Floyd Collins
Opening Night: April 21, 2025
Theater: Vivian Beaumont
Website: www.lct.org
Floyd Collins is a gripping and powerful musical based on the true story of a cave explorer in Kentucky, 1925. While chasing a dream of fame and fortune by turning Sand Cave into a tourist attraction, Floyd Collins (Jeremy Jordan) himself becomes the attraction when he gets trapped 200 feet underground. Alone but for sporadic contact with the outside world, including his brother Homer, Floyd fights for his sanity – and, ultimately, his life – as the rescue effort above explodes into the first genuine media circus. Reporters and gawkers from across the country descend on the property, fueling the hysteria and manipulating the nation into holding its collective breath.
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April 21, 2025
Yet one of the wonders of the show’s glorious-sounding new production, which opened on Monday night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater with a thoroughly winning Jeremy Jordan in the title role, is how far from claustrophobic it feels. Lincoln Center Theater’s vast and airy Broadway stage becomes an exalted evocation of the enormous cavern that Floyd discovers, delighting in its echoing acoustics, just before he gets into his ultimately fatal jam.
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April 22, 2025
“Floyd Collins” is somber, unique and sprinkled with tender moments. It’s a fine production with a gem of a lead actor, but the show is desperate for a raison d’etre. The musical rings with potential for relevance and social commentary on the state of our calamity-addicted world, but without leaning into the story about the first media frenzy that potential remains trapped.
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April 21, 2025
[Trensch] 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.
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April 21, 2025
Sumptuously desolate yet charged with enough emotion to reach the heavens, Landau’s crystal-clear revival allows us to see the show for what it truly is: an elegy for a carefree way of life, and a searing indictment of the way technology allows us to commodify tragedy.
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April 21, 2025
For a show with such a potentially powerful symbol at its core — a man trapped in the rock, singing as he’s crushed by America — Floyd Collins leaves far too soft an impression. It never really joins its hero in the depths.
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April 21, 2025
Despite some scattered strong elements, it’s hard to totally make sense of “Floyd Collins” or feel that it really works as a whole… There may be treasure hidden deep in the cave that is “Floyd Collins,” but it may just be too dark and difficult to fully extract it.
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April 21, 2025
Guettel’s songwriting here repeatedly recalls the sweeping chromatic music flecked with tantalizing dissonances that distinguishes “Piazza” and, later, “Days of Wine and Roses.” Any theatergoer who loves Broadway musicals needs to see this gorgeously sung revival of “Floyd Collins,” which opened Monday at LTC’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.
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April 21, 2025
With Guettel’s often sublime score and lyrics that get at the terror, cynicism and, most of all, undying hope against hope well captured in Landau’s book, Floyd Collins might haunt some of those who see it now just as surely as it haunted so many back in ’96. Notice, though, that I don’t say it will haunt everyone who sees it, and that’s simply because this musical is not without flaws, notably an overlong, repetitious book that can challenge patience, and a staging that scatters characters near and far on the massive Beaumont space.
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April 21, 2025
If you’re already a fan of Floyd Collins’s score, you are likely to enjoy this eminently respectable performance of it, and maybe even respond to it emotionally. If not, though—if, like Floyd or like me, you find yourself killing time without being moved—Floyd Collins’s admirable musical ambition may remind you that sometimes when exploring you make thrilling discoveries, and sometimes you just get stuck.
READ THE REVIEWApril 21, 2025
I imagine that when the musical premiered in 1996 off Broadway, a smaller theatre serviced the claustrophobia of the situation, a tougher sell on the gargantuan stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Jeremy Jordan, as Floyd, lingers on a stony chaise lounge in the open air. While Scott Zielinski’s lighting suggests the darkness that enfolds Floyd, it’s visually silly that he is “trapped” in a chair purposed for relaxation.
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April 21, 2025
Floyd Collins is more meditative than propulsive, with an unhappy ending it doesn’t shy from. You feel for its main character, but Collins is also a strangely meek and receding focus in his own story. Simultaneously, both his plight and the show disappear from view.
READ THE REVIEWApril 21, 2025
It is likely that plenty of viewers will be attracted to Floyd Collins to catch Jeremy Jordan as this musical’s title figure. Although they may ultimately feel the show to be a terribly sad experience, they will not be at all disappointed by the touching performance here from the former star of The Great Gatsby.
READ THE REVIEWApril 21, 2025
Still, there’s all that air, all that Beaumont expanse working against the claustrophobia any Floyd Collins really ought to engender. I ached for kinship with the doomed dreamer in his enforced, solitary imprisonment, the feeling of I-know-him, I-could-be-him. This time around, it was not to be.
READ THE REVIEWApril 21, 2025
The revelation here, though, is Mr. Jordan’s performance. All youthful, folksy vigor at first, the actor — who spends much of his time on stage seated, simulating the condition faced by Collins, whose leg was pinned under a rock — wrenchingly evokes both Floyd’s physical deterioration and an almost defiant spiritual endurance.
READ THE REVIEWApril 21, 2025
Simply put, the emotional waves that all musicals need to surf in order to fully work just seem here to stop at the surface. We understand the issues, but don’t feel all the feels underground.
READ THE REVIEWApril 21, 2025
Floyd’s final solo, “How Glory Goes”—one of Mr. Guettel’s most rhapsodic and best-known songs—is performed with a transfixing ardency by Mr. Jordan, and leaves you with a sense of spiritual uplift that, in contrast to similar climaxes in many musicals, feels not manufactured to manipulate the emotions, but absolutely authentic.
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