Broadway review by Adam Feldman
More than a century has gone by since an unfortunate Kentucky spelunker named Floyd Collins, in search of money and glory, made national headlines by getting trapped in a subterranean cavern. “I just know it’s my lucky day!” sings Floyd—played by a hale and hearty Jeremy Jordan—irresistibly tempting the gods of dramatic irony as he grapples through the dark at the start of the musical bearing his name. “There’s a kind of awe / You can’t catch in a photograph,” he continues. “S’like a giant jaw / It’s calling me.” But when he heeds that call, the jaw snaps shut: A passageway collapses and he’s pinned there by debris, all but sealed in a cave of wonders where no amount of wishing can save him. From this point on, there is nowhere for Floyd Collins, or Floyd Collins, to go.
Floyd Collins | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
Musical theater tends to be dynamic, but Tina Landau, as a writer, seems more interested in stasis. In her new musical Redwood, which opened on Broadway in February, grief drives a woman up a tree; in Floyd Collins, which premiered in 1996, greed strands a man underground. (Landau wrote the show’s book and additional lyrics, and directed its original production as well as its current one at Lincoln Center.) Both pieces examine a person fixed in place within a vast natural world, but in neither case is the central figure’s interior journey compelling enough to justify the lack of plot. What this one has that the other one doesn’t is a musically adventurous score: Adam Guettel’s bluegrass-tinted songs go off in unexpected directions from their baselines in wistful Americana. But music that can hold your attention on an original cast album—a medium through which Floyd Collins has earned a cult following—can’t always do the same onstage.
Floyd Collins | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
Here is where I’ll confess that, despite many efforts, I have never particularly warmed to Floyd Collins . I’m partial to Guettel’s later scores for The Light in the Piazza and Days of Wine and Roses, but this one still strikes me as the Kentucky equivalent of spinach. (Mustard greens?) The cub reporter who breaks the story, played by a strong Taylor Trensch, has a more involving emotional arc than the main character does; and if we feel for Floyd’s worried family members—brother Homer (Jason Gotay), sister Nellie (Lizzy McAlpine), father Lee (Marc Kudisch), stepmom Sara (Jessica Molaskey)—it’s in the way we would feel for anyone in their position. The show is one long elegy for a man we have barely met and barely get to know, and who doesn’t seem especially special except as a victim of circumstance. What happens to Floyd is sad, to be sure, but it’s only sad. It doesn’t mean anything; it’s a hundred-year-old bummer.
Floyd Collins | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
The pace picks up briefly at the start of the second act, when a media circus pitches tent around the entrance to Floyd’s cave; there’s even a nifty dance, choreographed by Jon Rua, for a trio of vulturous reporters. (The alchemical transformation of personal tragedy into sensationalist gold was a prominent theme for musicals in the post-O.J. 1990s; see also Parade, Ragtime, Side Show and the revival of Chicago.) But after the first ten minutes, Floyd is nearly buried in an invisible heap of rubble—rendered abstractly as a grey chaise longue—and although he gets up from time to time for meandering dream and memory sequences, even those sit under a permanent cloud of somberness. As the show drifts toward its foregone conclusion, it keeps us in a state of prolonged anticlimax.
Floyd Collins | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
The material reality of Floyd’s predicament may have felt more pressing in the cramped quarters of Playwrights Horizons in 1996 than it does in the wide open space of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, one of Broadway’s least confined venues. The set, by the design collective dots, is minimal—Scott Zielinski’s lighting accents the gritty textures of the floor—and Landau fills some of the emptiness with attractive stage pictures. (She’s partial to silhouettes.) In the main, however, this production’s pleasures are aural. It is perhaps most successful when approached as a staged recital of Guettel’s score. The orchestra, directed and conducted by Ted Sperling, is superb; so is the full-bodied singing by Jordan as Floyd and McAlpine as Nellie. (The latter is a young singer-songwriter with a voice that sounds truly special live, and her unpolished acting works fine for the character, who has recently left a mental institution.) The score has been fruitfully re-orchestrated by Bruce Coughlin, and is served beautifully by Dan Moses Schreier’s sound design, notably in an early song that incorporates echoes.
If you’re already a fan of Floyd Collins’s score, you are likely to enjoy this eminently respectable performance of it, and maybe even respond to it emotionally. If not, though—if, like Floyd or like me, you find yourself killing time without being moved—Floyd Collins’s admirable musical ambition may remind you that sometimes when exploring you make thrilling discoveries, and sometimes you just get stuck.
Floyd Collins. Vivian Beaumont Theater (Broadway). Book by Tina Landau. Music and lyrics by Adam Guettel. Additional lyrics by Landau. Directed by Landau. With Jeremy Jordan, Jason Gotay, Lizzy McAlpine, Taylor Trensch, Marc Kudisch, Jessica Molaskey, Sean Allan Krill, Wade McCollum, Cole Vaughan, Clyde Voce. Running time: 2hrs 30mins. One intermission.
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Floyd Collins | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
