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Hi, I'm Ariana Grande. Hi, I'm Cynthia Erivo and you're listening to the Broadway Podcast network. Visit BPN FM to discover more I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger so I can get in more squats anywhere I can. 1, 2, 3, 3. Will that be cash or credit? Credit. 4 Galaxy S25 Ultra. The AI companion that does the heavy lifting so you can do. You get yours@samsung.com compatible with select apps. Requires Google Gemini account. Results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy. Welcome to the White Lotus in Thailand. It's a wellness center. You should get a facial. The lady in the airport thought you were my dad. My God. The Emmy award winning HBO original series returns. There has been more crime on the island. I'm a little freaked out. What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand. What does that mean? It means we're not dead yet. Amen. Amen. A new season of the HBO original series the White Lotus premieres February 16th at 9pm on MAX. Thank you very much, that's all. But we have a great dramatic finish. Oh, I'm sure you do. But Mr. Greg hit it. Broadway. Broadway. We've missed it. So we're leaving soon and taking June to star her in a show. Bright light, white light, rhythm and romance. The train is late, so while we wait we're gonna do a little dance. Hello all you theater lovers both out and proud and on the DL. And welcome back to Broadway Breakdown, a podcast discussing the history und legacy of American the most exclusive address Broadway. I am your host Matt Koplake, the least famous and most opinionated of all the Broadway podcast hosts. And we have a review. Today your aunt was granted press seats to redwood. On Sunday, February 9th we went to the matinee and so that's why this episode will be coming out Friday morning as opposed to Thursday. You know we have an embargo that we have to abide by and it's just easier know to drop it first thing in the morning then to wait until like 10:30pm on a Thursday. So here we are, Redwood starring Ms. Adina Menzel. Tony winner Idina Menzel Adele Dazeem to her intimates. For those of you who did listen to the way too early Tony predictions episode with friend of the pod, David J. Lynch, we had mentioned like no, we had no idea what Redwood really was. There wasn't a lot of buzz from it out of town People hadn't really spoken that much about it. All everyone really knew was that it had to do with Idina Menzel and trees and that Tina Lando was directing it and also wrote the book and co wrote some of the lyrics and you know, I guess came up with the concept with Idina Menzel and that was all we really knew. And it's a very small cast. It's a cast of I think five total. It's Idina Zachary, Noah Peyser, Deidra Aziza, Michael park and then Kayla Wilcoxon. And yeah, I went in very open minded. I didn't know much about it. I purposely didn't read really anything about it. I knew that there was a lot of projection work and some aerial stuff obviously because you know, trees and climbing, but that was really it. Now if you are interested in seeing Redwood and you want to know my opinion, but you want to avoid spoilers, if you know what it's about or anything that happens, plot wise, I will say my immediate impression of it up front and then I will go into details of the show. So if you want to avoid spoilers, that's for you. If you don't care and you know, want to know sort of more about why I felt the way I felt, then the rest of the episode is for you. Because it's not just my opinions of this show but also sort of with information I was given about the process for this and and Tina Landau's desire for who to collaborate with on it. I kind of want to make a, a little dissertation about artists creating art and specifically musicals. So first off, right off the bat I will just say I did not care for Redwood. I did not find it to be terribly good. Usually with that's the case, I'll still be able to find some joy or some reasons for praise in maybe the cast or in a technical element. I didn't find the technical elements of Redwood terribly impressive. It is a very projection heavy show and I would say one out of every 20 times it's used effectively. A lot of the times it looks like, and I don't say this to be catty, but a lot of the projections kind of reminded me of is it Pandora? Is that the Avatar World? When you go to like Disney World and they have projections all around you, it was sort of like that. It wasn't cheap looking, it wasn't poorly crafted, it just was very obviously fake and not in a way that was impressionistic and on purpose in a way that was like you can't go the extra mile that you want to and you think that this is enough and it's not really enough. So that's one thing in terms of the cast, it is a strong cast. Everyone in it is doing, you know, a lot of really lovely work. Deidre Aziza, I think is doing very lovely work as Idina Menzel's wife. Zachary Noah Peyser plays a whole bunch of different roles