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Idina Menzel was sitting on a bench in a California redwood grove, yearning for silence. It was late one autumn afternoon, and I had been trying for months to get her to meet me in a forest where we could discuss this musical she’d been working on for 15 years about a woman in a tree, and now here we were. But also, there was a wedding party walking by, and an unleashed dog that knocked over her hibiscus tea, and an aircraft buzzing overhead.
No matter. On the drive to the forest from a dance studio where Menzel had been practicing singing upside down, because yes, this musical requires her to dance and sing while scaling a giant tree, she had been thinking about what she wanted to tell me about why she was making a show that is outwardly about redwoods — it’s called “Redwood” — but also about a grieving woman’s search for sanctuary.
“I’m a little reticent to say, but I think I have a lot of noise in my own head as a person,” she told me as we settled in at Oakland’s Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park. “The idea of escaping and freeing yourself from your own pain or loneliness or confusion is very healing to me.”
In an entertainment industry where actors are lucky to have one career-defining role, Menzel already has three: Maureen, the rabble-rousing performance artist in “Rent”; Elphaba, the green-skinned who-are-you-calling-wicked witch in “Wicked”; and Elsa, the ice-conjuring queen in Disney’s animated “Frozen” films. Those characters have many strengths, but serenity is not one of them.
“I had to audition for all of those roles. I didn’t choose them — I needed a job. And yet, maybe somehow I attract them to me,” Menzel said. “They’re fierce women, but I’m not afraid of making them very fragile at times. They’re also women — especially Elphaba and Elsa — who are afraid of their power. They’re afraid that they’re too much for people, and that their power will hurt people. And I think I feel that way in my life a lot. I’m too big. Too loud.”
On the day I met Menzel in California, we started at Bandaloop Studios; when I arrived, she was suspended a few feet in the air, with a black-and-red harness strapped over her bluejeans and gray half-zip hoodie, and she was practicing spinning her body while parallel to the floor. It was hard to control her movement, and at one point she accidentally kicked Bandaloop’s artistic director, Melecio Estrella, in the groin.
Menzel beamed as she executed a solid spin, but then reminded herself that was just the start. “And then sing really high notes!” she said.
The challenge of figuring out how to flip around on the side of a tree while singing was an appealing one. “To give me something physical to do is very healing for me, and it gets me out of my head,” she said. “It keeps me present. Otherwise, I’m going to fall down.”
Menzel, who is 53 and last appeared on Broadway a decade ago, is still uncomfortable with being seen as a role model. “It feels phony sometimes to represent empowerment and self-esteem when, you know, there are days when I can’t get out of bed,” she told me. “But I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished and I’m really proud of how it’s been multigenerational and that I made these fans from ‘Rent,’ and now they have kids, and now their kids watch ‘Frozen.’ And I feel like we’ve all grown up together.”
In the years that followed, she moved to Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, Aaron Lohr, an actor turned therapist, and a teenage son, Walker, from her first marriage, to her “Rent” co-star Taye Diggs.
Menzel has returned to Broadway just once, in the 2014 production of “If/Then,” but she has also worked Off Broadway (most recently in a 2018 play, “Skintight”), on television (she played Lea Michele’s mother on “Glee”) and in film (she made two movies opposite Adam Sandler, including “Uncut Gems”) and she has an active concert career. A cringey moment when John Travolta mistakenly called her “Adele Dazeem” at the 2014 Academy Awards redounded to her benefit. President Biden presented her with a National Medal of Arts, with a citation saying she had “empowered millions of Americans of all ages and backgrounds to be strong, use their voice, and lead with their hearts.”
She is still proud of her career, and happy to have enough financial security that she can be selective about what parts she takes. She said she expects the stage to remain important in her career, in part because, “the theater will always welcome me,” adding that “there are better roles for older women in theater, as opposed to worrying about your beauty and your age in Hollywood.”
I asked her again about her quest for quiet, which seems like it must be so hard to find in Times Square, at tech rehearsal, while shouldering a Broadway show. But Menzel said she was loving it all. “I walk into what I feel is a sanctuary — the rehearsal room, or the theater — and I feel at one with myself, and comfortable,” she said. “I think of it as my home, and where I feel closest to my truest self.”
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