While set designer Jason Ardizzone-West was pursuing his undergraduate degree, his professor referenced the Joyce Kilmer poem “Trees”: Poems are made by fools like me / But only God can make a tree.
“Well, God and Disney,” Ardizzone-West amends over Zoom. “That was always the cautionary voice in my head as a set designer: Be very careful when you’re trying to recreate a tree on stage, because what’s so incredible about trees is that they’re inherently very hard to make. They grow.”
Nearly 30 years later, Ardizzone-West was presented with the opportunity to design the set of Redwood, a 110-minute musical about a gallerist named Jesse (Idina Menzel) who, reeling from a personal tragedy, flees her wife and life in New York to drive across the country. She eventually ends up near Eureka, California, where she finds solace in a 300-foot-tall redwood giant she calls “Stella.”
The show, which opened at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre in February, was co-conceived, written, and directed by Tina Landau, who envisioned welcoming the audience into the emotional landscape of the forest. “We’re not trying to trick the audience into thinking that they re looking at a real tree,” explains Ardizzone-West. “We’re trying to bring the audience with us on a journey so that they feel like they’re experiencing what our main character, Jesse, is experiencing.”
Nevertheless, Landau’s concept required Menzel and her co-stars to don harnesses and ascend Stella, to dance while climbing, and–in Menzel’s case–to belt while suspended upside-down in the air. The show also required…a tree.
In the Kabbalistic creation myth Tikkun Olam, which Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon), a canopy botanist studying Stella, relays, 10 vessels of primordial light are sent to earth. But the light is so powerful that the vessels crack, scattering this brightness across the universe. Humans’ purpose on earth is to try to gather the light and repair the brokenness of the world.
“Jesse’s healing and trying to come to terms with this real fracture in her life,” says Ardizzone-West. “That image of a broken, empty vessel was really my starting point for what the space looked like.”
While Stella’s front resembles a 14-foot-wide tree trunk, she rotates throughout the show to reveal her posterior, which is made up of LED screens. These match the series of large, sculptural screens that surround her in concentric circles, tree ring-like, and are filled with moving digital images created by video designer Hana S. Kim. When the characters are on the ground, the screens evoke a dreamy and dynamic forest floor. When the players ascend to the canopy layer, the screens shift to convey the limitlessness of the sky.
“We did it that way to really showcase the ever-changing nature of the redwood forest,” says Kim over Zoom. “Stella is a physical being that we can touch and interact [with], but… the forest is always ever-changing and it always has different breaths and different ways of showing itself to us.”
Melecio Estrella, artistic director of the vertical performance company Bandaloop, joined Redwood during the early stages of production to choreograph its aerial dance sequences. Having collaborated with Pink on a duet for the 2017 American Music Awards, Estrella was well acquainted with the challenge of creating airborne movement that also supported vocalizing.
Luckily, Menzel, who played Elphaba in the original 2003 Broadway production of Wicked, was already familiar with executing gravity-defying feats onstage. Estrella kicked off Menzel’s training on a real-life redwood, which they ascended 40 feet using climbing gear. Later, they practiced descending the side of a 150-foot building often used for Bandaloop rehearsals. “[She was] very brave,” says Estrella over Zoom. (“You straddle the wall and then you kind of go [over the edge],” Menzel later recalled in an Instagram video. “I was too prideful to say that I was friggin’ terrified.”)
Bandaloop has historically used bridges, skyscrapers, billboards, cliffs, and other outdoor arenas as the backdrops for their performances. But choreographing for the Nederlander Theatre meant a “consistent canvas,” where Estrella didn’t have to account for weather or an audience whose vantage point is constantly changing. “It’s much more contained and predictable,” he says.
So, too, was Stella specifically designed to support Menzel and her costars’ mid-air endeavors: Special attention was paid to carving covert handholds into her bark.
“A lot of people use the word ‘immersive’ to try to describe what we’re doing,” says Ardizzone-West. “I think what we were focused on is making the space and the story embrace the audience…rather than immersing the audience.”
Estrella also believes that Redwood creates a kind of sanctuary for its viewers. “We are all experiencing grief and the world we live in doesn’t necessarily give us many places to feel or to process that grief,” he says. “[Landau] has created a story where nature is a place we can go to feel and to heal.”