again. And we'll get into this as I talk about the plot, specifically Idina Menzel's son and then a bunch of different young men who she encounters who remind her of her son. And he does a very lovely job. He has a very nice song towards the end that he sings very beautifully. Kayla and Michael also do a solid job with parts that I don't find to be terribly well written. But you know, they try to find nuances in there. Adina is unfortunately still rather sick. She had to call out about a week ago and Jessica Phillips went on in her place. Jessica Phillips is her standby and Idina did come back and you know, her acting is very strong. I've always felt that she was an underrated actress. I never thought she truly got her due in that respect because she's also not. She's not like an Audra McDonald kind of actress. She's not a grand dame of the stage. She doesn't go for like big, you know, hot blooded emotions. She's very introverted and small. It almost, you know, her choices work almost better for film, you might say, which is ironic because I think she's actually a better stage actress and film actress. But her choices on stage always read much more cinematic when you see them and then you see her on film and you're like, I feel like you're a stage actress. It's that odd conundrum. But it's what I like about her acting on stage. And she finds a lot of quirky nuances and she has really great deadpan dry delivery and she has a great deal of intuition and a connection with her instrument, with her emotional instrument. So like Audra, she can rawly expose herself on stage and not make it feel indulgent. She can make it feel organic. And that's something that you shouldn't sneeze at. She is still sick. And so the voice was being negotiated at our performance. And that's just. You can't not acknowledge that because it is so much music that she sings. It sort of showed you a lot of the pitfalls of the score because Idina could not overwhelm the music with her voice. She had to figure out a way through it still. And there were times when she totally soared. She had quite a few handful of bum notes, I won't lie. A lot of rough edges around some notes. But she made it through to the end. You know, her voice did not go out, which is very impressive, again, considering how clearly sick she still was. But as I said, when you didn't have the voice to be distracted by, when you were watching Adina negotiate and not just interpret and relish, your attention was drawn to the material more. And unfortunately, I found the material to be quite lacking. So Redwood in a Nutshell is a. About a woman. Sorry, let me go through the playbill to remember what her name is. Jesse. A woman named Jessie who runs an art gallery in New York City. And when we meet her at the top of the show, she's just driving. She's gone through something. Her wife keeps calling her Deidre. Aziza keeps calling her. We see through Zachary, Noah Peyser. Something's going on with her son. They're having fights. She's gone through a trauma, and all she wants to do is escape. And it's very chaotic. It's very hectic. It's very. There's a lot of high anxiety in the opening sequence. And she eventually finds herself at a motel by a nature preserve or national park, I guess. And she spends the night, you know, in the motel. And she turns off her phone. She's not answering texts or anything like that. And she takes herself out into the woods the next day and. And finds herself enraptured. It's not enamored with the trees around her, specifically a giant redwood that she encounters. And while she's there, she meets two. I guess you would call them, like tree scientists, nature preservers. Finn, played by Michael park, and Becca, played by Kayla Wilcoxon. And basically the whole show is Idina Menzel's Jesse. Just putting all of her time and her mental capacity into studying the trees with these two and. And wanting to climb the trees with these two because she's watching Becca and Finn, you know, go up on these ropes and these harnesses and. And just climb these very, very, very tall redwood trees. And she wants to do it, too. She just wants to sort of escape everything and put all of her energy into that. And she. I guess, you know, she gets pretty good at it. She's very. She becomes very intuitive with the trees. And in fact, she ends up naming the tree Stella. She. She has a very, you know, come to Jesus moment where she stays on a Platform. There's like this little bunker cabin halfway up the redwood that I guess Becca or Finn sometimes stay in overnight if, you know, they have a lot of, a lot of counting to do. They talk a lot, they talk about counting a lot. They got to do a lot of counting, I guess, of like leaves and branches and they have to mark stuff about the bark and all these other things. And Becca at one point, Jesse at one point stays on this little bunker halfway up the tree. And while she's up there overnight, she sort of in her panic attack state, calms herself by talking to the tree and listening to