Jeremy Jordan Finds His Way In the Dark – FLOYD COLLINS — Review

In many ways, Floyd Collins feels like a chamber piece – or like that’s what it wants to be. The 1994 musical, with an operatic bluegrass score by Adam Guettel and a book by Tina Landau, who here directs its Broadway premiere, is centered around a man who became trapped in an underground cave in 1925 Kentucky. The story opens up, offering glimpses of the rescue mission, its ensuing media circus, and the effect it all had on his family. But despite Guettel’s breathtaking work, and Landau’s admirably wide scope, those outside glimpses remain as insufficient and fruitless as whatever flecks of light the unfortunate explorer might have gleaned from below.

It’s still an often ravishing experience, led by Jeremy Jordan at the top of his game, with a rich, penetrating voice that at times feels like it could shatter right through that cavern. He excels in this darker territory than he’s used to, and Landau stages his introduction with thrilling inventiveness. Those seeking a bisected vesuvian set at the Beaumont will find instead that she and the design collective dots have turned the vast auditorium into the blackness enveloping Collins, and so much happens in the absence of light: towers rise, ramps and obstacles materialize, the light (by Scott Zielinski) fixed tightly on Jordan as he narrates his descent and maneuvers through the darkness, climbing, sliding, crawling, and disappearing from sight to pop up somewhere else. The effect is disorienting, expansive and claustrophobic, and the odd, schizophrenic phrasing of that number believably conveys the character’s aloneness.

But alone Jordan mostly remains at that dizzying artistic peak. The work’s above-ground portion, portrayed like the dusty landscapes of a Steinbeck hardcover, is too disjointed, and is staged too discretely – something happens on this side of the stage, another over there. His father (Marc Kudisch) has an aimless cough then recedes into the background and his stepmother (Jessica Molaskey) is just sort of there. Sister Nellie, gets some lovely ballads and the singer-songwriter Lizzy McAlpine, making an appealing stage debut, acquits herself of wobbly moments with her lilting voice, but also adds little to the proceedings. Brother Homer (Jason Gotay) is eager to help, but is wooed by the promise of stardom once the story makes headlines. An outside engineer (Sean Allan Krill) takes over the operation, and a trio of locals (Wade McCollum, Cole Vaughan and Clyde Voce) chime in as a Greek chorus. The panoramic approach renders the vista rather flat, and though the score never dips in quality, perhaps this story is best told in one act.

Thank God for Taylor Trensch, the backbone of every show he is in. Here he plays Skeets Miller, a dopey reporter who’s the only one lithe enough to regularly reach Floyd, and Trensch’s vitality is the only one that matches the all-in physicality Jordan’s howling desperation. Though his character lacks interiority, the stakes are on his face at all times, and a meaty leading role for Trensch can’t come soon enough.

He and Jordan (and that opening sequence) are worth the price of admission, as are Ted Sperling’s music direction and Bruce Coughlin’s orchestrations. Floyd Collins is an odd piece which, staged, asks a little too hard that we mine through dense earth to reach its goal. But this Broadway premiere makes a solid case for its beauty, found through a gorgeous score that draws opera from Americana.

Floyd Collins is in performance at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre on West 65th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.