Headlines at the time called Floyd Collins a “cave captive,” a “prisoner of nature’s dungeon” — dramatic language, but accurate, and the American public was obsessed. In a nail-biting news saga that lasted just over two weeks in the winter of 1925, Collins, a cave explorer, was pinned deep under the cold Kentucky soil. Inside a narrow, precarious passageway, his left foot was snared by a rock.
As one of the rescue team members says in “Floyd Collins,” the 1994 musical that Tina Landau (“Redwood”) and Adam Guettel (“Days of Wine and Roses”) adapted from the story: “It’s a real chest compressor down there.”
Yet one of the wonders of the show’s glorious-sounding new production, which opened on Monday night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater with a thoroughly winning Jeremy Jordan in the title role, is how far from claustrophobic it feels. Lincoln Center Theater’s vast and airy Broadway stage becomes an exalted evocation of the enormous cavern that Floyd discovers, delighting in its echoing acoustics, just before he gets into his ultimately fatal jam.
Bit of a grim subject for a musical, though, isn’t it? Especially now, when so many headlines fuel anxiety. Even so, there is comfort in it, and not just for those of us who are always up for a tale involving a hero journalist. That would be the adorably named Skeets Miller (Taylor Trensch), a cub reporter from Louisville who is small enough, and bold enough, to reach Floyd and interview him while trying to dig him out.
But neighbors and family are the first to come to the aid of the inquisitive, intrepid Floyd, who is forever landing in scrapes that he needs saving from. Eventually, even the governor becomes involved.
Something about all that hits hard right now, especially wrapped in Americana as the show is: the idea that when we’re in danger — maybe trapped somewhere, maddeningly out of reach — our community will show up to help, and the government, too.
With music and lyrics by Guettel, and a book and additional lyrics by Landau, who directs, “Floyd Collins” is structurally unruly — its attention doled out among so many characters (a core of 10, plus ensemble roles) that its focus is too rarely on Floyd. And the authors, who were in their late 20s and early 30s when the show was new, seem to have been skittish about plumbing their caver’s scarier emotions.
Is this inspired-by-real-life story as clear and detailed as it needs to be? Nope. Do we, the audience, feel as profoundly as we might if its characters were more richly written? Possibly not, though that is arguably an upside; the public isn’t exactly crying out right now for sad stories that bore into our very souls.
Still, “Floyd Collins” reaches the sublime, and that is a rare achievement in any work of art.
Amid the muchness of this musical, it is difficult to discern the creators’ primary impulse for telling the story. But if, for Guettel, it was about wanting to play with canon singing and echoes, all that layering of sound and melody bouncing off cave walls, that would be reason enough. The effect is exquisite, even haunting. (Music direction is by Ted Sperling, sound design by Dan Moses Schreier — both veterans of Landau’s 1996 Off Broadway production, as are Scott Zielinski, the lighting designer, and Bruce Coughlin, the orchestrator.)
Hearing an echo is how Floyd knows he has found a cave worth exploring. When we first meet him, he is jaunty, agile and easy in his own eccentricity — which is to say, given to making conversation with the cave crickets.
The son of a farmer, he intends to find his own fortune underground, by discovering a cave that he can turn into a tourist attraction, part of a local industry.
“Welcome to Floyd Collins’ Great Sand Cave!” he sings, trying out his spiel.
On a set (by dots, the collective) that starts out minimalist before rescue equipment crisscrosses it handsomely, Floyd scrambles and crab-walks and climbs. In his element, he imagines his financially secure future — and sharing it, magnanimously, with his family. Jordan swiftly makes us want that for Floyd.
Then, disaster.
While Floyd lies there, awaiting rescue, the person he seems to love most in the world — his sister, Nellie (played by the singer-songwriter Lizzy McAlpine, in a vocal wow of a Broadway debut) — worries and sends him sandwiches. Forbidden to climb down and see Floyd for herself when so many men are waved right in, she erupts into outraged, wounded song: “But why can all of you go?”
Able to get near Floyd, though not quite to him, their brother Homer (Jason Gotay) is rattled when the ordinarily scrappy Floyd acknowledges that he is trapped.
Homer tells him: “I’ve never heard you say that before.”
“Well,” Floyd says, “I’ve never felt it before.”
That, too, resounds differently than it would have three decades ago, or it did for me, anyway. Suddenly, powerfully, Floyd was all of us, waylaid mid-pursuit of happiness, uncertain how to proceed.
In a Feb. 3, 1925, dispatch, the real Skeets Miller wrote: “Death holds no terror for Floyd Collins, he told me when I fed him tonight, more than 115 hours after he was trapped in Sand Cave; but he does not expect to die.”
Miller’s coverage, which won a Pulitzer Prize, begot a frenzy, with print and radio correspondents arriving from all over — a situation at which the musical tsk-tsks, it being a harbinger of media circuses to come. As crowds of gawkers converge in Act II, the show’s liveliest number belongs to the rumor-fueled members of the visiting press corps, who keep hoping that whatever they’ve just added to their stories will prove “remarkable enough.”
The thing is, the popular interest in Floyd’s story — which, yes, sold a lot of newspapers — suggests an underlying compassion and empathy: What if I were the one stuck down there? What if it were someone I loved, or someone from my street? That’s what makes human interest: what humans care about. And it isn’t always frivolous.
Skeets asks Floyd’s forgiveness “for turning you into a story,” but the line rings hollow because Skeets has done nothing wrong. Inside that tiny, frightening pocket of earth, Floyd needs an echo.
To cry out and get only silence back: There would be heartbreak.
Floyd Collins
Through June 22 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Manhattan; floydcollinsbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
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