the tree and understanding that the tree's name is Stella. And so when everyone else is like, who's Stella? She's like, the tree, the redwood, that's Stella. And some people are like, oh, wow, you really are one with, with this tree. And other people are like, okay. But we get a lot more information about what exactly happened to Idina's Jesse and what made her flee. Because as all this is happening, we're constantly interrupted with flashbacks of, you know, when she first met Deidre Aziza and when Zachary Noah Pizer, her son, is growing up, and some good memories and some bad memories. And all this time, Deirdre Ziza keeps calling her, you know, saying, we need to talk about this, we have to talk about what happened with our son. And you just can't escape and you have to answer your phone and things like that. And we're told pretty early in the show that Idina's son died. So that's not really a spoiler. It's told pretty early. She says it to Becca and Finn that her son died, but we don't know how. And ultimately Becca has been very wary of Jesse. Becca is very progressive and open minded, woke, as close minded people would say with their eyes sort of rolling. And in fairness, the way that she's written in this show, it is a little eye rolly of just how progressive she is. It's sort of like checking all the boxes to make sure that no one gets offended because she is a bipoc character. And then calls out that Idina's character is Jewish just by facial recognition, gives her a couple of Jewish phrases and prayers. And Adina's like, I mean, I am Jewish, but also like, how do you know that? And why would you assume that I'm Jewish? And Becca's like, oh, no, no, I'm half Jewish myself and I live alone and I'm empowered and independent and I have two dogs and I care about Nature. And I'm like, okay, Tina Landau, it's fine, calm down, it's all good. But Becca and Jesse have a sort of heart to heart where Becca sort of slowly warms to Jesse. She's definitely been anti Jesse climbing the redwood and studying the redwood with them. And she thinks that she's not qualified because she isn't qualified to do it with them. But ultimately Michael Parks Finn keeps overruling her and letting Idina Mendel do that. And it's ultimately revealed that his reasons for doing that is because he had a son much later in life. You know, He's I guess 60 and he has a 15 year old son. And he's sort of missing out on his son's adolescence by doing this kind of nature study work, but and feels guilt about that. So he feels like in his control he can help Jesse feel better. But ultimately he's still abandoning his family by doing so. Anywho, Becca and Jesse have this heart to heart. And we find out exactly what happened with Jesse's son, which is that he was a sweet and kind boy with a lot of talent and a lot of intelligence. But ultimately as he grew up and he had to sort of apply himself to the modern world and like get a job, find a place to live, he couldn't find a way to do that and was having issues with substance abuse, primarily drugs. We never exactly find out which kind of drugs. And he's struggling. He's staying at home with his moms and it's not going well. And he wants to go to la, back to where his friends are because he went to school there. And he, you know, thinks that he'll find a job there and he'll thrive there and he'll be happy. And he's just really suffering at home. And ultimately he has a really big blow up with Adina and she and her wife give him $2,000, put him on a plane and they're like, this is to last you till you get a job and don't call us till you get a job. And she says, but he did call us and we were grateful and we were happy. And he called us every day for three days and then he stopped. And two days later the LAPD called us to tell us that the hotel that he was staying in, the hotel maid found him and he had overdosed. And Adina says, you know, she is determined to believe that it was an accidental overdose. She knew that he had struggles, but she didn't think that he was necessarily trying to end his life. And Sorry. I also. I'm sorry. I apologize. I probably should have said trigger warning about all of this at the beginning of the review. We will be discussing a little bit about this part of the plot, especially how it resolves with Edina's mourning and loss and her character's arc of the show. So if you really don't hear any more about it, I would recommend that you stop. We won't be going into details because the show doesn't go into detail. So don't worry. It's not trauma porn or anything like that. But this is subject matter that is touched on. And it's also kind of a complaint I have with the show because of how they deal with it and how they ultimately resolve it. And so obviously Idina is holding on to a lot of grief and a lot of guilt because of the circumstances of her son's passing. And then there's a forest fire that happens, and while Idina's up in the tree and eventually it passes, but in that time, while she's sort of waiting it out up in