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Floyd Collins starring Jeremy Jordan (Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, Broadway) - ★★ REVIEW
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Miki Jo
Laughing is not a response to good yodeling. If it was good, you'd have been like, wow, what good yodeling. Yo yo, yo. My God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you're listening on podcast platforms. My name is Miki Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am a professional theatre critic here on social media, traveling around the world, seeing as many shows as possible. And recently I headed back to New York around the time of the 2025 Tony Awards to see the last few shows of the Broadway season. The last few openings that I hadn't yet seen, including the revival of the musical Floyd Collins at Lincoln Center Theatre. Many of you were very distressed that I hadn't seen this on my last trip, despite my best efforts. Don't worry, now I have and we're going to be talking about it today. Man goes into Cave. Man gets trapped in cave Musical about man in cave. What is it like? How is Jeremy Jordan as the man in the cave? Many questions arise. Do you know who doesn't arise? Floyd. Floyd Collins. Spoiler alert. And also too soon. I don't know. Anyhow, we're going to chat about this show. This was my first experience of the material, despite the fact that that it's quite revered in musical theater circles. So I'm going to let you know my thoughts about the score and the writing as well as this particular production. Was this the right theater for it? Is a Broadway space the best fit for a show like Floyd Collins? And how was Jeremy and the rest of the cast? This is what we'll be talking about today. But as always, if you have seen this production or indeed any previous different production of Floyd Collins, I would love to hear about them in the comments section down below. Let us all know your thoughts. Let me know. And as always, if you enjoy listening to my full review of the show, then make sure you are subscribed right here on YouTube. Turn on those notifications. There is a button somewhere below my face right now that looks like a bell. And then YouTube will let you know on your device. Every time that I share a new video, I have many other show reviews from this most recent trip coming very, very soon. Not just New York, but also shows in Chicago as well as plenty of exciting London openings over the coming weeks. Did a fly just fly directly in front of my camera lens? If you, if that's a fly is what's happening there now. I feel like I'm in a cave. I mean, realistically, it was one fly I would do well in a cave or you can also find this review and all of my others on podcast platforms. In the meantime, while you are following me all over the Internet and commenting down below and liking this video if you do, here are all of my thoughts on Floyd Collins. So let's talk first of all about the arrival of this production, limited run Lincoln Center Theatre, who over the last couple of decades really have been very associated with prestigious revivals of esteemed musical theatre work. What's interesting is this is considered by everyone to be a revival of a musical and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, despite the fact that this is its Broadway premiere production, not unlike another revival from this season the last five years. Both of these shows premiered decades back, with Floyd Collins having been first seen in the 1990s, having been staged off Broadway but never transferring to Broadway, and it's only in this current season that each of them have finally made it to Broadway for the first time. But because of the classics rule at the Tony Awards, they are designated as revivals and they're understood to be revivals, even though this production of Floyd Collins has been directed by its original director as well as its co writer Tina Landau, the other co writer being the composer Adam Gettel. And we'll talk momentarily about the material that they each created for this show. But this production obviously is coming towards the end of its limited run at Lincoln Center. It's fair to say that it never really substantially set the box office on fire. I'm going to say the inclusion of stars Jeremy Jordan as well as Lizzie McAlpine were probably its strongest selling points, as well as an interesting and slightly niche part of musical theatre history. But in terms of the marketing, in terms of the title, they don't really afford it much of a quality to stand out alongside a lot of other exciting Broadway offerings in a very busy season and arriving at the busiest time of the season. We can debate extensively about whether or not Floyd Collins feels like a show that ever really belongs on Broadway, but I think even more so is this really a show that belongs on Broadway in the spring and summer? Would this have gone a little differently if it opened as little limited run revival back in the fall? Although admittedly it would have been literally then alongside its big revival competition competition this season with Sunset Boulevard and Gypsy. Hell of a year for musical theatre revivals and Floyd Collins was never really able to get out from underneath that, which was an accidental pun that I'm just hearing as I say it. I'm so sorry, so sorry to this musical. And it follows that the show, despite getting a couple of Tony