royal circle club Idina Menzel Played Elphaba and Elsa. Now She’s Going Out on a Limb.

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.

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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,betso88 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.

Menzel had her breakout role in “Rent,” top left, and then won a Tony in “Wicked,” top right. Her other stage roles have included the Off Broadway play “Skintight,” bottom right, and the Broadway musical “If/Then,” bottom left.Credit...Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

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But many of their smiles shrank when they were asked about the embattled Republican nominee for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who has been under fire since CNN reported this week on the lewd comments he made on a pornography website several years ago. According to CNN, Mr. Robinson wrote on the site that he was a “black NAZI,” that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography and that slavery was not bad. He also recounted on the site how he went “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a teenager.

The answer? He wouldn’t.

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