the tree during the forest fire, she kind of passes out and has this vision where she talks to her son, played by Zachary Noah Peyser in the beyond, in the afterlife, or in Limbo, let's say. And they have a heart to heart and he sort of absolves her of all of her guilt and she moves on. And she calls Diedre and she's like, I'm ready to come home and I want to talk about our son and maybe we can start again. And she thanks, Stella. And that's basically the end of the show. So, fun fact, by the way. I had written a screenplay back in 2019. It was the very first piece, second piece of narrative writing I had done. I wrote a TV pilot based on my mom and I living together that had made the rounds in a couple of studios in la. And one studio that really liked it asked me to come out and meet them and I did. And they're like, so we really like your writing. You know, we're not going to pick up your pilot because we're not doing tv. We're only doing small films. Are you writing a screenplay? Because we really do like your writing here. So I said, sure, I'm writing something. And then I went off and I wrote something. And I pitched them two things. I pitched a modern queer take on Pride and Prejudice, which they said, we don't really think there's an audience for that. Cut to three years later and Fire island by Joel Kim. Booster comes Out. So I was like, clearly I was onto something there. The other one was the script I wrote called Knowing Eric. And it came about from my own morbid brain where I said, you know, my parents get. My parents have been divorced now for, you know, 18 years, something like that. And they get along. There's not a lot of drama. But my sister and I were like, they wouldn't necessarily sit in a car together for a long period of time for any reason unless it had something to do with one of us. And, you know, super morbid here, but like one of us passing. And it was in connection to that. So I wrote this screenplay about a divorced couple that had been divorced for a very long time, and their son, who they both had been estranged from for the past year, they discover has died due to a substance overdose. And it's unclear whether it was intentional or if it was an accidental overdose. And we find out through their journey together, they end up taking a cross country trip in a car. Long story, we don't need to get into it too much. It ultimately ends with them at Disneyland trying to scatter their son's ashes on Splash Mountain, which is now the Princess and the Frog Ride, but it not going well, and them ending up in Disneyland jail for a little period covered in water and their son's ashes. I told you, I've got a weird brain. But you know, the whole point of the movie was your child leaves this world before you, and there's so much pain in that. But also you have a lot of conflict when your child also gave you a lot of pain while they were alive. The struggles that they went through, that you tried to help and maybe didn't know how, or you messed up in trying to help. And what does that do? And what does that make you second guess? And. And all of these things, right? And we learned that their. We learned that their child was the one. He made himself estranged from them and blocked their numbers and all these things. And in. In death, the father wants to kind of make the kid more of a saint than he was, and the mother is sort of just trying to shut it all down. And they eventually have to kind of come to grips with the ultimate truth, which is somewhere in the middle, right? And I won't lie, the script was pretty solid. My dad is a big fan of it, and as you know, he's not a very big fan of the Yours Truly play. So that's saying something. And it placed in a couple of screenwriting competitions and then Covid happened and it all shut down and it is registered with the wga. So I did watch this play and I was like, there are quite a few parallels to knowing Eric and Redwood. Not gonna lie. What's interesting about Redwood, by interesting, I mean frustrating, is ultimately Idina's coming together with her son in the end in the third act of the, of the musical. It kind of bothered me because the, the scene is very pat. It is very squeaky clean. It ties it up with a ribbon. And it is Zachary, Noah Peyser's character, his name is Spencer. Spencer basically tells Adina's Jesse, it, it was an accidental overdose. I didn't mean to do it. I. I didn't realize. So it was an accident and it had nothing to do with you. You have nothing to feel sorry about. Do not blame yourself. You were the best mother that I could have possibly had, you know, free of guilt. And obviously this is, you know, if we're being realistic here, it's most likely just her subconscious in a dream state telling her this so she can move on, because it's what she needs to hear to move on, I guess. But I'm a big fan of living in the gray area of things when it comes to drama and character development. And there is something to be said when you listen to her talk in her confession to Becca