The Brooklyn Rail

Audiences walking in to see Idina Menzel at the Gershwin Theatre in 2003 were met with a glittering map of Oz, gears the size of monster truck wheels, and, from on high, a steampunk-coded dragon reigning over Wicked’s stage.

Those walking in to see Menzel now, in Redwood at the Nederlander Theatre, will have a completely different visual experience.

The pre-show scenic design for the new musical is a bare white stage and, enveloping it, bare white panels. It’s a fitting start for Jesse (Menzel), who, in the wake of her son’s death, wants to become a blank slate, hungry for new beginnings. As she comes to life, so do the panels with a video design highlighting stops on her journey: New York’s shimmering cityscape, the Heartland’s roving highways, and finally, California’s breathing redwood forest. But full of eye-popping landscapes and far-from-Midtown settings, do these videos transport?

Broadway scenic design has become increasingly reliant on digitally rendered backdrops. That trend makes sense. A minimal physical set can be less expensive, and a digital design can feel appealingly contemporary. How the physical and digital elements work together, however, can prove tricky.

Menzel’s own stage career has coincided with this trend. She is one of only a few living actresses, including Joanna Gleason and Bernadette Peters, to have originated principal roles in Broadway musicals in four consecutive decades. As such, the new works she’s appeared in offer not just a historical survey of modern musicals but also an opportunity to consider how their physical worlds have evolved.

Rent, opening in 1996, marked Menzel’s Broadway debut and Michael Greif’s directorial one. Through scenic designer Paul Clay’s scaffolding, Rent’s set was minimalist but evocative. Audiences could fill in the gaps, putting their vision of the Lower East Side onto the musical’s urban retelling of La Bohème, but they also saw, as scaffolds suggest, a city in flux, one in which the architecture surrounding the characters was in a process of change.

In 2003, Menzel starred in Wicked, directed by Joe Mantello. Here was Eugene Lee’s Ozian set, complete with a sweeping staircase, collegiate statue, and floor-to-ceiling dresser chock full of shoes. While grander than Rent’s scenic design, Lee’s remained flexible: each of those aforementioned pieces operated as their corresponding scenes’ main set unit. Again, audiences were invited to fill in the world that surrounded them.

Greif and Menzel reunited for If/Then in 2014. Menzel bounced between dual roles, Beth and Liz, requiring an equally spry production, and Mark Wendland’s scenic design was the simplest discussed yet. By If/Then’s bow, projections had become common on Broadway (Elaine J. McCarthy, who supplied them for Wicked, has credits dating back to 1995), but Kenneth Posner’s lighting design became this production’s main table setter. Scrim lighting connoted time of day, mood, and location. Such broad washes of color could lean abstract but allowed enough openness for scenes, and Menzel’s characters, to switch with alacrity.

These musicals’ sets and lighting are suggestive but non-prescriptive. However, in Redwood, video operates as an omnipresent design force, overly prescribing and squashing audience interpretation.

While each of the previous shows, in du jour fashion, moved away from classic flats and painted backdrops, they still suggested location through physical pieces. In Redwood, video design does the work for you, which might strengthen clarity but sacrifices something holier: participation.

In Tina Landau’s production and Hana S. Kim’s video design, all-encompassing LED screens surround the stage and tell you where you are before you summon the ability to imagine it. Such design feels anti-theatrical. In the way that AI can supply quick answers, some video designs can similarly stifle critical thought.

While the videos do not strive to offer a documentarian’s verisimilitude, the issue is less about their direction than their impact. In his review for the New York Times, Jesse Green called the videos “spectacular,” which is partially true. They make for a lovely mise-en-scene, holding Menzel, at center, in a family of beamish trees caught at dawn, but, the moment after you see it, rendered by one thousand LED panels, you detach; there is nothing more to see. It’s all already before you.

Then there’s the dramaturgy. Looking to unplug in the woods, Jesse largely abandons her phone. That Menzel is actually surrounded by even larger screens seems like a dark joke.

