“I simply wish to bear in mind how one can do the factor I knew how one can do!” she mentioned with frustration.
Gentle streamed in from the road, bikes roared by, and instructors supplied encouragement. “That’s it!” “You’re doing nice!”
Menzel beamed as she executed a stable spin, however then reminded herself that was simply the beginning. “After which sing actually excessive notes!” she mentioned.
The problem of determining how one can flip round on the aspect of a tree whereas singing was an interesting one. “To offer me one thing bodily to do may be very therapeutic for me, and it will get me out of my head,” she mentioned. “It retains me current. In any other case, I’m going to fall down.”
Menzel, who’s 53 and final appeared on Broadway a decade in the past, is deeply concerned with each side of the present. She had the preliminary concept that turned “Redwood,” contributed to the writing, stars in it, and her firm, Loudmouth Media, is among the many lead producers.
“Redwood” opens at a very difficult time for brand spanking new musicals, when a pointy rise in capitalization prices implies that vanishingly few such reveals change into worthwhile on Broadway.
However new musicals have been on the coronary heart of Menzel’s stage profession. She mentioned she doesn’t really feel like others see her as an excellent match for revivals of traditional works, however she additionally clearly revels within the messy means of creative creation, saying, “There’s numerous tales nonetheless to be informed, you realize.”
This musical is, partially, a love letter to redwoods. Menzel’s character sees them as sentient. “The redwoods signify the whole lot I believe we try for as human beings,” Menzel mentioned. “Their roots clasp fingers with one another and maintain one another and hydrate and gasoline one another and maintain one another up.”
In preparation for the present, Menzel and her sister took a highway journey to the Avenue of the Giants, a scenic forest drive in Northern California. I requested her how she feels when she’s surrounded by towering timber. “It may well make you’re feeling utterly alone, or like part of one thing astounding on the similar time,” she mentioned. “That’s what I like about it.”
“Redwood” has its origins within the story of Julia Butterfly Hill, an environmental activist who within the late ’90s spent 738 days residing in a 1,000-year-old tree, known as Luna, in an effort to forestall it from being logged. (The timber firm backed down.)
Menzel approached Tina Landau, a theater director for whom she had as soon as unsuccessfully auditioned (for a 2001 revival of “Bells Are Ringing”), and advised they collaborate. “She known as me out of the blue, and mentioned, ‘Can we meet for espresso?’” Landau recalled. “And she or he tells me, ‘I’ve been obsessive about this girl Julia Butterfly Hill.’ And I mentioned, ‘That’s humorous, as a result of I’m just a little obsessive about timber,’ and I had a factor about individuals in timber.”
Menzel was drawn to the theme of bravery; Landau was extra all for why individuals retreat into nature. Nothing got here of it. Menzel known as once more; she had been writing shards of songs and story. However they had been each busy.
Then the pandemic hit. Landau, idled as a director, was specializing in writing, and now they acquired critical. They determined they didn’t wish to make a musical about environmental activism; no matter they did can be fictional and psychological, a couple of girl’s journey into the redwoods and up right into a tree. However why was she there?
Life, or fairly demise, tragically advised a narrative line. That spring, Landau’s 23-year-old nephew, to whom she was fairly shut, died of an unintended drug overdose. The director discovered herself residence in Connecticut, searching for solace whereas considering timber. And shortly, their woman-in-a-tree present had its again story: The character can be unmoored by her son’s drug-related demise.
Landau, who then drove to California and visited the redwoods, started to think about the timber as exemplars, as academics, as guides. She was pondering, too, about Menzel. “I wished to create a task that might stretch her and develop her and invite her into different territories,” she mentioned, “raging differently, and erratic in numerous methods.” Additionally: The character can be humorous. Menzel has a wry humorousness, and Landau discovered herself taking notes throughout their conversations, turning snippets of Menzel’s patter into dialogue.
Going for ‘Huge Notes’
They nonetheless wanted a songwriter. Menzel wished somebody with a up to date pop sound; Landau knew she wished a contemporary voice from outdoors musical theater. “I simply didn’t wish to go to anybody I knew,” she mentioned.
Scouring the web, Landau recognized eight promising younger ladies, and reached out to them chilly, inviting them to jot down two songs on spec. Kate Diaz, a songwriter from Chicago, stood out; she had launched acoustic albums and was working in Los Angeles on movie and TV scores. Diaz was simply 23, and her music instantly appealed to Menzel and Landau. “She has this actually natural, soulful, melodic sound,” Menzel mentioned.
Diaz set about learning Menzel’s voice, listening to the solid recordings of “Hire” and “Depraved” in addition to solo albums. “I remembered ‘Let It Go’ — how may you not?” she mentioned, referring to the blockbuster, Oscar-winning “Frozen” track. “She will be so highly effective but additionally be so inside,” Diaz added. “There are such a lot of components of her voice to jot down for. I wished her to have these huge notes, but additionally she has such a uncooked, emotional decrease register, too.”