about what went on with her son. She's not blameless. You know, her son was frustrating, but she clearly had a difficult time figuring out how to help him. She tried to be strict and it didn't go great. And then she tried to be stricter and it still didn't go great. And she did the best she could. She loved her son and everything she did was for helping her son, but she just didn't. She kept failing at doing it as he got more and more complicated and struggled more and more. And there's something to be said for acknowledging the fuck ups you've done, acknowledging that there are ways in which you tried to help and maybe made things worse, but knowing that because that wasn't your intent, you can't hold onto the guilt and also take all of the blame. You are a piece of the puzzle, but you are not the whole puzzle. Whenever my friends and I talk about when our parents ask, like, how could I have known the struggles you were going through at the time and how could I have helped and all these things, and it's sort of the older your kid gets, the more agency they have and the more time they spend in the world without you. There are so many things that you cannot control that happens to them and the choices that they make. So at some point your kid stops being your kid, at least in terms of as a person. And you do kind of have to acknowledge that when they are drowning. But it made me feel a little icky watching that scene because it was so clean. And as I said, Pat, that the point of it was to absolve the main character so we could like her again by the end because she's been a very troublesome character. I'm not saying problematic because she's meant to be complicated and not doing a lot of things that are healthy for her or very healthy for the people who love her. But the idea is that with this cleansing forest fire, she is then cleansed from the guilt of her son's passing. And thus she is able to come back and live in the world. And her son tells her from the beyond, like, you know, you have to live. Life is for the living. We're all going to die eventually, so you got to live. And don't worry about me. None of what happened to me was your fault. And it's just so. It's very much giving that meme of the worst person you know, is in therapy and being told that they're the victim. And obviously Jesse in Redwood is not a full on villain, but she has blame on her hands, some blame. Even if it's only 5%, it's enough. You want to acknowledge the 5%, you don't want to rewrite that because that just becomes mental gymnastics to absolve yourself. You got. If you've. If you've done fucked up in this world and done fucked up to somebody else, you gotta walk with that forever. You don't necessarily define yourself by that. You try to do better. You try to improve yourself in the things you do to hopefully make up for the wrongs you've done, but it doesn't erase them. And it just bothered me that that was sort of how we resolved that plotline. On a technical level, we're talking just pure writing of this show. It's also just a very choppy show. There are a lot of songs in it. It's two hours, no intermission, maybe hour and 55 at this point. But let's say hour, let's say two hours, no intermission, 90 minute. No. As Laura Nicole Chapman would say, even though 90 minutes is not the length, first of all, it is too long. Not a lot happens. And it happens very slowly, which are two deadly statements to say about any show, let alone a musical. And in Redwood There are a lot of songs that just feel like padding and have no build, they have no structure, they have no arc to them, let alone a hook. And half of the songs aren't necessary. They're either statement songs or they're songs to be covered in two lines of dialogue or we have moments of inner emotion happening. But it's short lived. Instead of it being a 3 1/2 minute discovery song, it's a hundred second discovery song after we just had a four minute song about the history of the redwood in song. And I'm watching it going okay. So I don't think the score is objectively very good. And I don't consider a good score about how melodic it is or not or how, you know, how clever the lyrics are. There are lyrics that can be painfully bad because they can be really prosaic or they can be very purpley and fabric softenery. Melodies can have a hook to them, but it could be the wrong time. I've said this all the time, Diana. The musical is my exhibit A of when having a score full of bops isn't okay. There are times when you don't want to be tapping your foot to what's going on on stage because dramatically speaking, it might be too complicated or too sad or too frightening. As I said, when we're comparing the two wild parties, it's why I prefer burrs breakdown in the Lachiusa one as opposed to let me drown in Lippas. Because let me drown isn't scary. You don't feel danger from burrs in that. It's too much of a gospel bop. So it's not that there aren't bops in Redwood. And that's the problem. There are moments where the music is very