GRAMOPHONE Review: Floyd Collins – Original Broadway Cast Recording
It’s been a staggering 30 years since I reviewed the original Nonesuch recording of this masterwork right here in Gramophone. This true story of the cave explorer Floyd Collins whose quest for the ultimate sand cavern – a tourist attraction to trump them all – ended in a media circus to trump them all when he became trapped underground never again to surface. Billy Wilder made a movie of it – Ace In The Hole – but Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s musical will continue to resonate in our hearts and minds like the echoes of Collins’ underground paradise.
The latest, but sadly short-lived, Broadway revival starred the incredibly versatile and charismatic Jeremy Jordan as Floyd, his voice flipping jubilantly through the yodelling Bluegrass riffs and rejoicing in the twang of Guettel’s rangy vocal lines. This wonderful score comes at us like a love-child of Bluegrass and Igor Stravinsky and its quirky broken rhythms and ‘Soldier’s Tale’ like exuberance positively leaps from the page to spirit us to 1925 Kentucky. The echoing caves of Floyd’s dreams are ingeniously written into the Bluegrass ‘scat’ and the melodies both jaunty and haunting are achingly long-spun like inventions of the moment seemingly created in the singing of them. It was/is a musical that underlined the importance of escaping the generic in musical theatre and inhabiting the musical specifics of the setting and storytelling at hand. It may be Bluegrass but it’s unmistakable Guettel and when you think that this is the man who also wrote The Light in the Piazza it boggles the mind.
There are priceless moments. The song ‘Daybreak’ when Floyd’s brother Homer (Jason Gotay) comforts him and in his words ‘gets him through the night’. There’s the parody of news-hungry reporters as a close-harmony 20s pop group in ‘Is That Remarkable’ and there’s the duet ‘The Riddle Song’ for Floyd and Homer that Sondheim hugely admired. A song which plays riddles with reminiscences and whose joy explodes from page to stage.
And then there’s the eleven o’clock number ‘How Glory Goes’ – Floyd’s farewell to the world – which has to be one of the greatest songs in the contemporary musical theatre repertoire. The brilliant harmonica, guitar and banjo flecked band excel under the musical direction of Ted Sperling. I love this piece, always have, and this second cast recording is as cherishable as the first.