Menzel has been nurturing that voice for a very long time. She carried out as an adolescent on Lengthy Island, singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs. “Hire,” which opened Off Broadway in 1996 after which transferred to Broadway that very same 12 months, was her first skilled job after graduating from N.Y.U., and after that every one she actually wished to do was sing.
“I left ‘Hire’ and I had a giant document deal and I assumed I used to be going to be the subsequent Alanis Morissette, so I simply targeted on being a songwriter and being a rock ’n’ roll star and making albums,” she mentioned. “After which I acquired dropped from the document label and I didn’t promote any information. I needed to begin over again.”
“Depraved,” which opened on Broadway in 2003 after a run in San Francisco, was that new begin — Menzel received a Tony Award for her efficiency, and it cemented her stardom.
Within the years that adopted, she moved to Los Angeles, the place she lives together with her husband, Aaron Lohr, an actor turned therapist, and a teenage son, Walker, from her first marriage, to her “Hire” co-star Taye Diggs.
Menzel has returned to Broadway simply as soon as, within the 2014 manufacturing of “If/Then,” however she has additionally labored Off Broadway (most not too long ago in a 2018 play, “Skintight”), on tv (she performed Lea Michele’s mom on “Glee”) and in movie (she made two motion pictures reverse Adam Sandler, together with “Uncut Gems”) and he or she has an lively live performance profession. A cringey second when John Travolta mistakenly known as her “Adele Dazeem” on the 2014 Academy Awards redounded to her profit. President Biden introduced her with a Nationwide Medal of Arts, with a quotation saying she had “empowered tens of millions of Individuals of all ages and backgrounds to be sturdy, use their voice, and lead with their hearts.”
She remains to be uncomfortable with being seen as a task mannequin. “It feels phony typically to signify empowerment and shallowness when, you realize, there are days once I can’t get off the bed,” she informed me. “However I’m actually pleased with what I’ve achieved and I’m actually pleased with the way it’s been multigenerational and that I made these followers from ‘Hire,’ and now they’ve children, and now their children watch ‘Frozen.’ And I really feel like we’ve all grown up collectively.”
These followers are dedicated to her. They packed the primary preview efficiency of “Redwood” on Jan. 24, giving her sustained applause only for strolling onto the stage, and when a technical concern compelled the present to take a large pause (not unheard-of in early previews), she got here onstage to banter with the viewers, fielding questions on “Hire” and “Depraved,” greeting youngsters within the entrance row (she gently knowledgeable them that this present has cursing) and main the group in singing “Pleased Birthday” to a couple celebrating theatergoers.
‘Like a Homecoming’
“Redwood” is being staged on the Nederlander Theater, which has monumental significance for Menzel: It’s the place she made her Broadway debut 29 years in the past in “Hire.” “Truthfully, it’s been very emotional, like a homecoming, and it’s inflicting me to replicate so much on who I’m and the place I’ve come from,” Menzel informed me once we met in her dressing room 9 days earlier than that first preview.
That dressing room is similar one she shared throughout “Hire,” though it has since been expanded, and this time she has it to herself. She hadn’t absolutely settled in, however she was planning to cowl the partitions with pictures of redwoods, and sparkly wallpaper close to the self-importance, “simply to embrace my theater diva.”
She had spent a part of that morning atop the large tree at heart stage (Jesse names the tree Stella), and whereas the artistic crew labored on technical components of the present, Menzel sang bits of Glinda’s soprano numbers from “Depraved,” explaining that she and Kristin Chenoweth, who originated that position, have lengthy fantasized a couple of profit live performance by which they swap components.
How does she sq. her appreciable accomplishments together with her persistent angst? “I’m getting just a little uninterested in my self-deprecation,” she mentioned. “In a means, it’s been a crutch. It’s a means of naming a shortcoming in my life earlier than another person can say it. However I additionally acknowledge that it makes me weak, and that being weak is so essential to being an ideal performer and with the ability to join together with your viewers. Making errors and being fallible are the issues that draw individuals to you.”
So, sure, she is pleased with her profession, and glad to have sufficient monetary safety that she will be selective about what components she takes. She mentioned she expects the stage to stay essential in her profession, partially as a result of, “the theater will at all times welcome me,” including that “there are higher roles for older ladies in theater, versus worrying about your magnificence and your age in Hollywood.”
I requested her once more about her quest for quiet, which looks like it should be so onerous to search out in Occasions Sq., at tech rehearsal, whereas shouldering a Broadway present. However Menzel mentioned she was loving all of it. “I stroll into what I really feel is a sanctuary — the rehearsal room, or the theater — and I really feel at one with myself, and comfy,” she mentioned. “I consider it as my residence, and the place I really feel closest to my truest self.”
