Everything We Know About Redwood, the Musical Bringing Idina Menzel Home to Broadway

Of the new musicals slated for the 2024-25 Broadway season, Redwood has the greatest air of mystery. It’s a brand-new title with a brand-new score, and not only brings Tony winner Idina Menzel back to Broadway for the first time in over a decade, but she returns in creative collaboration with Tina Landau, the wild creative mind whose last Broadway musical was the underwater fever dream, SpongeBob SquarePants. West Coast audiences got a first look at the new project during its La Jolla Playhouse world premiere earlier this year, but here’s the essential information that we East Coasters have managed to piece together.

Return to Nederlander
In 1996, Idina Menzel landed her first professional theater job after her boyfriend secretly faxed her resume to a casting director. The show was Rent. After a couple of months at New York Theatre Workshop, the generation-defining rock musical opened at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre on 41st Street in April that year—a theater chosen for its appropriately dilapidated surroundings and fixer-upper conditions. It was here, really, that the world got to hear and know Menzel’s roof-raising soprano for the first time. Nearly 30 years later, Menzel is making her return to the theater with Redwood. The heartfelt expressions of love from Rentheads have long disappeared from the adjacent alleyway, but the memories surely linger on. And the voice will still raise that roof.

Finishing the Hat... and Wearing a New One 
Including Redwood, Idina Menzel has helped mold new characters in four original Broadway musicals, has won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical and turns all of her eleven o’clock numbers into the battle cry of a generation. She’s now conquering the next frontier. As co-conceiver (alongside Tina Landau) with an “additional contributions by” credit, Redwood will mark the first time Menzel is listed among the writing team of a Broadway musical. The premise alone—a woman finding her purpose among the redwood forests—sounds like a canvas for introspection, so Menzel could be laying her heart at our feet with this one.

Who Is Kate Diaz?
Kate Diaz, Redwood’s composer and co-lyricist, is a name to watch. She’s a graduate of both Harvard and Berklee College of Music and has been composing and releasing albums since childhood. Now, new to the theater scene and just 27 years old, she’s making her Broadway debut crafting a musical for one of Broadway’s most beloved leading ladies who took home her Tony for Wicked when Diaz was still in elementary school. The composer has teased her music for the show, describing it in an interview with the Alliance for Women Film Composers as “half cinematic orchestral scores and half pop/rock songs.” But if you want a taste of the real thing, listen to Menzel’s rendition of the Broadway-bound number “Great Escape.”

Dancing on the X-Axis Is So Last Year
The Redwood creative team includes Melecio Estrella, who is credited with vertical choreography. What exactly is vertical choreography? Estrella is the artistic director of Bandaloop, an Oakland-based company that utilizes climbing technology to literally elevate dance and flip it 90 degrees. In their own words, they aspire to “turn the dance floor on its side.” Bandaloop’s harnessed performers have danced on the sides of cliffs, skyscrapers, bridges and billboards, in stadiums and convention centers. Think mountaineering-meets-contemporary dance. Given the arboreal theme of Redwood, it looks like we’ll be seeing some rappelling action on Broadway. Will Menzel herself once again defy gravity?

The Woman Who Lived in a Tree
Redwood is a work of fiction but it’s inspired by the true story of environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill. In 1996, she was badly injured in a car accident, and after a year of recovery, headed west to do some much-needed soul-searching. She's said, “When I entered the majestic cathedral of the redwood forest for the first time, my spirit knew it had found what it was searching for.” In December 1997, Hill went to live in the canopy of a 1,500-year-old redwood tree, Luna, staying there for 738 days. After two years, she was able to negotiate terms with Pacific Lumber Company, securing protections for Luna and a 200-foot buffer zone around the tree. "I was just fascinated with the idea that a woman or anyone could do this," said Menzel in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. "I am always questioning what I have in me, how far could I take something." For a deeper dive in the fascinating figure that inspired Redwood, read Hill’s book, The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods.

Redwood will begin previews at the Nederlander Theatre January 24, 2025, opening February 13. Tickets are now on sale.