pretty but more pretty in terms of atmosphere than in terms of drama and story and character. And again, there's just so many of them and they all add up to nothing. And when I got out of redwood, a lot of people were reaching out to me, wanting to know my thoughts. But one friend of mine who listens to the pod, hello friend. If you are listening, a British friend, he knows who he is, said oh, you know, that they purposely looked for someone to write the score who had never done a musical before. And I went, oh. And I looked it up and it's true, you know, the book is by Tina Landau, the music by Kate Diaz and the lyrics are by Landau and Diaz. Now Landau has done musicals, she co wrote Floyd Collins, she directed SpongeBob SquarePants, famously did that production of Annie, where Annie woke up at the end and it was all a dream and the writer shut it down. But I would not necessarily call Tina Landau a musical theater girly. She's had success in musicals, but I would not say she's someone who understands them totally. Not in the way that a Sondheim did or, you know, even an Arthur Lawrence did or Terence McNally or, I don't know, a Dorothy Fields or a Carolyn Lee or a Betty Comden. Right. She's a very talented artist and a smart person, but I don't think that she inherently gets musical theater. I think she has struck gold a couple of times, and there's a difference for that. And I say this because a lot of people now want to sort of look from the outside to have a new angle for a musical. Oh, we hired this team to write the score. They've never done a musical before in their life. We saw this happen with Fucking Water for Elephants and the Notebook recently. And it all stems from the musical Promises, Promises. And if you want to know more about that, you can listen to that episode with me and Gunko, the Pod, Adam Elsbury. But ultimately, just know that Promises, Promises score was by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, who came from the pop world. They were very famous pop songwriters, had never written a musical before. And Promises, Promises to date is their only musical theater score. And it's a good score. It's also very much a product of its time. I wouldn't say it's super integrated. It doesn't hold up as one of the best scores of all time. Probably one of the stronger scores of the 60s, but in a weird sort of mushy way. But what made it work was that they were surrounded by people who did understand musical theater. Neil Simon wrote the book, and I think that was his fourth libretto by that point. Fourth successful libretto by that point. Michael Bennett was choreographer, and he very much understood musical theater. David Merrick was the producer, he understood musical theater. So they had guidance in that respect. But ever since then, there's always been this fetishization of taking people outside of the musical theater world and, ooh, they're writing their first musical theater score. And sometimes it works out like a Sara Bareilles in Waitress. Sara Bareilles, however, is also a musical theater girly. She knows her shit, and she also knows how to write for story and character. It's not just about o. What sort of sounds can they make? What music can they write? Can they think outside the box in terms of composition? It's do they know how to build a score. Do they understand what motifs are? Do they understand how to make a lyric scan? Do they understand how to use melody as a form of storytelling and stitching scenes together? And in this case, no. I've been informed also by the way, that since the out of town tryout at La Jolla, Tom Kitt was brought on as musical supervisor, a role that he did not have at La Jolla. And I guarantee you he was brought on to oversee everything that had been done to the score to see if he could make it more of a musical theater score, something that Tom Kitt has actually done in the past. He and Lando worked together on spongebob, and I don't know what work he has done. Maybe the score was even more patchy before he got his hands on it. But I will say in its current form, it's a score that just sort of sits there. Songs just sort of happen and they'll often end with Idina holding a big money note. And if Idina were in stronger health, maybe more people would be willing to look past it. But I have a lot of friends who went to go see this as huge Adina fans and even those who said, oh, I think this could have been a good show. They all have been anti on that score. It is just a bad score. It doesn't fit the story. It's. Half of the songs are irrelevant and unnecessary. None of them are exciting, none of them are moving. There are, as I said, a couple of pretty compositions. But a couple of pretty compositions does not a good score make. I would even argue a couple. A couple of good compositions does not a good song make. Not when you're telling a story, not when you're diving into character, and not when you are weaving a tapestry. And that is a problem with this show is that it has all of these ideas