Semper Virens. Heartwood. A knotty growth of bark, the burls are filled with unspotted bud tissue—should a redwood tree fall, a burl can sprout a new tree. The burls, which fetch thousands of ...

Idina Menzel is no stranger to flying high above Broadway stages, and she made her soaring return (literally) Thursday night with the new musical “ Redwood .” ...

EAST LANSING, MI – Decades after being struck by lightning, a large dawn redwood stands tall and proud at Michigan State University, serving an example of a species once believed to be extinct.

The musical follows Jesse, a woman who drives West in the wake of her son’s death and ultimately learns about “Big Tree Religion,” leading her to fall in love with a redwood tree named Stella.

It’s easy to fall into a big hole ... Kim’s gorgeous images of trees achieve the same uplifting effect in “Redwood” without the help of hydraulics.

But there’s little ideal about “Redwood,” a wholly unsurprising new tree-hugging musical (and I mean that literally) written and directed by Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member Tina Landau ...

There, she befriends two arborists who let her climb a towering Redwood tree on her own to process ... and nobody reported any falls or close calls. “There’s no fake flying in here.