**Floyd Collins
Been down so long ...
Lizzy McAlpine and Jeremy Jordan in Floyd Collins. Photo: Joan Marcus
These are the facts, as passed down in caver lore (and Wikipedia): On January 30, 1925, Kentuckian Floyd Collins – hoping to profit off tourist interest in a possible addiitonal vault within the state’s vast underground network – got stuck exploring a promising new crawlway. The longer he stayed pinned in place, the more newsworthy he became – to the point that his plight made headlines across the country, attracting tens of thousands of lookie-loos and turning the rescue site into a macabre carnival. The entire episode was an early and by no means unrivaled example of the public’s craving for disaster porn.
Lamentable? Yes. Fertile ground for a musical? Debatable. Adam Guettel (best known for The Light in the Piazza) thought so. Roping in Tina Landau to provide the book and direct, he sent up a trial balloon at Playwrights Horizons in 1996. The show bumped around the regionals for a while, then lay mostly underground, rarely produced. Would this be an appropriate time for its exhumation?
Hard to say. Human nature has scarcely improved in the interim: we do like to track a calamity (consider how avidly we follow every outrage perpetrated by the current administration). But why willingly subject oneself to this sorry saga, which has very few lessons to impart?
The creators managed to insert a tangential allusion to corporate overstepping, by having a construction executive (played commandingly by Sean Allan Krill) take over the rescue mission. He bars the efforts of Floyd’s younger brother, Homer (Jason Gotay, whose heavenly voice deserves the reverberance of a canyon: excellent sound design by Dan Moses Schreier). Also sidelined: a local reporter (Taylor Trench), who, being first on the scene, quickly gets in over his head.
The script also gets in a dig at bottom-feeding journos, by inserting a trio of gray-suited out-of-towners who execute a tight-harmony song-and-dance number as unoriginal as it is tasteless (it comes across as a desperate attempt to wring comedy from a tragedy, as reprehensible as the crowds’ sick caveside pilgrimage). And can we just erase from memory an opportunistic filmmaker (Cliff Roney) got up by costume designer Anita Yavich, clearly under orders, in cliché von Stroheim drag?
The entire circus would make for a miserable experience were it not for Jeremy Jordan’s efforts to outmaneuver the confines of his role. It’s a pleasure to hear his voice emerge from a living grave, even if he’s assigned the hokiest, hick-est songs – ersatz Appalachian – and must perforce perform them semi-recumbent.
The real treat is getting to witness Lizzy McAlpine (an online singer-songwriter phenom) making her stage debut. She sings like an angel with a slight wobble: her voice has an intriguing, delicate hemidemiquaver (think Loretta Lynn Lite). McAlpine plays Nellie, Floyd’s real-life sister, 25 at the time, who – according to the script – is just back from a stay at an asylum (the precipitating incident is left unclear). As McAlpine portrays her, Nellie has an otherworldly, prophetic presence. I’d be curious to learn her story.
Broadway, to June 22