FLOYD COLLINS: TOO MINIMALIST FOR ITS OWN GOOD

“Floyd Collins”, a cult musical about a young man trapped inside a cave, finally makes it to Broadway as a Lincoln Center Production. The play, brainchild of lyricist composer Adam Guettel and director Tina Landau, started out in the mid-1980s when both were students at Yale University. Originally staged at a theater festival in Philadelphia in 1994, the show made it to New York in an off-Broadway production in 1996 that ran for 25 performances. A production in London and numerous US regional productions followed. It now hits the big time at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, the second largest and deepest stage in Manhattan.

Goettel brings a rarified theater pedigree to his work, grandson of composer Richard Rogers (as in Rodgers and Hammerstin) and son of Mary Rodgers, an accomplished composer best known for “Once Upon a Mattress” (1959). He won two Tony Awards - for score and orchestrations - for the wonderful “Light in the Piazza” (2005), which was staged, too, at Lincoln Center. He recently scored the seering “Days of Wine and Roses”. Landau was nominated for a Tony for Best Director of a Musical for “Sponge Bob Square Pants” a few years back.

The musical is based on the real-life tragedy of Floyd Collins, a poor Appalachian lad, who, in 1925, gets trapped in a cave during the Kentucky Cave Wars, a time when poor landowners were exploiting the caves found on their land to draw business and tourism. Floyd’s (Jeremy Johnson) ambitious dreams of the wealth he can bring to his impoverished family are dashed as locals lead by his brother Homer (Jadon Gotay) and family members - father Lee (Marc Kurdish), stepmother Miss Jane (Jessica Molaskey) and fragile but loving sister Nellie (Lizzy McAlpine) - try to rescue him. Visited in the cave by brother Homer, there is an occasion to recall their departed natural mother. Above ground, when an engineer H.T. Carmichael (Sean Allan Krill) arrives on the scene, conflict arises between locals and outsiders on how to rescue Floyd. A local news account goes national; a public carnival on site erupts as chances for Floyd’s survival dwindle.

Thematically, there’s enough in “Floyd Collins” for satiric comment about American values of wealth, media and celebrity, but its real emotional narrative is the intimacy of the family relationships and Floyd’s personal tragedy. So, It’s all the more ironic that Landau’s staging is oppressively minimalist. On the vast stage, there are virtually no props. Apparently, Landau saw the naked, cavernous space of the Beaumont as a cave. Lighting designer Scott Zielinski has the yeoman’s task of creating settings with inventive lighting schemes, which underground or above all seem dark. The scene wherein Floyd gets trapped is eerily claustraphobic.

Geottel’s score - 16 numbers in two acts - blends bluegrass, country and folk. Funnily, here and there, little melodies from “A Light in the Piazza” spike through. The score is beautifully sung all around. Jeremy Jordan’s tenor is perfectly suited for the material; he seems naturally comfortable in the title role, unlike his unfortunate casting as Gatsby last year. Jordan is matched, in brotherly affection, with Jason Gotay, who was impressive in last year’s Off-Broadway’s “Teeth”.

The story has moments that are tender and heartfelt and sensitive, but lost up there in the vast, naked Beamont stage, it all seems… well… empty.