Award nominations, did not pick up any awards at this year's ceremony. What the musical actually depicts is a real set of circumstances. Floyd Collins was a real man remembered in history thereafter as a great explorer who found himself trapped in a ca. And the show depicts not only his circumstances and how that happened. We don't venture really very far at all back into his life before that actually happening. It's not like some sort of a bio musical around the life and times of Floyd Collins. And that's because as well as depicting the event itself and all of the attempts made to rescue Floyd from the cave, we also glimpse the media circus and frenzy that surrounded the whole situation. I've heard this described as one of the first truly viral events in America. America. This having taken place around a century ago and obviously long before the dawn of social media. The news and the media having been then a thing that was very different. But there was a lot of excitement and intrigue around this particular situation, around Floyd getting stuck in the cave. Now, all of this took place in Sand Cave in central Kentucky. Floyd was trapped there for 14 days in total, the majority of which he spent in total isolation after a further cave collapse prevented him from. From being able to have any kind of contact with the outside world. And obviously he then subsequently passed away from starvation and thirst and hypothermia. And. I know what you're thinking. Intriguing fodder for a musical theater piece. While Tina Landau and Adam Gettle are intriguing people. And I believe it was Tina who originally pitched this show to Adam as something that they could work on together when the two of them met. And if we consider her contribution to all of this, first of all, as a book writer, the scope of the thing is very interesting because like I said, we sort of meet the story and meet Floyd at that instigating moment when he is venturing into the cave and through song, chasing glory and prosperity, he is hoping to find this flourishing cave network. He is yodeling through it in order to try and test, echoing and hear the possibility of some kind of a chamber that he believes he is nearby to, which is a natural way of inviting musicality to the story. But we'll talk about the score in just a second. And we do learn about his situation and his aspirations, inspiration here and his determination through these lyrics. But there's also so much of his character and the intriguing nature of his family as well, who we meet subsequently when they become obviously Very distressed about him being trapped in the cave. That isn't necessarily conveyed to us very thoroughly. We essentially meet him venturing into the cave. He gets stuck in the cave very quickly. He tries to remain optimistic about it, and then soon enough realizes that he is trapped. Even then, people aren't necessarily hugely fatalistic about this. It's happened to him before, before he's been able to get himself out before. This is something that Floyd does. The man goes in caves. Where the story gets considerably more interesting is where the morbidity of it all begins to creep in. And the notion that there's this family member to some, stranger to others, but a man, in any case, trapped there and within reach of their conversation. They can venture down to him, but they can't quite get him out of there. And there is careful consideration of all of the approaches that they could take and which of these might harm him and what would be worse, worth it. But as we progress, we start to get more and more acutely aware of the fact that he's not coming out of this cave. And there is a character called Skeets Miller, portrayed in this production by Tony Award nominee Taylor Trench, who arrives quite early on the scene, having been tasked with the responsibility of reporting on the story. He is a writer for the paper and the first journalist to arrive ahead of a sprawling media circus that we find out a little bit more about in the second act as our focus shifts from Floyd's circumstances and his family and the emotional reaction to all of this, and Skeets becoming very emotionally involved, becoming very personally involved with the rescue attempts as sort of a placeholder and an insert for the audience as he's getting to know Floyd and his family alongside us, to the wider perspective that America has on this. And I think the juxtaposition of those two ideas is so theatrically interesting. It feels quite niche and specific, but it's something that we see a lot of in musical theater. It's something that we saw an awful lot of this season. I mean, so many of the nominated new musicals and revivals were talking about death and fame and fame and death and death and fame. I mean, Sunset Boulevard, it's fame, and then a little death creeps in there. Operation Mincemeat, it's definitely death and there's a little bit of fame talked about in its own way. Dead Outlaw, all about fame and death. There is a huge amount of crossover between a show like Dead Outlaw and its themes and something like Floyd Collins and to my money, Dead Outlaw, although the shorter of the two sort of has a little bit more to say, certainly, about the fame of it all and the way that its own character is regarded by the wider American population after Demise. Floyd Collins ultimately is a show I wish was a little bit more articulate in its conversations, particularly in that second