After playing Elphaba and Elsa, Idina Menzel is still climbing to hit the high notes

OAKLAND, California – Idina Menzel was sitting on a bench in a California redwood grove, yearning for silence. It was late one autumn afternoon, and I had been trying for months to get her to meet me in a forest where we could discuss this musical she had been working on for 15 years about a woman in a tree, and now here we were.

The American actress-singer had been practising singing upside down at a dance studio, because yes, this musical requires her to dance and sing while scaling a giant tree. On the drive to the forest, she had been thinking about what she wanted to tell me about why she was making a show that is outwardly about redwoods – it is called Redwood – but also about a grieving woman’s search for sanctuary.

“I’m a little reticent to say, but I think I have a lot of noise in my own head as a person,” she told me as we settled in at Oakland’s Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park. “The idea of escaping and freeing yourself from your own pain or loneliness or confusion is very healing to me.”

In an entertainment industry where actors are lucky to have one career-defining role, Menzel already has three: Maureen, the rabble-rousing performance artist in Rent; Elphaba, the green-skinned who-are-you-calling-wicked witch in Wicked; and Elsa, the ice-conjuring queen in Disney’s animated Frozen films (2013 to present). Those characters have many strengths, but serenity is not one of them.

“I had to audition for all of those roles. I didn’t choose them – I needed a job. And yet, maybe somehow I attract them to me,” Menzel, 53, said.

“They’re fierce women, but I’m not afraid of making them very fragile at times. They’re also women – especially Elphaba and Elsa – who are afraid of their power. They’re afraid that they’re too much for people, and that their power will hurt people. And I think I feel that way in my life a lot. I’m too big. Too loud.”

Redwood is in previews on Broadway and scheduled to open on Feb 13. It tells the fictional story of an anguished New York gallerist named Jesse, who embarks on an unplanned road trip and winds up near Eureka, California. There, awed by the soaring redwoods, she befriends a pair of canopy botanists and persuades them to let her stay on a platform high in a tree.

The musical, first staged in 2024 at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, not only features climbing, but is also technologically ambitious, with more than a thousand LED panels enveloping the stage – offering panoramic forest vistas.

To make the climbing realistic, Menzel has been working with Bandaloop, a dance company based in Oakland that specialises in “vertical performance” – dancing on the sides of buildings, bridges and walls.

The company, credited with vertical movement and vertical choreography for Redwood, has worked with entertainers before – including American pop singer Pink – but this is its first theatre venture.

The challenge of figuring out how to flip around on the side of a tree while singing was an appealing one.

“To give me something physical to do is very healing for me, and it gets me out of my head,” Menzel said. “It keeps me present. Otherwise, I’m going to fall down.”

Menzel, who last appeared on Broadway a decade ago, is deeply involved with every aspect of the show. She had the initial idea that became Redwood, contributed to the writing, stars in it and her company, Loudmouth Media, is among the lead producers.

It has its origins in the story of Julia Butterfly Hill, an environmental activist who in the late 1990s spent 738 days living in a 1,000-year-old tree called Luna, in an effort to prevent it from being logged. The timber company backed down.

Expect those signature big notes, from that voice that Menzel has been nurturing for a long time.

She performed as an adolescent on Long Island, singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs. Rent, which opened off-Broadway in 1996 and then transferred to Broadway that same year, was her first professional job after graduating from New York University, and after that, all she really wanted to do was sing.

“I left Rent and I had a big record deal and I thought I was going to be the next Alanis Morissette, so I just focused on being a songwriter and being a rock ’n’ roll star and making albums,” she said. “And then I got dropped from the record label and I didn’t sell any records. I had to start all over again.”

Wicked, which opened on Broadway in 2003 after a run in San Francisco, was that new start. Menzel won a Tony Award for her performance, and it cemented her stardom. She even had a cameo in the 2024 hit film adaptation of the musical that starred Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo.

In the years that followed, she moved to Los Angeles. She lives there with her husband Aaron Lohr, 48, an American actor turned therapist, and a 15-year-old son, Walker, from her first marriage to her Rent co-star, American actor Taye Diggs, 54.

She said: “I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished and how it’s been multigenerational. I made these fans from Rent, and now they have kids, and now their kids watch Frozen. And I feel like we’ve all grown up together.”

Redwood is being staged at Nederlander Theatre, which has enormous significance for Menzel: It is where she made her Broadway debut 29 years ago in Rent.

“Honestly, it’s been very emotional, like a homecoming, and it’s causing me to reflect a lot on who I am and where I’ve come from.”

She said she expects the stage to remain important in her career, in part because, “the theatre will always welcome me”, adding that “there are better roles for older women in theatre, as opposed to worrying about your beauty and your age in Hollywood”. NYTIMES