By Matthew Wexler
For a brief while, I was a Houdini stunt double in the original company of Ragtime, locked inside a crate and hoisted toward the rafters of a Broadway theatre. I wasn’t very good, often tripping up the intended effect, and triggering a “Plan B” that lacked the intended, explosive impact. But I understood claustrophobia—a key element missing from Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of Floyd Collins, based on the real-life story involving a spelunker trapped in a Kentucky cave circa 1925.
Written by Adam Guettel (music and lyrics) and Tina Landau (book), the musical follows Collins (a captivating Jeremy Jordan) into a cave he hopes to monetize (part of the Kentucky Cave Wars) and leverage the state’s natural wonders as a tourist attraction. But Collins gets stuck. And so does the audience.
I can’t imagine a more committed effort to make sense of Guettel’s far-reaching score, which shines a headlamp on Jordan’s exquisite voice and that of his onstage brother Homer (Jason Gotay). But despite their earnestness, Floyd Collins leaves us nobody to root for.
The broader media spectacle, spurred by the first time such an incident received national attention, thanks to the advancement of broadcast radio, feels spackled on, as does the arrival of H.T. Carmichael (Sean Allan Krill)l, an engineer who wants to monopolize the rescue efforts, perhaps for his company’s exposure or self-interest, we’re never really sure.
The creative team’s work includes a sparse but intentional scenic design by dots, echo-filled sound by Dan Moses Schreier, and—most challenging of all—Scott Zielinski’s lighting, which transforms the 1,080-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater into a collapsed passageway. But for all their expertise and Jeremy Jordan’s moving performance, the sum of the whole can’t capture the palpable fear of a man facing his mortality and those he is destined to leave behind.
1MC Takeaway
Guettel and Landau aren’t the first (nor will they be the last, I’m sure) to dramatize our innate ability to end up in places we don’t belong. Everybody’s Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure dramatized the 1987 incident in which an 18-month-old fell into a well in her aunt’s backyard, while documentary filmmaker Chai Vasarhelyi explored the nail-biting extraction of 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped for 18 days in an underwater cave in Northern Thailand.