act. I really wanted to dig in once again, pardon the pun. I cannot stop stepping on these landmines, which is not what happened to Floyd Collins. But I wish that it really waded in further to a conversation about the morbidity of it all and the fame that he found and the way that people were treating this whole situation. And the fascination that arose while it was still happening. And this being the first, like, viral event, whatever it was, and how that spoke to where our culture is now. And the parallels between all of that. And I did find it ultimately frustrating that with such rich theatrical fodder as those ideas, what we were talking about and focusing on instead was the emotional reaction of all of these often stoic characters and deviating with these passingly profound but largely ethereal moments and songs, which, incidentally, didn't really do all that much for acquainting us with a lot of these supporting characters either. It would be another slightly unfortunate pun to refer to this as a chamber musical, but that's sort of what it feels like it ought to be. We'll talk more about the actual space of Lincoln center in just a moment. But the scale of the whole thing, in terms of the number of characters, in terms of the way that it's been staged here, in terms of the size of the company, seems a little incongruous with the nature of the story that it's telling. Now, let's talk about Adam Gettle's score. Because this is the thing that has maintained an interest in Floyd Collins and really led to this revival. And thank God that it was recorded, you know, the first time around, even though it never transferred to Broadway, because it's on that basis that the show was able to elicit this sort of occult status, reminding us very much of the importance of preserving material like this for me. This was the third Adam Gettler score that I'd heard on a major stage, with the previous two being a couple of productions of the Light in the Piazza as well as the recent Days of Wine and Roses. And there is consistently this opera light quality to Adam Gettles work. It is consistently striking and profound and very ornate musically. And it is very tonally rich. It is detailed, it is complex. Floyd Collins as score is rooted in a tremendous amount of Americana. So it really has the feel and voice of those characters and those sort of working class American roots. And you can hear, even in that first song, in the music of it, the sense of aspiration and the sense of drive and this soaring quality to the melody as Floyd is reaching out into the future for some kind of success and prosperity and wealth. Even the exact musical nature of the yodel that he does, that he sings out into the cavern, hoping to hear it sung back to him, hoping that the cave he is in will duet with what he is singing, which is beautiful in and of itself, has a climbing quality, as though he is asking a question, which inherently he is. But he's also sort of begging for the answer that he's hoping for. At the same time, there's a real poetry to many of the lyrics. There's a very haunting quality to a lot of the music as well. One of the most striking songs to me is one called Heart and Hand, which Floyd's father's wife sings to his father towards the end of the first act. And yet, in spite of their popularity and obvious objective quality, there's still something that I struggle to connect to about an Adam Gettel score. And it's a certain quality of the melodies. I don't know what it is that I'm waiting for in terms of some sort of a sense of culmination or climax. Because it feels a little more like an operatic passage in which everything sort of meanders in its way and doesn't have a more traditional song structure in many instances. And I find that as I listen to a lot of Adam's music, and I experience this sensation often also when I listen to opera, there is this sensation that I am sort of trying to grapple with it, but not quite grasping it as fully as I would like to. Which I think says more about me than the score itself, honestly. I also think it's an indication I need to spend a little bit more time listening to Floyd Collins. And for those of you that know this score, love this score. Let me know which your favorite song in the Floyd Collins score is. So that I can fixate on that and try and pick out what everyone is latching on to here. Ultimately, perhaps I am questioning what Floyd Collins as a musical really has to say to audiences. And not that it isn't enough to just tell a fascinating story about true events, but I think there are ideas and themes and takeaways within this that could speak a little more powerfully if they were amplified a little bit more, which is Also a conversation about this particular production. So let's talk about that next. So this production of Floyd Collins at Lincoln Center Theatre, directed by co writer Tina Landau, as was the original production at Playwrights Horizons. And before I talk about Floyd Collins at this theater, I think it's interesting to see this arriving in the same season as Redwood, starring Idina Menzel, that the two of them actually played concurrently, which was also directed and co written by Tina Landau and explores some similarity in the themes about these desperate protagonists clinging to the natural world. Clinging in each instance perhaps a little too closely, with very different results. It almost feels like Tina Landau has done the