She may have once been the reigning queen of Broadway, but it’s been a little while since Jewish actress and singer Idina Menzel was on the Broadway stage. She was the original Maureen in “Rent,” Fanny Brice in the 2002 production of “Funny Girl,” the original Elphaba in “Wicked” (and even had a small but mighty role in the new movie opposite OG Glinda Kristen Chenoweth). But last time she was on Broadway was in 2014, in the musical “If/Then” as Elizabeth.
Now, a decade later, the “Uncut Gems” and “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” star is finally back in a new timely and incredibly Jewish musical called “Redwood,” where she plays Jesse, a Jewish mom who, after a tragic loss, drives away from her life to the Redwood forest in Northern California. There, a chance encounter gives her a way to change her life as she knows it.
The musical is about so many things — grieving, finding yourself and interconnectedness — but it’s also about the power and importance of nature, the environment and the Jewish value of tikkun olam. It feels like kismet that this very Jewish musical premiered on the week of Tu Bishvat, the Jewish holiday sometimes referred to as the New Year of the Trees, a holiday that celebrates our connection with nature which people often mark by planting trees.
Menzel, who grew up Jewish on Long Island and started her singing career on the wedding and bar/bat mitzvah circuit (though she never had her own bat mitzvah), was inspired to co-create the musical by activist and tree sitter Julia Butterfly Hill, who spent 738 days in a California redwood between 1997 and 1999 and managed to save that tree from being cut down. The same year Hill settled in that redwood tree, the “Redwood Rabbis” held their own subversive Tu Bisvhat action, planting redwood seeds and chanting kaddish for the creatures killed during the logging of those trees that they wished to halt.
In “Redwood,” Menzel’s Jesse, a workaholic reeling from grief, meets two researchers in that forest trying to study and preserve it. One of them is Becca, played by “Six” star Khaila Wilcoxon, a Black Jewish California native who studies forest sequestration and who cares deeply about the Redwood forest. Becca is at first weary of Jesse, but the two connect when she rightly points out that Jesse is, like her, Jewish. Becca shares with her the Jewish concepts that inform her life — “bal tashchit,” the Jewish prohibition from destroying the natural world, and tikkun olam, the Jewish value of repairing the world, which Becca even sings a powerful song about.
Jesse’s son, Spencer, is played by Jewish actor Zachary Noah Piser, who back in 2022 became the first Asian American Evan Hansen in the Broadway musical “Dear Evan Hansen.” Like Spencer, Piser is from California, where he grew up deeply connected to his local Jewish community and had a swimming-themed (!) bar mitzvah.
Menzel first floated the idea of this musical to Jewish playwright Tina Landau, who created “Floyd Collins” (which is once again playing in Lincoln Center starring Jewish musical sensation Jeremy Jordan) and the “SpongeBob SquarePants” musical. Landau has always been fascinated by the idea of people living in trees and the two connected about it, but things never went further. That is, until 2020 came around and the pandemic halted both their work, so they decided to start on the new musical in earnest. Landau and Menzel quickly realized that this play needed to be about more than just environmentalism, and when Landau herself experienced the unimaginable loss of her nephew to a fentanyl overdose, it informed the great loss of a loved one that Jesse experiences in the play.
The play is many things, but also very much an ode to the majestic titular tree. Aside from the concepts of “bal taschit” and “tikkun olam,” it also seems to touch on the Jewish concept of “yirah,” awe at nature around us. The set beautifully recreates the grandeur of the Redwood forest, with a gigantic tree that Jesse climbs taking center stage. Menzel was taught how to sing and dance while suspended in the air by the Oakland group BANDALOOP, who also worked with another Jewish superstar, Pink, on her suspended singing.
“The redwoods signify everything I think we strive for as human beings,” Menzel, who also became a certified redwood climber for the role, told the New York Times. “Their roots clasp hands with each other and sustain each other and hydrate and fuel each other and hold each other up.” The play touches too on a another Jewish concept, that of mutual responsibility. As the Talmud says, “Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh” — we are, all the people of Israel, responsible for one another. That feeling of community and connectivity, Menzel recalled in recent interview, is also palpable among this incredibly talented cast
“Redwood” is a reminder of another community centered play that premiered at the same Nederlander Theater: “Rent.” Thirty years ago, Menzel made her Broadway debut in that theater, a bittersweet experience as the cast was reeling from the sudden loss of the play’s Jewish creater, Jonathan Larsen. It was also the place where she met her first husband and the father of her son, Taye Diggs. Now, she’s there again, playing a Jewish character, who like all her greatest roles, from Elphaba to Princess Elsa, is complicated and strong.
There’s something that Menzel said about the beauty of the redwood trees that I think feels especially relevant during this year full of Jewish grief and strife. “The most poignant thing to me is something that they have called heartwood, like your heart,” Menzel told CBS Good Morning. “Heartwood is the innermost of the redwood and it’s impervious to disease and decay. It’s actually dead inside the tree, but it’s the strongest part of the tree. I love this idea that our loss and our troubles as human beings kind of help define who we are, and that if we can embrace that loss and that pain, then we can live again.”
If that is not the story of our people, I don’t know what is.
