Whereas set designer Jason Ardizzone-West was pursuing his undergraduate diploma, his professor referenced the Joyce Kilmer poem “Timber”: Poems are made by fools like me / However solely God could make a tree.
“Properly, God and Disney,” Ardizzone-West amends over Zoom. “That was all the time the cautionary voice in my head as a set designer: Be very cautious if you’re making an attempt to recreate a tree on stage, as a result of what’s so unbelievable about bushes is that they’re inherently very onerous to make. They develop.”
Practically 30 years later, Ardizzone-West was introduced with the chance to design the set of Redwood, a 110-minute musical a couple of gallerist named Jesse (Idina Menzel) who, reeling from a private tragedy, flees her spouse and life in New York to drive throughout the nation. She finally finally ends up close to Eureka, California, the place she finds solace in a 300-foot-tall redwood big she calls “Stella.”
The present, which opened at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre in February, was co-conceived, written, and directed by Tina Landau, who envisioned welcoming the viewers into the emotional panorama of the forest. “We’re not making an attempt to trick the viewers into pondering that they are taking a look at an actual tree,” explains Ardizzone-West. “We’re making an attempt to carry the viewers with us on a journey in order that they really feel like they’re experiencing what our major character, Jesse, is experiencing.”
Nonetheless, Landau’s idea required Menzel and her co-stars to don harnesses and ascend Stella, to bounce whereas climbing, and–in Menzel’s case–to belt whereas suspended upside-down within the air. The present additionally required…a tree.
