Review: How Glory Goes to Jeremy Jordan in Floyd Collins on Broadway

In 1925, the spelunker Floyd Collins got stuck 55 feet underground in a Kentucky cave. Rescue attempts back then were primitive—even the best efforts were offset by the harsh environment and the fact that using any kind of pneumatic tool or dynamite might make the situation worse. Collins, 37, survived for about two weeks before perishing, and by then, the whole country knew his name. Thanks to the telegraph and the recent advent of broadcast radio, the Floyd Collins rescue operation became the third-biggest media sensation between the two world wars, with tourists from all over gathering at the site to hopefully witness a miracle.

Not a natural story for a musical, but that didn’t stop composer Adam Guettel and writer-director Tina Landau from attempting the impossible themselves. Regarded as a noble exercise when it opened at Playwrights Horizons in 1996, reviews called it “easy to admire but hard to love.” The beauty of the material was “exasperatingly undercut by the flatness, repetitiveness, and blunt sentimentality of the show’s book and lyrics.” In the ensuing decades, Floyd Collins the musical has become as much of a curiosity as Floyd Collins the person. Its most notable asset has been the finale song “How Glory Goes,” covered by the likes of Audra McDonald, Kelli O’Hara, and any young auditioner looking for an emotive ballad for their binder.

Twenty-nine years later, Landau and Guettel return to the show that put them on the map for a Broadway production via Lincoln Center Theater at the Beaumont. 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.

The remarkable feat of Landau’s new production is the way she and her designers conjure a rising sense of claustrophobia within the cavernous expanse of the Beaumont. That stage is gigantic—big enough for sailing ships, dinosaurs, and IMAX screen avatars of Robert Downey Jr.—and yet, in pitch darkness, with only holes of light illuminating his face, and his voice reverberating through the void, we feel confined to the Sand Cave with Jeremy Jordan’s Floyd. It’s a triumph of lighting (Scott Zielinski) and sound (Dan Moses Schreier) within negative space, not to mention a set by dots that seems perpetually slick with rain and mud, though none is present.

There’s an acute awareness of fate etched into Jordan’s superb performance, which tenderly and tragically charts the downfall of a small-time dreamer. At first, he scales jagged pillars, his yodels of joy and freedom echoing off the imagined cave walls. But once he becomes stuck, Landau confines him to a misshapen chaise stage right, his face contorted in agony. The odd realism in his performance is so uncomfortable, so unrelenting, that you feel like you’re actually watching this man slowly waste away and die, and we’re as powerless to stop it as his kinfolk above ground.

At the same time, Landau (who penned the book and additional lyrics) and Guettel (music and lyrics) widen the lens to show us the world beyond the cave. Floyd’s brother Homer (an open-hearted Jason Gotay) is steadfast in his resolve to save him, even as he’s gradually sidelined by H.T. Carmichael, the tyrannical engineer brought in to do the heavy lifting. Sean Allan Krill is great as this befurred industrialist, with Anita Yavich’s costumes adding character development along the way.

Floyd’s sister Nellie (the singer-songwriter Lizzy McAlpine, whose haunted vocals fit Guettel’s score like a glove) becomes a mournful guardian of her brother and, ultimately, an imagined angel of death. Marc Kudisch brings a steely resolve to their father, Lee, whose good intentions dissolve the moment he sees profit in his son’s plight. And Taylor Trensch wears ragged devastation on his face as Skeets Miller, the empathetic journalist who, by virtue of his slight frame, becomes the only one able to reach Floyd.

But it’s Jordan’s show. Even when he’s not the focus, the gravity of his presence remains. His “How Glory Goes” is transcendent, justifying the price of admission in three-and-a-half minutes. Floyd Collins is not a show for everyone—many will mistake its stillness for inertia, the use of negative space for emptiness—but if you surrender to the journey, you will feel everything.