The screens are, of course, meant to whisk you deep into, and then high above, the California canopies. Sometimes, it does so with enough gusto that the experience feels more like a roller coaster ride than a Broadway show, evoking what Sara Holdren in Vulture called “the queasy feeling of being at Epcot.”

Nature is hard to present in a digital medium; attempts to do so can make them, well, wooden. Stare long enough, and despite the wind-addled sways they exhibit in the video, Redwood’s branches look lifeless. They call to mind the vista Daniel Kaluuya’s character gazes at in Black Mirror— the windowless cell he buys in a luxury building affords him a panoramic view of a forest, but one only visible through a screen.

Advancing technology is not live theater’s enemy. Continuing his Brechtian vocabulary, Greif kept Dear Evan Hansen physically spare; by only swapping a couch’s Pier 1 Imports pillows with a more handwoven-looking blanket, Greif easily moved audiences between the Murphy and Hansen households. Technology came in when called for by showing the social media posts that built up Evan’s reputation—and then took it down.

Video designs may also create new jobs; the Playbill for Redwood lists at least six different roles with “Animation” or “Video” in the title and multiple technicians sharing a single one.

However, if those roles are used to create a seemingly literal world on stage, the work can be a detriment to theater’s potential as a medium for collective imagination. In 2017, Anastasia’s more literal projection designs (by Aaron Rhyne) forced St. Petersburg onto audiences, but, in the 2023 revival of Parade, Sven Ortel used his design to resurface documents tied to Leo Frank’s historical trial. Images of newspaper headlines empowered the audience’s deeper consideration.

Many still come to the theater to exercise a more spiritual muscle: wonder. In attempting to create something literal on screen, videos can leave audiences more aware of their artifice.

When physical scenic design aims to represent a literal space, it acts as an embrace of liveness rather than a shortcut. In last season’s Stereophonic, David Zinn’s rendering of a bygone era’s recording studio was so meticulous audiences could almost smell it. That commanding sense of naturalism was integral to the play: more than a studio, the set became an artistic prison, a room the flailing rock band couldn’t escape as take after take left them dissatisfied with their creative, and interpersonal, lives.

This difference of impact lies in the medium; a design of “digital naturalism,” one wherein pixels attempt to seem tangible, will always feel hollow.

But given theater’s economic realities, digital naturalism will likely become more common. As achieving profit remains exceedingly difficult, video designs can help save scene shop labor and materials and may be easier to transport on tours. Wicked, with its enormous spectacle, was a financial risk but had good timing: the musical opened in the narrow six-year window between the dot-com bubble and Great Recession. In the years since, achieving such blockbuster status has been elusive. The next Broadway musical to do so, Hamilton, also opened in a prosperous time, 2015, but has nine fewer onstage actors and, comparatively, a much scaled-down set (by David Korins).

Amidst Redwood’s video feed, there is a standout design in the musical’s title character. Philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term “suspension of disbelief” in his 1817 work Biographia Literaria, saying it “constitutes poetic faith.” That is what scenic designer Jason Ardizzone-West’s fourteen-foot wide tree asked of me.

I had no illusions that the tree was real. When it spun around to reveal an open white tube, hollow as a drained aorta, I thought, “Right; this is not a tree—I am in a theater, watching a play.” Witnessing the barked side, then, became an invitation instead of a proclamation. Now, I could marvel at its grandeur.

Ruddy, muddy, ocherous, and a thousand other shades, and then—woah!—scalable by three actors at once, the tree was more tremendous than any edifice on Billionaires’ Row. Its towering height offered Jesse a baptismal font, opportunity to consider her mortality, and singular dance partner.

If I wished for more trees—one for every screen pixel, enough to build a forest—I knew that desire was impossible but healthy. In my craving, I could envision them all.

Broadway theaters are enormous canvases; there is so much space to fill. Doing so with videos can have dramaturgical rigor, but not if they reduce our capacity to intuit and believe.

Let my mind wander. It might find confusion and air and, eventually, clarity—in some small way, a journey not unlike Jesse’s.