Broadway Reviews Theatre Review by Howard Miller - April 21, 2025 Floyd Collins. Music and lyrics by Adam Guettel. Book, additional lyrics, and directed by Tina Landau. Sets by dots. Costumes by Anita Yavich. Lighting by Scott Zielinski. Sound by Dan Moses Schreier. Projections by Ruey Horng Sun. Dance sequences by Jon Rua. Orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin. Music direction by Ted Sperling.
Floyd Collins. Such a neutral title for this show, which Guettel and its bookwriter and director Tina Landau had at one time wanted to call Deathwatch Carnival. That would be a more telling name for it. Certainly it conveys all you need to know in terms of the clashing mix of tones packed into the two-and-a-half-hour production. But Floyd Collins it is, named for the actual person being portrayed, whose sad tale unfolded during the cold early days of winter 1925 in rural Kentucky. In brief, Collins, while exploring a cave, became trapped in a narrow crawlway beneath a cascade of falling rocks. Despite massive efforts to extricate him, he perished two weeks later of thirst, hunger and hypothermia. Bleak enough for you? That's one side of the story that unfolds onstage, the "deathwatch" part, with Floyd being portrayed in a thrilling performance by Jeremy Jordan. The other side takes place aboveground on a piece of farmland on which sits at the entrance to the cave. The focus here is on Floyd's family, the rescue efforts, and the media frenzy and commercialization of the events. That last part, the bit about the media frenzy, etc., that's the "carnival" part. A tough combination to pull off, this tonal shift, and it doesn't entirely work. This mix of the tragic and the satirical is somewhat akin to what Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman brought to Assassins, with its serious subject matter, satiric bite, and wide range of musical styles. Certainly, Guettel and Sondheim's names have frequently been linked, and their influences and approaches occasionally overlap. But Guettel has developed his own mode of sophisticated musical communication, drawing from the world of opera, classical music, jazz, swing, folk, and, in the case of Floyd Collins, bluegrass. This varied range is the great strength of Floyd Collins. The score is strong enough so that it could be presented as a song cycle with minimal staging. That is something that Tina Landau, in her capacity as director, seems to fully grasp. And despite the vastness of the stage at the Vivian Beaumont, the production team has opted for a simple set by the design collective dots, with just enough to give us a sense of place. We can also rely on Scott Zielinski's very creative use of lighting to move us smoothly from deep within the cave to the surface, where we meet up with Floyd's family. There is his father Lee Collins (the excellent Marc Kudisch), deeply worried about his eldest son and frustrated with the way his children have all turned their backs on the kind of hardscrabble, feet-on-the-ground life that he expected them to take on. The rest of the family members are rounded out by Floyd's loving stepmother (Jessica Molaskey), his devoted sister Nellie (Lizzie McAlpine), and his brother Homer (Jason Gotay). Even in the face of Lee's surly demeanor, you can tell there is a lot of affection among them.
"The Call" is a masterpiece of a song, filled with joy and the thrill of discovery, sung as Floyd moves up and down and through a maze of passageways. It incorporates yodeling and echoes, and it requires a great deal of athleticism on Jordan's part as we join him on an adventurous journey, which stops abruptly at the point where Floyd becomes trapped. It's all there in this one song, the story of Floyd Collins. For the rest of the show, except for fanciful scenes in which Floyd imagines himself to be free, Jordan remains tied to one spot, occasionally interacting with Homer (their terrific upbeat duet, "The Riddle Song," ends Act I) and a young newspaper reporter, Skeets (Taylor Trensch), who becomes as committed as anyone to the rescue. Arguably, if Floyd Collins had stuck with the human side to the story, that would have been more than enough to carry us through to the finish as Floyd, knowing the end is near, turns to his religious faith and sings the moving "How Glory Goes." But Guettel and Landau have something else to share, and it is an awkward fit. At the start of Act II, the tone shifts into a satirical mode that doesn't particularly mesh with the deeply personal story we've been dealing with, made all the more moving by the touching performances. When we return from intermission, it is as if we had accidentally entered a different theater. We are treated to a comic scene of a group of muckraking reporters singing a catchy swing tune called "Is That Remarkable?" It's a toe-tapper, sounding rather like "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," and it certainly lifts the mood. But, wow, does it ever clash with everything that comes before. And just like that, zap, we are expected to be caught up in a relatively mild satire that would feel right at home in a Broadway musical comedy of the sort that Floyd Collins is not. Our title character is no longer a person to be worried about, but a source of fodder to sell newspapers and for a caravan of hucksters catering to the gathering crowds of gawking onlookers. We are even treated to another plot thread, about a know-it-all mining company engineer (Sean Allan Krill) who insinuates himself into the rescue operation. Even though all of this has been drawn from the historical record, poor Floyd almost gets lost in the shuffle. So, yes, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance we are asked to digest here. Yet, there is so much to both appreciate and enjoy, I would highly recommend Floyd Collins, if only to experience Adam Guettel's music. And Jeremy Jordan's performance alone is worth the price of admission.
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