rock musical and has done the tree musical and has done the underwater musical with spongebob. Sky musical feels inevitable at some point. Either that or lava. And I respect the relationship that Tina clearly has to the majesty of the natural world and the inclination to uplift that on stage. What's confusing is that what Redwood got right was the scale of the thing and the idea of showing the climbing of this tree on stage and seeing the tree on stage and the projections and the beauty of it and the wonder of it. And that is a quality that is sorely lacking from this production, which starts, I think, with the decision to stay stage it at Lincoln Center Theatre. And I am happy to see a musical arrive on Broadway, especially one like this, which is finally arriving on Broadway. But there is still something to be said for the right shows going into the right spaces. And there is a necessary claustrophobic quality to a show like Floyd Collins, where he spends almost the entirety of the Thing trapped so tightly in a cave collapse that he cannot move a single limb within audible reach of the other characters in the show, but not physically able to be extricated. That needs to feel, I think, to a certain extent, intense and claustrophobic and intimate. And Lincoln center is one of the more open spaces with this sort of thrust amphitheater, wraparound seating layout that they could possibly have found. Not only that, but the staging is almost entirely bare with this lit blank rear wall that goes from light blue daylight to cave like darkness to a sort of a sunrise and sunset glow when it needs to. And a playing space is not filled with really any kind of set pieces other than these various different arms and passageways that lower out of the floor. There is a fairly impressive sequence at the very top of the show when Jeremy Jordan as Floyd is navigating the space and climbing up little sort of nooks and hand holds and foot grips in a piece of floor that has Risen up, and he's able to climb around it and he's able to slide down and he's yodeling all the way. And there is a charm and a wistfulness to it alongside this very sinister quality, because we know where this is going. That is, if you're not somebody who's turned up at the show having no idea what it's about and think that it's actually about the guy who invented a cocktail, it's Tom Collins. You're thinking of Tom Collins. And truly, it's not the actual caving of the thing that I have a problem with as much as the situation that he eventually finds himself in and how that is represented. It reminded me a little of the Broadway production of Violet by Janine Tesori, another musical which was seen off Broadway years prior. Now, in that Sutton Foster played Violet, a young woman with a facial disfigurement, which they made the decision not to depict literally. You could see it in the way that other characters reacted to her on stage and she described it, but we never saw it. Similarly in this, they do not literally depict Jeremy Jordan being crushed under any kind of rock. Instead, he lies in a very still, reclined position on a rock that looks a little bit like a sun lounger or a business class airplane seat in the near horizontal position, which works about as well as it sounds like it does. And I don't need this to be a literal moment. I am all for this being metaphorically depicted. However, the big problem here, I think, is that the man just looks really comfortable. And he ought not to look comfortable. There ought to be some degree of challenge, some level of discomfort to the way that he is having to hold himself to the way that he is staged in this moment. Even if he was flat on a rock that was able to, like, tilt and rotate around, he was harnessed into it in some way. And occasionally it was like rearing upside down or whatever. Having him just go and lie down on this rock chair. Not even in the center of the stage, by the way, over at the side of the stage, literally moving him from our focus off to the side and pushing it to one side so that we can talk about all of the characters back up above ground, speculating about how best to save him. Doing that, I think, strips the central component of this show of a lot of its tension and a lot of the fear around it. We know this is a stressful situation because Taylor Trench's face keeps telling us that it is. And we hear repeatedly the nature of the exact way in which he is trapped in this cave system. We just don't see it, nor do we see anything that can really allow us to envision it. If you're going to do something more loose and metaphorical and expect us to infer, then we need a little bit more assistance, I think, in order to do that. And once again, the space just doesn't help with this. I was thinking in my head about great places where you could stage a production of Floyd Collins that would be be eerie and gloomy and dank like a cave would be. But Lincoln Center Theater is far more reminiscent of the kind of an expansive cave chamber like the one that Floyd knew he was nearby to and very close to finding his way into. Not to once again compare the show to Dead Outlaw, but people have been talking about Jeremy Jordan spending a lot of this show lying still in one position. Similarly, there is something that Andrew Durand has to do in Dead Outlaw for a prolonged amount of time that involves him standing very still. And I think even with that, if Jeremy Jordan had been