The new Broadway musical “Redwood” features set design by Cornell Alum Jason Ardizzone-West ’95, a former AAP student who participated in many PMA productions. The show stars Tony Award-winner Idina Menzel who co-conceived the show alongside director Tina Landau. “Redwood” opened at the Nederlander Theatre on Broadway on February 13.
The tree [Stella] that Landau and her designers have put onstage is among the most beautiful and wondrous theatrical creations I can recall,” writes Jesse Green in the New York Times. “Like Menzel’s Jesse, Stella is multifarious. Her trunk rotates into place like an animated Richard Serra sculpture.”
Ardizzone-West took some time to discuss his work on the show:
Tell us about your process of creating the set design for “Redwood?”
“Tina Landau conceived and wrote “Redwood” as a unique form of a theatrical / musical event which she described to me as “a kind of hybrid musical-concert-performance piece-art installation-experience.” She was looking for a set designer that would lean into a non-traditional design language, pulling from architecture and art / video installation rather than traditional musical theater scenery. My particular design experience as an architect, set designer, concert designer, and photographer (and lover of trees) made me a uniquely appropriate fit for the creative team, which included Tina Landau (director), Hana S Kim (video design), Scott Zielinski (lighting design), Jonathan Deans (sound design), Toni-Leslie James (costume design), and Bandaloop (vertical movement).
““Redwood” is the story of Jesse (played by Idina Menzel), a grieving mother who finds a path to healing through communion with the redwoods, and one particular tree that she names Stella. The musical is set in New York, the road, the memory space of Jesse, and most importantly, in and around the redwood forest (including 200 feet up in the canopy of Stella), a challenging if not impossible series of environments to recreate on stage! I have a strong memory of PMA’s own Dick Archer sharing with me years ago Joyce Kilmer’s poetic statement that “only god can make a tree”, which he amended to “only god and Disney can make a tree.” This cautionary tale has stayed with me throughout my career as I am routinely challenged by playwrights and directors to evoke naturalistic spaces and ideas in physical form inside theaters.
“In the script of “Redwood,” one of the characters shares the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam with this story: “In the beginning of creation, God put his light into vessels to send to the earth but the light was too powerful and so the vessels broke – and shards of light were scattered everywhere. Like the stars. So then God made humans and gave us the purpose of gathering up those sparks of light. That’s our job: to repair what’s broken.” This concept of a broken vessel, and the human attempt to gather and fill that vessel with light became for me a starting point to the stage design of “Redwood.” The physical space is an abstract interpretation of this empty / broken vessel, the inside of a redwood tree, Jesse’s brain space, and a map of the universe. The fractured space is made from surfaces and materials that can emit light (video screens), and is geometrically organized around the central heart of a very tangible and tactile sculpture of a redwood tree (which I think our shop, PRG, did a better-than-Disney job of sculpting!).
“The evocation of the redwood forest was a deeply collaborative job combining sculpture, video, lighting, sound, and human movement – all working together to embrace the audience into the internal experience that the main character, Jesse, is having as she simultaneously experiences the immersion in the forest, her memories, her isolation, and ultimately her connections.”
How did your time at PMA influence your career trajectory?
“I was an architecture student at Cornell, but my heart was always in the theater, so amidst the packed schedule of the intensive 5 year B Arch program, most of my spare time at Cornell was spent in the Schwartz Center where I took as many classes and independent studies as possible with Set Design Professor Kent Goetz, and worked in the scene shop under the mentorship of the late great Technical Director Dick Archer and his team. My time at PMA plus the intensive Cornell Architecture program combined to provide a richly broad and multidisciplinary education which has deeply informed my broad approach design for theater, concerts, tv, film, dance, immersive and performance architecture, and more.”
Jason Ardizzone-West is an Emmy award-winning scenic designer & production designer whose work spans many genres & media including live theater, concert design, tv, film, events, and theater architecture. Read more about his work.
