Kate Diaz and Tina Landau
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, director and writer Tina Landau suddenly found herself with a lot of free time. She figured it was the right moment to call up Idina Menzel and resurrect an idea the two of them had been tossing around for a decade.
“I called her and I said, ‘Are you still interested in this germ, this seed, this image of a thing?'” Landau told Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens on The Broadway Show. “She said yes.”
Originally, Menzel was intrigued by Julia Butterfly Hill, an environmental activist who lived in a redwood tree for two years in the late ’90s as a protest against logging practices. The story of Redwood, now on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre, became one of loss, grief and renewal. Menzel’s character Jesse, who flees to the redwoods at the top of the show, is mourning the loss of her young-adult son. In spring 2020, Landau lost her 23-year-old nephew to an accidental drug overdose.
(Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
“The show really grew out of that time,” said Landau. “Being isolated, being in nature, going through a loss that I experienced personally, and the way that the trees kind of brought me solace and became my friends during that time.”
Of course, a musical needs a composer. For that, Landau turned to Google.
“She and Idina wanted to find somebody outside of the theater space,” says Kate Diaz, the young L.A.-based musician who eventually landed the gig. “From what I’ve heard, Tina kind of just scoured the internet and I ended up on her short list of people to reach out to. That was the first week of 2021.”
To that point, Diaz had composed for TV, film, commercials, even video games. Never theater. Still, after her deep dive on the web, Landau had a hunch it could be the right fit.
“First, I couldn’t really believe it,” Diaz says of Landau’s out-of-the-blue email. “But also, it had such a beautiful description of the story and I immediately was really excited by it. I kind of just hit the ground running and demoed. ‘Great Escape’ was the first song that I wrote for it, which is still in the show.” The number musicalizes Jesse’s moment of transcendence and ascendence a couple hundred feet off the ground—an illusion supported by Hana S. Kim’s sweeping video design. It’s become the show’s signature.
“[It’s] why we went to her in the first place—this combination of her pop, rock, alt sensibility and her cinematic breadth,” Landau says. “I always knew the show needed to have instrumental sections where things could only be expressed in music and where things were beyond words. I felt very fortunate to find someone who did that organically.”
“I’d get pages from Tina, and it always felt like Christmas morning,” Diaz says of her collaboration with Landau. “I loved just diving in and thinking about what would it feel like musically, which is the best part of my job.”
Watch the full interview, featuring Diaz’s acoustic performances of “Great Escape” and “Becca’s Song.”
