REDWOOD Previews — Page 4

As much as it’s AUDRAGYPSY, it’s IDINAREDWOOD.

I got a great ticket for Jessica's debut last night at a very steep discount.

Thought she was pretty excellent. If I had not known it was her first time on, I don't know if I would have believed it. There were maybe a couple times she jumped in to say a line a beat early but otherwise was pretty note perfect and seemed totally and completely at ease. She is a consummate professional and I thought she delivered a very impressive and deeply felt performance -- or as deep as the material will allow anyone to go.

The score sits in a space in her voice where really and truly she sounds almost exactly like Idina at her absolute peak of vocal health. Likely an intentional choice.

For all the good of Jessica's performance, the show itself is, to me, the definition of middle of the road.

Firstly, they should stop saying it's 1:45 or 1:50. It is solidly 2 hours. And that's fine. Just tell people that. It doesn't really feel that long aside from a 20 minute stretch or so when the main character starts sleeping on a platform in the tree.

Musically I found it pretty uninspired and uninteresting. I was forgetting songs as they were happening (even know I can only sing "I can see iiiiiit" which I think is mostly because it's used in the commercial), and nothing really felt like it surpassed anything more than decent. There is a song Jesse (Idina/Jessica's role) sings early on about stars that was lovely in the moment, and Khaila Wilcoxon's character has a song about the life/development of a redwood tree that also stuck out to me at the time but now I could not tell you a single thing about it. It never truly veers into outright bad -- though a rap song performed by Zach Piser and De'Adre Aziza's characters comes close -- but it's also never as good as it needs to be. It is mostly just pleasant. Even Piser's song near the end of the show musically and lyrically had some of the cringiest moments for me when it should be packing an emotional wallop. The show also never met a tree metaphor it didn't glom onto and hold onto for dear life.

Interestingly, I found that a bunch of the material had almost one-to-one matches in tone/meaning to If/Then. Jesse has a song that basically is a lesser rehash of "Learn to Live Without," Piser's last song is basically "Always Starting Over." A rare time I find If/Then to be the better version of anything.

The show is largely about grief and living through/beyond it. But I don't think it ever goes deep enough in any direction for any character to get you to truly care. The wife character is hugely under-developed and might actually leave more of an impact if she was completely un-seen or even just played by Khaila Wilcoxon/the Becca character as there is a sort of recurring theme of Jesse thinking she's seeing someone from her past in the present day. Piser's role is pretty thankless. Park does solid work, he is a dependable actor. Wilcoxon I thought was a standout trying to do the most she could with the material and she has a real presence and gravitas to her, but the material doesn't really support her in any noticeable way. Still, I thought she acquitted herself well.

The direction didn't really wow me at all. The climbing is cool, the tree projections are presented in such high definition that they almost feel like AI or too realistic to be natural (which of course they aren't, but in a show about nature it seemed odd). Any projection that isn't part of the tree was cheesy and looked incredibly silly.

It sounds like I hated it, but I really didn't. It was easy enough to sit through and mostly entertaining. But I left feeling like it was really a shrug of a show with some good performances keeping it alive. I'm interested in going back to see Idina because I know it's a bit of a passion project for her. I can't imagine it being hugely improved but it's always nice to see the star in the star vehicle, even though I really did think Jessica Phillips was quite excellent.