America has always found a place in its heart for dreamers, however flawed or misguided. Almost exactly a century ago, the story of a Kentucky cave enthusiast and natural risk-taker named Floyd Collins found himself trapped 56 feet underground while exploring caverns that he hoped to turn into a tourist destination to rival the nearby Mammoth Cave. His plight captured the public’s imagination through the then-brand-new medium of broadcast radio, prompting a two-week rescue operation that became the third biggest U.S. media event between the world wars. (Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight in 1927 and the kidnapping of the famed pilot’s baby five years later top the list.)
The centenary of the story has prompted a splashy and wonderfully sung revival of composer-lyricist Adam Guettel and writer-director Tina Landau’s 1996 musical Floyd Collins, an elegiac look at a uniquely American tragedy that anticipates many elements of contemporary life. First, there’s the hubris of its hero, played by the still-boyish Jeremy Jordan, and the determined efforts of his two siblings (Jason Gotay and Lizzie McAlpine) to rescue him. Second, there’s the conflict between a hollow or two full of Kentucky locals and outsiders like the opportunistic engineer H.T. Carmichael (Sean Allan Krill) who spar over the best way of prying Floyd loose from the rocks and gravel that entrap him. Finally, there’s the media circus that breaks out on the farmland above the caves — prompted at first by an earnest cub reporter from Louisville named Skeets Miller (Taylor Trensch) who finds himself drawn into the rescue operation with his skinny frame and earnest demeanor.
Landau, who directed the original Off Broadway production nearly three decades ago, reprises her duties here in the cavernous Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center Theater. Yes, there’s a bit of an incongruity in watching a story so rooted in feelings of claustrophobia and confinement play out in such an open performance space. (Jordan spends most of the show supine on a kind of chaise longue downstage right that resembles a blocky dentist’s chair.) Indeed, the scenic design (by the collective dots) is minimalist in the extreme, with see-saw planks poking up and down from the rough-hewn stage floor to suggest passageways to the caves below. And there are projections on the back wall (by Ruey Horng Sun) that indicate the dusky Appalachian sky. Even when Jordan’s Floyd is exploring his underground lair early on and finds a promising cavern of some expansiveness, Scott Zielinski’s pinpoint lighting isolates him in a three-dimensional darkness where we are left to imagine what he’s seeing.
Guettel’s bluegrass-inflected score, performed by a 12-piece band that includes guitar, banjo, harmonica, mandolin, and fiddle, includes some wonderful melodies that underscore the sense of place. Jordan is magnificent in his opening solo, “The Call,” in which he plumbs his feelings about the underground world and its potential promise to free him from a dead-end agricultural job where he’d spend his days “plowin’ a hardscrabble field.” He’s aided by the echoing, yodel-like call-and-response of Dan Moses Schreier’s sound design that helps turn the song into a one-man round bolstered by moments of harmonizing with himself.
Vocally, the real standouts are the two actors playing his siblings — whose determination to save Floyd is far more apparent than our sympathy for the reckless daredevil who’s only sketchily drawn. McAlpine (whose 2024 single “ceilings” went platinum) brings a wispy, fragile, almost otherworldly presence to Nellie, just released from a mental hospital and feeling an almost psychic connection with her trapped sibling. Meanwhile, Gotay (last seen as a high school jock who meets a calamitous fate in Teeth) is a vocal dynamo as the can-do baby brother who’s driven to help Floyd despite the distracting prospect of capitalizing on his experience with one of the cinema directors or vaudeville agents circling around.
While Jordan remains on stage for most of the show, there are vast stretches when the focus shifts to the ensemble — sometimes to the detriment of achieving narrative momentum. His character isn’t given much to do; he’s even denied a love interest, reduced instead to a tune imagining a generic future romance with a girl with “blue eyes and yella’ hair.” Instead of fleshing out the title character, we get subplots about Skeets and his growing ambivalence about journalism as practiced by the hordes who descend on the scene, as well as Floyd’s ailing father (Marc Kudisch), with that telltale cough, and his stepmom (Jessica Molaskey), who worries after everyone like a mother hen. And then there’s the officious Carmichael, whose shadowy motives for taking charge of the rescue operation are never fully explained but who regularly butts heads with Homer and other locals more familiar with the realities of cave excavation. (It probably doesn’t help that Carmichael doesn’t get a song of his own.)
Floyd Collins, whose original run lasted just 25 performances, remains a musical oddity — a glorified chamber musical about a real-life historical downer of a story that seems solidly in the Sondheimian tradition of the late 20th century. But this is no Sweeney Todd, reveling in the macabre in a guilty-pleasure sort of way, or even Parade, another ’90s show by a Sondheim acolyte (Jason Robert Brown) whose bleak history was built on the scaffolding of the serious issue of antisemitism. And yet you can see (and hear) the seeds of the talent Guettel would display in shows like 2005’s Tony-winning A Light in the Piazza and the recent Days of Wine and Roses. In both, he produced richly layered, almost operatic scores around stories so dark that they seem to reject the very principles of commercial musical theater. The pleasures of Floyd Collins are many, but they’re often diffuse, like bits of gravel and sandstone that’s been chiseled away. ★★★★☆
FLOYD COLLINS
Vivian Beaumont in Lincoln Center Theater, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 22 for $58 to $299
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