forced to just stand still center stage, immobilized, and keep telling us that he was trapped and he remains there the entire time, wouldn't that be so much more menacing? As the media circus begins to spread around him, as they're having conversations in parallel with this across him above ground about possibly having to amputate his limbs in order to save him, as they're talking about him while he remains at the center of all of this, I just think that would be so much more powerful than pushing him off to one side, having him occasionally just stand up and move across to go and do a dream sequence with his brother, and then saunter back on over to his rock chair. It felt more like something that we would do in a concert staging of Floyd Collins, where they're like, this theater must have a rock looking chair somewhere. And Jeremy could just go and sit on that when he's meant to be in the cave. Like, it's not something you do in a fully staged production where you want it to feel crazy and intense. Now, the set design in the playbill is credited to Dots, as in more than one dot. And I liked a lot of the scenic elements that were used. I just longed for a fuller, slightly more naturalistic set. It's just what I wanted from this production. And I have seen entire complex cave systems arise from the floors of theaters before I have been transported into that setting. And Lincoln center audiences have seen ships sail onto the stage. They have seen like crazy impressive things. Done. Done in that space. And hell, even when I saw Uncle Vanya, which was more disappointing for me as an experience than Floyd Collins was at Lincoln center, even that rained on stage like that had a more dismal quality than Floyd Collins. Where I think the design excelled a little more was in the lighting design by Scott Zelinsky. There was a quality in the beginning when Floyd is caving, where the true darkness of that was achieved very well. I have done a little bit of caving in my life, including on one occasion, one sort of very shallow section of cave in which you literally had to commando crawl on your elbows in order to get through. And I've gone through gaps before that have been like that elevated up here and like, done very scary sounding things. And the nature of the compelling darkness that they were unafraid to achieve in the first few moments of the show I thought was interesting and was spooky and haunting and eerie. And thereafter it got a little too bright, a little too quick. But I loved a lot of the lighting choices made throughout the show. Finally, then, let's talk about the performances of this company led by Jeremy Jordan. Now, I don't think that Floyd Collins was ever really a contender in the Tony race as far as best revival of a musical goes, but a lot of people were rooting for Jeremy Jordan to win the Tony for his performance. And there were many strong performances this year. I thought where he excelled the furthest was in his vocal performance and to hear his. Him singing a complex score the likes of which he hasn't necessarily done on stage really, since, I don't know, perhaps like west side Story, like back in the day. For him to be doing this kind of more legit kind of sound, but also with an Americana quality as well that he's done in your Bonnie and Clyde's your Newsies. That was really satisfying. And on that basis, having Jeremy in this role really made sense. And if it were to be a concert production with his little rock chair, then I think it would have been perf. Where this got away from me just a little bit is in the nature of the character because he starts as such a Jeremy Jordan type, right? Like I've said many times already, he is hopeful, he is optimistic, and he is joyous, and he is happy. Go lucky. As he is exploring this cave, even when it collapses in on him, he's like, it's fine. You've gotten out of worse scrapes than this before. And he's trying to keep his own spirits up before the hopelessness of his situation begins to slowly dawn on him and everyone else. But it's as that happens that the quality of this character and this material material begins to move just a little further from Jeremy Jordan's fingertips. And Broadway seems to be forever lining up these brooding leading man characters for him to play. I enjoyed him immensely as Clyde in the concert version of Bonnie and Clyde, but Jeremy Jordan does so, so well in moments of easy comedy in this show. And I think if he were to just be permitted to play more Seymour type characters, more Dr. Pomatter type characters, then honestly, I feel like he would be more satisfied. Because there is this morose, brooding sorrow that begins to emerge within Floyd Collins that is just so far from the nature of the characters that Jeremy tends to create on stage. There is a youthfulness in his performance that works in this. There is a charm in his performance. Any single time he has to defuse the tension by making a joke. He does that so instantly and so effortlessly, but we never really sink all the way in to his sorrows. Do you know who feels completely broken up and devastated and distraught about it? Is Taylor Trench. Like, we only really glimpse the horror of his circumstances through Taylor Trench's reactions. And there's something to be said for Floyd. Kind of compartmentalizing, not fully coming to terms with it, whatever, but we need to get there eventually. And I feel like we never really get there. Within