| “I’m a believer, big trees can heal ya.” Maybe, but they can’t help ya write a good musical. REDWOOD is a feast of triteness. Heartbreak sends Idina Menzel into the wood where she belts her way through trauma while swinging from the titular redwood. The “video design” is the whole, so to speak, show, a Hayden Planetarium show to be precise. Nothing here works: the score is, kindly speaking, unvarying and indistinct. The book is aggressively facile; you know just where this show is headed in the first five minutes because you’ve been (pushed) there before. Worse, it reduces grief to a bromide; it doesn’t nearly address the depth and complexity of sorrow. From start to finish—two grim hours—REDWOOD is just misbegotten. |
