Original Broadway Cast, 2025 (Sony Masterworks Broadway) (2 / 5)  Redwood, which lasted only 127 performances on Broadway, has a score that exposes several of the musical’s inherent weaknesses even while showcasing the undeniable talent of its cast. Featuring music by Kate Diaz, lyrics by Diaz and Tina Landau, and a book also by Landau, the show centers on Jesse (Idina Menzel), a woman grappling with the profound grief of her son’s death. Unexpectedly, she finds solace and healing by connecting with a giant redwood tree. Jesse is first introduced to the beauty of the redwoods by tree experts Finn (Michael Park) and Becca (Khalia Wilcoxon) while she is trying to avoid processing her grief by running away from her life with her wife, Mel (De’Adre Aziza). Idina Menzel, as always, delivers a vocally powerful performance, and the score is clearly tailored to highlight her voice. However, at times her singing here feels like a familiar display of her well-established strengths, and occasionally it overshadows the nuances of Jesse’s complex emotional state. The score can be broadly divided into two parts: the modern musical theater-style ballads employed for most of Jesse’s numbers (“Great Escape,” “In the Leaves,” “No Repair”) and the more rhythmic, folk-inspired songs that the rest of the cast sings (specifically, “Little Redwood” and “Becca’s Song”). Those in the latter group most effectively capture the show’s focus on the magnificence of its redwood forest setting, yet the result is a score that often feels more cinematic than theatrically intimate. Breaking from this pattern, Jesse’s son Spencer (Zachary Noah Piser) appears to her in a dream at the end of the show, offering her closure and offering the listener the most memorable musical moment on the recording, a delicately performed song titled “Still.” Ultimately, despite Menzel’s presence and a strong supporting cast, this cast album only hints at the more compelling musical Redwood might have been, had it featured a more distinctive and nuanced score. — Forrest Hutchinson