Floyd Collins

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Floyd Collins, the musical having its Broadway premiere at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont, was first seen in New York at Playwrights Horizons in 1996. This score by Adam Guettel is the second of his shows to move from Off Broadway to Broadway, the earlier one being Days of Wine and Roses in 2024. Floyd Collins is based on the true life of story William Floyd Collins, an American cave explorer, who became trapped in an underground tunnel on Bee Doyle’s farm in Barren County, Kentucky, in an area that is now part of Mammoth Cave National Park, during the first two weeks of February 1925. This led to a media circus that became national news.

Soon after we meet Floyd Collins played by Jeremy Jordan exploring what he names Sand Cave, he becomes stuck in a tiny crevice and due to a rock slide his legs become buried. As result the actor must remain entirely immobilized during most of the show except for two dream sequences/flashbacks. While he is occasionally given songs to sing, we have a hero who can’t move which is not very dramatic. In the Playwrights Horizons version, the smaller stage worked well to show the claustrophobic world that Collins found himself in and increased the urgency of his situation. Unfortunately, the set by the collective dots using the huge Beaumont stage never makes us feel like we are underground and trapped in a cave. Nor does the direction by Tina Landau who also wrote the book and additional lyrics give us the sense of pressing need in a race against time.

To fill up the story line, Landau and Guettel introduce us to the Collins family, stern patriarch Lee (Marc Kudisch) his second wife Miss Jane (Jessica Molaskey), and Floyd’s younger brother Homer (Jason Gotay) and sister Nellie (Lizzy McAlpine). When the media circus above the cave erupts, the family is joined by reporter Skeets Miller of the Louisville Courier-Journal (played by Taylor Trensch) who is thin enough to journey back and forth to try to dig Collins out, as well as use the opportunity to interview him. In Miller we have the active hero which the title character can’t be. We also meet Collins’ ne’er-do-well neighbors Ed Bishop (Clyde Voce), Bee Doyle (Wade McCollum), and Jewell Estes (Cole Vaughan), who can’t be convinced to risk their lives and help in the attempt to dig him out. Along the way, they are joined by H. T. Carmichael (Sean Allan Krill), an engineer sent by the Kentucky Rock and Asphalt Company, a man who has ulterior motives of his own, and the crew he brings in to help with the recovery effort.

Unfortunately, while the carnival atmosphere in the field above the cave increases, the musical is mostly a waiting game: if and when Floyd Collins will be brought up from the deteriorating cave. The emotions that you would expect as time begins to run out as passageways become either waterlogged or impassible are not in evidence except for Floyd’s father who is more concerned with finances that his son’s life. Floyd himself is often depicted as delirious or depressed so that we don’t get much of an arc of his emotions.

The songs by Guettel, written in bluegrass and country western style and using guitars and banjoes in the Obie Award winning orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin, are attractive but do not advance the story much nor do they develop character. In fact, they are more window dressing than anything else. The melodies given to Floyd’s sister Nellie in such numbers as “Lucky” and “Through the Mountain” and sung by the fine McAlpine are quite beautiful but they are mostly extraneous to the plot. The reporters are given a witty number called “Is That Remarkable” in the second act as they begin to get the story wrong in order to get a scoop but this only tends to make them satiric characters, undermining the seriousness of the story. The song titles tend to give away the messages of each number so that there isn’t much to wait for.

Best are Trensch as Skeets Miller who eventually seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown as he exhausts himself going up and down from the field through the 150 feet route in the cave to reach Floyd and Gotay as Floyd’s brother Homer who is the one who must argue more and more with the engineer who knows nothing of caves. The usually reliable Kudisch and Molaskey as Floyd’s parents aren’t given much to do though each has been assigned a memorable song.

Although lighting designer Scott Zielinski worked on the Off Broadway version back in 1996, he seems to have been defeated by the larger Beaumont stage, never making us feel what it is like to be plunged into total darkness. Nor does the set by the collective dots make us feel we are either in a cave or in a huge field eventually cluttered with thousands of spectators or equipment. The firework effect by projection designer Ruey Horng Sun is spectacular but the show does not prepare us for it.

Like his score for Days of Wine and Roses, Guettel seems to be reaching for operatic proportions but like his more recent musical, he doesn’t go far enough to achieve this. Landau’s book is not very exciting or rousing even with all the characters introduced. Some waiting scenes are actually plodding and a bit boring. As produced by Lincoln Center Theater, this Floyd Collins revival is an interesting but failed attempt to tell this historic tale. One can easily imagine a more dramatic and electrifying production staged environmentally somewhere else. FYI, Skeets Miller won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Reporting for his interview with Floyd Collins 150 feet underground.

Floyd Collins (open run)

Lincoln Center Theater

Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 W. 65^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-501-3100 or visit http://www.lct.org

Running time: two hours and 25 minutes include one intermission