"FLOYD COLLINS:" How Glory Goes & Comes Again
On an April evening in 1991 I ventured out to Brooklyn to see my friend Karen Trott in a show I knew nothing about. The small theater, BACA Downtown, 111 Willoughby Street, was up on the second floor. The show paired a couple of experimental one-act musicals under the rubric: Hybrids — both experiments conceived, directed and choreographed by the marvelous Randolyn Zinn to music that was simply transfixing. The first piece was called Dream and Variations. The second, The Fourth Woman, was about Hildegard von Bingen — the 10th Century Benedictine Abess/polymath-writer-composer-scientist-philosopher. Afterwards, Karen (who’d played Hildegard) introduced me to the young composer responsible for all of the evening’s sonic beauty. Adam Guettel. And I thought: I’m gonna follow this guy and his music wherever he goes.
I then waited on Adam Guettel, waited some three years before he at last finished a draft of his first full-length musical and I heard it was being presented at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia. I headed straight for Philly and caught what proved to be Floyd Collins for the first time. His music again floored me; a dense melodic amalgam this time of Copland-esque Roots Americana, Bernstein-esque musical theater eclecticism, and an unearthly, yearning state of grace I can only describe as Guettel-esque.
The story his music told was unlike any I had ever before seen on a stage; a true story, no less, about a 1920s Kentucky “spelunker” named Floyd Collins, who triggered a nationwide media circus after getting himself trapped in one of the subterranean caves he’d been exploring. “With its stark, string-dominated score,” I later wrote in the N.Y. Times, “Floyd Collins managed to depict the heartbreaking dreams and death of a dirt-poor hillbilly trapped in a cave. Not an easy thing to do.”
Floyd Collins premiered in New York two years later, in February 1996, for a woefully brief 25 performances at Playwrights Horizons. It arrived in the immediate wake of my friend Jonathan Larson’s sudden death barely two weeks before — just as his first produced full-length musical, Rent, was on the verge of opening Off Broadway. I therefore found Floyd Collins almost unbearably poignant now, focused, as it is, on the single-minded pursuit of one’s dream, and the ultimate surrender to death as one’s fate.
Rent rendered Floyd Collins all but invisible that year, dominating Broadway and beyond with its own media circus instigated by another doomed young man’s tragic true story.
In the aftermath, I went on to write often about Adam Guettel, as he went on to write The Light in the Piazza, winning a 2005 Tony Award for Best Score; and Days of Wine and Roses, which brought him a 2024 Tony nomination.
I’ve been waiting, though, ever since, for another chance to see and hear Floyd Collins. That opportunity finally arrived with Lincoln Center Theater’s musically exquisite revival currently running in its vast Vivian Beaumont Theater.
The production is blessed with a dream Floyd Collins: Jeremy Jordan, the longtime musical theater heartthrob, who, as it turns out, was born to sing Adam Guettel’s music. Jordan inhabits Floyd Collins with a perfect combination of bravado and metaphysical hunger, while singing the hell out of Guettel’s stunning music for Floyd; a series of folk arias melded from yodeling echoes of the Appalachians that sit effortlessly in Jeremy Jordan’s rich, rugged voice.
He is matched by a terrific Taylor Trensch as Skeets Miller, the reporter who was physically small enough to reach Floyd in his constricted cave and live to write about it; and by Lizzy McAlpine, as Floyd’s devoted young sister Nellie, who communicates with her brother in extra-sensory vocalese that penetrates the brutal distance between them. The music is conducted by the quintessential conductor of this score, Ted Sperling, who was Floyd Collins’ original music director in 1996, and, happily, has returned to reprise and enrich that role.
The production is not perfect. The director, Tina Landau — who co-wrote Floyd Collins’ script with Adam Guettel and staged the original, pocket-sized Playwrights production — has mounted a sprawling new Floyd Collins on the Vivian Beaumont’s notoriously inhospitable thrust stage. Her painterly, wide-angle tableaus and endless horizons work against the show’s essential sense of confinement, depriving it of intimacy. Characters wander across moodily-lit yawning spaces, disconnected from one another and, most vitally, from Floyd Collins himself, trapped stage-right on what looked like a lawn chair abstractly standing in for his tomb of a cave .
Might it have been better, I found myself thinking, to fill all that empty space with projections of the caves themselves; the hulking network of dank caverns that Floyd lies crushed beneath? Certainly, it would have been a more literally overpowering use of all that Vivian Beaumont stage real estate.
No matter. The ultimate beauty of Floyd Collins is in its score, which has never been sung or played better, I suspect; certainly not in New York. In the end, when Floyd’s final moments arrived on the wings of his heavenly farewell hymn, “How Glory Goes,” I found myself yet again in awe of Adam Guettel, a composer capable of capturing the sound of a young man greeting death and letting go of life with heart-shattering hope; singing the ineffable.