and has all these themes it wants to explore. And it has either too narrow of a focus and thus everything surrounding the point of the show just feels like extraneous set dressing, or it's not laser focused enough and it's putting too much attention on a bunch of other stuff that we don't necessarily need. If this is Dina's character story, if this is Jesse's story and her arc, everything's got to stem from that. Everything that anyone sings or says to her has to help her get to the finish line of finally grieving the loss of her son, the unknowable pain of losing a child, as well as having to make peace with the things that you said and did while they were alive that you regret now knowing you can't change it or fix it, while also understanding that you did do your best. That is an interesting journey to take through song, and that's not what this show is ultimately successful at. It's what it's aiming to do, and it's not successful at it. I am very into the idea of an intimate musical surrounding one woman's journey. I think intimate musicals like that can be very powerful, very moving. I think Fun Home is the prime example of the 21st century of an intimate musical and is actually really, ultimately about Big Alison's journey of grieving the loss of her father, the trauma of how her father died, of her coming out and then learning of her father's gay history and grappling with all of the unanswered questions of the past and of her own issues that stem from that trauma, dealing with all of that. And so everything that happens in Fun Home is swirling around that central issue. It all connects to it and ultimately leads to the conclusion of that show. So that is a very narrow focus, and there are a lot of other plates spinning throughout it, but all those plates are connected to that one singular issue. And in Redwood, it feels very distracted. Diedre Aziza has a song where she's singing into her phone to send a video to Idina Menzel, and it's about their son and about their past with their son. But ultimately, because she, spoiler alert, she forgets to hit record. So the song ends on a joke of, oh, fuck, I forgot to hit record. And so there's no button to it. But that also means that this is a song that Idina never gets to hear. We hear it as an audience. It gives us more insight into their past, but it doesn't help Adina's journey. And in a show like Redwood, which is two hours supposedly focused around Adina, what's the point of the song? There's a flashback to where her son Spencer and Deidre Aziza's Mel, do a rap for her for her birthday. It's three minutes long. It's kind of painful. It's intentionally cringe, but it's a little extra cringe, and it just goes on for far too long. It could be an example of a happy memory that they have. But in a show where time is money and we've been spending so much time on so many other superfluous things, you start to get resentful of the scenes and the songs that go on for too long, even if it's only 30 seconds and it's not 30 seconds in the show. It's like four minutes each for the show. Yeah, I guess that's sort of all we really got to say about Redwood. I mean, if you were to ask me like, is there a specific song I liked? The song I liked the most is from the scene that I have the biggest issue with. It's the song Still. No, not still. No, now still the song still sung by Spencer and Jesse and then turns into a finale with the whole company. I think it's the prettiest song in the show. I think it has the best lyrics of the show. I don't mind the messaging of it. It's the context in which it is sung that I have the issue with. As I said, the design. In theory, I'm on board with it. It's the execution that makes it look very Disney World esque and not even imagineer brilliance. Disneyland. Like this is the ride from the 1970s. It's serving Soarin at Epcot Realness or Soren at Great Adventure realness. But it's not actual film footage, it's computerized footage. So it's like semi realistic but not enough and it's not impressionistic enough to seem artistic. So it just almost looks like a CD ROM graphic. Yeah. Some solid lighting, I guess I'll say. And the sound design for the orchestra, which is backstage, is good, but the sound design for the voices is bad. It's hard to decipher lyrics sometimes. Not that I necessarily have lyrics that I would want you to decipher. But yeah, a lot of times with musicals people will hear a score on a first listen and go, oh, unmemorable. I don't like it. And then when the cast album comes out, it finds a new life. This happened with women on the verge of nervous breakdown. I'm convinced this is going to happen with maybe happy ending when that cast recording comes out. I think it's going to. I mean people already really like that score. I like that score. But I think it's going to get a lot more support when the album comes out. And maybe if Redwood gets an album, we'll all change our tune as we listen to it more and more. But I will say in context of watching the show, my friend