arts & culture
Disney+ Doc Traces Idina Menzel’s
Rise, From the Bat Mitzvah Circuit
to Broadway
Stephen Silver | JTA.org
B 20
Idina Menzel performs in a scene from
“Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage.”
playing there was a big deal, and I
wanted to film it, no matter what I did
with the footage, I know I just wanted
to document it for myself, so I could
take that in and really just appreciate
the moment.”
The documentary shows Menzel
with her then-preteen son — from her
previous marriage to Taye Diggs — and
her husband, actor Aaron Lohr, while
going through the process of in vitro
fertilization. The tour that the film follows arrived
in Pittsburgh about two weeks after
the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue mas-
sacre, and Menzel is shown singing the
“Rent” number “No Day But Today”
to a crowd at Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints
Arena. (Menzel more recently wrote
and performed a song called “A Tree of
Life,” which was featured in the closing
credits of a recent HBO documentary
about the tragedy and its aftermath.)
In that part of the film, Menzel wears
a shirt with a Jewish star that says
“Stronger Than Hate.”
“That show was all about tolerance,”
Menzel says of “Rent” in the film, while
on stage in Pittsburgh. “It was about
DECEMBER 22, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
love, it was about community… I’m sit-
ting here in this beautiful city, a Jewish
girl from Long Island. I thought about
how we light candles in the Jewish
religion, sort of choosing light over
darkness, choosing love over bigotry.”
“That particular concert is now trag-
ically defined by what had happened
in Pittsburgh, and I felt like I couldn’t
ignore that, and I felt like that song was
the right song for the moment, and that
if there was any way I could use my
music to help heal, then I wanted to do
it,” she said.

The documentary also looks back
at Menzel’s entire career, from break-
ing through in the original produc-
tion of “Rent” in the mid-1990s (the
“which way to the stage” subtitle, as
“Rent”-heads will know, is a reference
to what was Menzel’s very first line
in that musical), to an ill-fated run at
a pop career, to her second big musi-
cal smash, “Wicked,” which landed on
Broadway in 2003. Viewers also get the
story of the “Frozen” phenomenon and
its Menzel-performed torch song “Let
it Go,” as well as other notable epi-
sodes — such as the time John Travolta
mispronounced her name at the Oscars
in 2014. (Menzel finds the whole thing
hilarious.) Menzel’s career is about to come
full circle, with another bar/bat mitz-
vah-related performance: She is set to
co-star in “You Are So Not Invited
to My Bat Mitzvah,” a Netflix movie
adapted from the young adult novel
by Fiona Rosenbloom and directed by
Sammi Cohen. The film will reunite
Menzel with Adam Sandler, who played
her husband in 2019’s “Uncut Gems”
and will do so again in the new movie.

“You Are So Not Invited to My Bat
Mitzvah” does not have a release date
but is expected to arrive sometime in
2023. For now, she’s reveling in the
documentary. “It was just such a joy because I got to
look back on it… I got to see myself as
a little girl again,” Menzel said. “How
I always believed in myself, even more
so than maybe I do now. There was
no one who was going to tell me that
I wasn’t going to live my dream one
day. I believed that I had something
to offer the world, and so it was really
emotional for me to see.” JE
Eric Maldin/Walkman Productions Inc.

efore becoming one of the most
iconic vocal performers of her
time, appearing in Broadway shows
such as “Rent” and “Wicked” and
voicing Queen Elsa in “Frozen,” Idina
Menzel got her start singing as a teen-
ager on the wedding and bar and bat
mitzvah circuit near where she grew up
on Long Island and other parts of the
New York area.

“It was everything to me, forma-
tively,” Menzel said of her early singing
experiences. “I believe ... that that had
a lot to do with my education in music
and genres, but also as a performer. I
was so young when I did it ... I would
lie about my age, I would be 15 or 16
years old and I’d dress all mature and
go in in high heels. I would usually be
the only woman in a group of six guys.”
In the new documentary “Idina
Menzel: Which Way to the Stage,”
which had its world premiere in
mid-November at the DOC NYC
film festival and is now available on
Disney+, Menzel discusses those expe-
riences, even returning to the main
venue where she used to perform at
weddings and bar mitzvahs. The film
also shows Menzel in Pittsburgh in the
immediate aftermath of the Tree of Life
massacre and shows her sharing her
thoughts on it as a Jewish person.

The film, directed by Anne McCabe,
follows Menzel’s 2018 arena tour, along
with Josh Groban, which culminated
in Menzel fulfilling her lifelong dream
of headlining Madison Square Garden.

It combines concerts with intimate
behind-the-scenes moments, as well
as archival footage from Menzel’s early
life and throughout her career.

“When I heard that the tour was
going to culminate at Madison Square
Garden, I realized that it was a dream
come true — it was a place that I’d
always wanted to play, growing up on
Long Island, and living in New York
City, at NYU and beyond that,” Menzel
said. “The fact that I was going to be