UNDER THE SPREADING REDWOOD TREE… By Peter Filichia
idina Menzel wasn’t the only one galvanized by the story.
Tina Landau was equally engaged when she heard about julia butterfly hill.
(And yes, julia prefers small letters in the spelling of her name.)
In 1997, when hill was a mere 23, she climbed a 1,000-plus-year-old redwood. After scaling 180 feet, she planted herself there for 738 consecutive days. Her goal was to bring attention to the threat that forests were facing.
Environmental lobbyists certainly took notice. Only after hill and they had received promises that three acres of land surrounding the redwood would be protected did the intrepid climber come down from the tree.
Menzel saw the makings of a musical, and Landau agreed. They wouldn’t tell hill’s story, though, but would co-write one of their own. Menzel would portray Jesse, a spouse who leaves her wife Mel on the East Coast and sets off on a cross-country journey. Little by little, the audience would see why.
Menzel hadn’t been on Broadway since she was Tony-nominated for IF/THEN. That was 11 years ago, around the time when Landau was seeking composers and lyricists for SPONGEBOB SQUARE PANTS. She made a point of avoiding those songwriters who have studied musical theater at universities or workshops conducted by ASCAP or BMI. Landau went off the beaten Broadway path and hired more than a dozen songwriters from the world of pop. Their songs will be heard in hundreds upon hundreds of productions of SPONGEBOB in the upcoming months.
For REDWOOD, Landau again “wanted to find a sound and an approach that would be fresh and outside-the-box, so we did a search for a young, female composer who was not steeped in the musical theater tradition.”
That meant cold-calling and cold-emailing. In early 2021, Kate Diaz was one of her recipients. Coincidentally, like julia butterfly hill when she set off on her odyssey, Diaz was all of 23. Yet despite her youth, Diaz had already penned music for a number of films and television shows.
Diaz might well have felt her participation was meant to be, for she received Landau’s email while hiking through the Santa Monica Mountains. When Landau sent her a picture of hill atop the tree, Diaz was inspired to write “Great Escape,” in which Jesse climbs the redwood and sees it as “nature’s remedy.”
That song was enough to have Landau and Menzel ask Diaz to continue. “She had never written a musical before,” Landau recalled, happily. “Perfect for us!”
Diaz’s sound has been described as pop, alt rock and alt folk – all of which would fit Menzel’s power, vulnerability, belt notes and lower register. Diaz aimed to “combine contemporary pop grooves and melodies with big cinematic orchestration to communicate the story’s dichotomy of an intimate journey set in the grand scale of the redwoods.”
Very rarely does a songwriter’s first attempt at a song survive rewrites and workshops, still to be heard when the show reaches Broadway. But the 19 tracks on REDWOOD’s cast album include “Great Escape.”
First, though, we meet Jesse, who’s been a businesswoman, wife and mother. Now, though, circumstances have forced her to play only two of those roles. They’re not enough to keep her moored. She gets in her car and sings “Drive.”
“Go far, go faster, stay calm and push the pedal down. But what comes after? No clue, but just get outta town.”
She also gets off her cell phone and won’t return the many phone calls from Mel (the velvet-voiced De’Adre Aziza) on her drive to somewhere, anywhere. In “Looking through This Lens,” Mel observes that “For 20 years you’ve had my heart; we’ve barely spent time apart. Now all I can do is try living life without you.”
But when you reach Eureka, California, you’ve gone about as far as you can go. There in the middle of a redwood forest, Jesse meets Finn and Becca, two botanists who have come to regard the redwoods as their surrogate children. Although Finn is a crusty guy in his 50s and Becca is substantially younger, she’s the more conservative and has no use for rank amateur Jesse.
In “Climb,” when Jesse sings “What’s that clip? Would you let me see?” Becca responds with a curt “No.” After eight consecutive questions, Jesse finally blurts out, “Do you wish that I’d stop asking questions right now?” Becca’s response is a repeat of Jesse’s previous five words: “Stop asking questions right now.” In “Little Redwoods,” she demands that Jesse “Honor the giants; bow down in silence.”
Jesse will, in her own way; she doesn’t stay in a hotel but on the premises. Now she can lie back and savor “The Stars.” She wonders, “Night sky, can you show me the way? Can the stars lend their light to me? Can they shine through and brighten my dreams?”
And what’s Finn’s story? He tells it in “Big Tree Religion,” in which he admits to youthful atheism until “I found salvation – my revelation!” – but in the redwoods, not any of the usual gods that people adore. Now Finn wants to share the emotional wealth: “I’ve made it my mission to share big tree religion. I know it will save her.”
Meanwhile back east, Mel sings about “Back Then,” revealing to us both the start of her relationship with Jesse and what derailed it. At this point, Jesse is not able to return “back then” to her. Can she go home again? Or is she home?
REDWOOD embraces one of America’s favorite themes: Return to Nature. Here, though, director Landau made nature more challenging for her star. When Menzel played Elphaba in WICKED, she had to fly to the top of the proscenium arch. Although REDWOOD didn’t demand that she go nearly as high, Menzel had to sing while not only climbing the huge redwood but also while hanging upside down.
Try that, Elphaba!
If you miss REDWOOD on Broadway when it finishes its run this weekend, its original cast album will keep the show alive. No, you won’t be able to enjoy it as long as the life of a redwood, but you will be able to savor it for some time to come.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY: 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available on Amazon.