and I, when we were there and we were hoping to enjoy it, we like Idina a great deal and I think Tina is a very talented artist. She's currently 0 for 2 with me right now between this and Mother Play. But there were like a Dozen numbers where they ended, and we just kind of looked at each other and went. And you never want to say that about any musical. We give props to it being an original musical, but again, we don't fetishize the fact that it's original. And thus that makes it better than others because there are adaptations that are very clever and creative and really understand the structure and the bones of musical theater. Gypsy is an adaptation. West side Story is an adaptation. Sweeney Todd is an adaptation. Nine is an adaptation. Fiddler on the Roof is an adaptation. She Loves Me. So you don't have to just be original to be good. In fact, I would argue it's harder to be good when you're an original musical because you have to figure out how to make your story work through song, and an original story at that. You have to make sure that your story is grand enough and emotional enough for the songs to make sense. And there are moments in the story in Redwood where you go, yeah, a song makes sense here. Maybe not this song, but a song. And then there are other moments where you think, why are. Why do we have a song here? And other moments where they go for humor. God bless. Because there's. I would argue there's not a ton of humor in the show, but when they go for humor, you're thankful for it, even if you don't find it terribly funny. And sometimes the humor that they go for, it's for the sake of trying to break the tension. But it's a joke that doesn't make sense, or it's a joke that ruins the flow. And it's just a lot of stuff that no matter how well meaning you are, how insightful, how creative you are, how outside of the box you are, you do have to have that sixth sense of what makes a musical tick. And a lot of people don't have it, which is fine. Not everyone's going to have it, but it sort of separates the Sondheims from the Bird Bachelor acts when it comes to musical theater. You know, sometimes you can have collaborators around you who understand musicals and that can help you, but maybe not on your own. Right. That's where we're at with Redwood. If you have very specific questions about the show, about my thoughts on the plot or about Idina or the design or whatever, or if it's Tony Chances, you can join the Discord Channel. I'm going to put the link for that again in the episode description box. Yeah. If you like the podcast, make sure you give us a nice 5 star rating or review I try to be respectful in all of my reviews, whether I like the show or not. So I hope that you're respectful. If you write a bad review, just, you know, state why without being insulting. We are people, after all. And that's it for now, I guess. In terms of Tony chances, I'll just say briefly, I don't really see much for it unless the rest of the spring really is a dud at the moment. Just feels too crowded. I don't really see a world where Dina gets nominated, not when we have Nicole Scherzinger and Audra McDonald as Lockes. Megan Hilty and Jennifer Smarter now both officially in lead, and they're coming and fighting. Helen J. Shen is leading in what is right now the front runner for best musical. That's five nominees right there. We have Sutton Foster, who I also still don't think will get nominated, but she was in a production that was relatively well liked. That cast recording will be coming out right around the time of nominations. Jasmine Amy Rogers will be coming out in Boop. And from what we've been told, that's a star turn. Robyn Herter in Smash. There's simply too much Adrienne Warren in the last five years. It's just simply too much for us to just say, well, Idina's trying and we love Adina and she's an icon. The show just doesn't work. And I'll be interested to see what the reviews are like. Granted, so many shows this season have thrown me for a loop in terms of what the reviews have said, but I. I did not find this to work. So see it on your own. Make your own decision. But that's how I felt. Maybe a design nomination in terms of set because the projections or the lighting, but again, I highly doubt it. It's just simply too crowded a year. You know what? Just because we are, we. We love her. She is a wonderful icon of the stage. We are going to close out with Idina in good voice, maybe singing from if, Then maybe instead of going the normal Wicked or. Or Rent route or even Frozen route, we'll do if Then a different original musical that Adina starred in, one that I also did not necessarily care for, but I thought was more successful artistically than Redwood. So, yeah, that's it. We will see you guys next week for the wizard movie episode with Kaisha Hugley. And we'll see you in a week. Take it away, Adina. Bye. We're always starting over Every life we living yes, we're always just awake Every step we take and my love our life is over but love I'll make.