The headlines at the time called Floyd Collins a “captive cave”, a “dungeon of the prison of nature” – a dramatic, but precise language, and the American public was obsessed. In a saga of news that bit the nails that lasted a little more than two weeks in the winter of 1925, Collins, an explorer of caves, was stuck deep under the cold ground of Kentucky. Inside a narrow and precarious passage, its left foot was tilted by a rock.
As one of the members of the rescue team says it in “Floyd Collins”, the 1994 musical that Tina Landau (“Redwood”) and Adam Guettel (“Days of Wine and Roses”) adapted from history: “It is a real breast compressor there.”
However, one of the wonders of the new production of glorious consonance of the show, which opened its doors on Monday evening at the Vivian Beaumont Theater with a Jeremy Jordan Victoire in the title role, it is how far from the claustrophobic he feels. The vast and airy Broadway of Lincoln Center Theater becomes an exalted evocation of the huge cave that Floyd discovers, rejoicing about his echo acoustics, just before he enters his ultimately fatal jam.
A bit of a dark subject for a musical, isn’t it? Especially now, when so many titles feed anxiety. Even so, there is comfort, and not only for those of us who are always ready for a story involving a hero journalist. It would be the adorably named Skeet Miller (Taylor Trensch), a journalist from Cub de Louisville who is quite small and bold enough, to reach Floyd and the interviewer while trying to dig up.
But the neighbors and the family are the first to come to the aid of the curious and intrepid Floyd, which lies forever in the scratches he needs to save. Finally, even the governor gets involved.