the nuances of Jeremy's acting performance. The dark jokes are great, they're few and far between. The singing is fantastic. And that's really the biggest selling point of his performance in the show. But as far as the depths of darkness go and his acting performance, I don't think we got that. Taylor Trench, meanwhile, accomplished musical theater actor Taylor Trench barely sings a note in this show, but he gives us a really intriguing, multi layered performance that is stricken with guilt and compelled to help. And, you know, we see him pushing himself far beyond, beyond the expected professional boundaries in this situation. Every time that he scurries forward on the stage in a great moment of lighting and screams about something else that has just happened. When he's been down there trying to help Floyd and having a conversation with him, his character not only serves a brilliant purpose dramatically, but he's also played very, very well. It reminded me a lot of Younger brother in Ragtime as a character only in a cave. And Taylor, as well as Jeremy was also recognized with a Tony Award nomination for his performance, which I think think was very well deserved. I also enjoyed Jason Gote's performance as Homer a lot I think he is another brilliant vocalist. There's a little bit in the material about Homer being Floyd's younger, handsome brother and some curiosity around his potential ambition to go and be an actor in Hollywood. And I think when Jeremy Jordan is your charismatic lead, to find a performer who is like the more charismatic, the more charming, the more handsome brother, you have to go quite a long way. Thank goodness they found Jason Gotay, who ticks those boxes. And he, interestingly, is a character that we keep going back to. We get his perspective on all of this almost more than we do with Floyd's. If anyone had been going to this, hoping for the Jeremy Jordan show, that's really not what you have in store here. Then you have Lizzie McAlpine as Floyd's sister, with whom he has always shared some sort of an unspoken special connection. She remains eerily calm throughout all of this, but feels deeply connected to Floyd. She has just recently returned to her family from treatment facility, and there are a couple of uncertainties about her character. She's a little Desdemona from Hamlet, coded and lazy. McAlpine, if you don't know, and I scarcely knew because I'm exclusively a musical theater person, has a music background, and this, I believe, is her Broadway debut. I look forward to potentially seeing her in another stage project where it's a little bit more of a developed character. In terms of the acting performance. Vocally, she. She sounds great and has a really unique and intriguing and exciting vocal tone. It was great to hear her performing this score, and it had that kind of an ethereal quality that seemed appropriate for the Adam Guessel music. In terms of the characterization, there was very little depth to this character. And if it was meant to communicate something to us, that she seemed so passive to everything happening and then some suddenly deeply involved and deeply stressed about all of this, then we didn't really have the necessary clues from Lizzie's performance in order to connect that to any kind of a deeper meaning here. We were a little lost with this one, I'm sorry to say. Arguably, a few too many characters on stage for what I still think should be a smaller musical staged in a little cave of a space somewhere. But Jessica Malaski and Mark Kudish and Wade McCollum and Sean Alan Krill, brilliant performances from these veteran Broadway performers. Which brings me, I think, to the end of my thoughts about Floyd Collins. For those of you who have been waiting a long time for me to talk about this show, I hope that that was satisfying. I'm sorry if I didn't like it as much as you were hoping that I would. I think there's a really great production of this to be staged somewhere, like the vaults under Waterloo Station in London, or even an open air outdoor space. Just somewhere where you can conjure the horror of of it and the intensity of it. But critically, the claustrophobia of it. We need to feel that smallness. We need to feel the closeness of that space. And I think we need to be able to understand the fear that Floyd is contending with while he is trapped in this position. In any case, that's what I thought of the Lincoln center production, which concludes its run very, very soon. If you haven't yet seen Floyd Collins, then you better get yourself to Lincoln Center Theater, the Vivian Beaumont because you don't have much time. It's literally limited. Run is ending this month. If you have seen it, as I mentioned before, I would love to hear what you thought in the comments section down below. Let me know if you enjoyed Floyd Collins more than I did. Please feel free to share why. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening to this review. I hope that you enjoyed if you did, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel for many more reviews coming very soon. Turn on that notifications button so you don't miss any of them. Or if it's easier, go and follow me on podcast platforms. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have have a Stagey Day for ten more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theater. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching Have a Stagey Day. Subscribe.