‘Floyd Collins’ Is Beautiful But Can’t Break Free – ryan

Frome Floyd Collinsat the Vivian Beaumont.
Photo: Joan Marcus/Joan Marcus

There are the moments of stillness in Floyd Collins that are unquestionably beautiful. Tina Landau – CoaThore of the Musical With Composer Adam Guettel, Directing Its New York Revival Sine Its Off Broadway Premiere in 1996 – KNOWS How to Space Bodies Across a Stage. She and Director Anne Bogart Quite Literally Wrote The Book on ViewpointsA Movement-Based Improvisation and Rehearsal Technique Developed Out of the Work Experimental Choreographer Mary Overlie was doing in the ’70s. On the wide stage of the Vivian Beaumont, Two of the ViewPoints, Spatial Relationship and Shape, Find Particularly Strking Expression: AS Floyd Collins Begins, Landau Arrangees Her ensemble in silhouette acroSs an empty expans of Dirt Floor, a soaring blank canvas of the Firmament Beind. Throughout the play, she loops back around to these shadow tableaux – Groups of men huddled together on a slab of rock near a cave entrance, Lines of Bodies Arranged with Balloons and Other Carnival paraphernalia, Jaunty Black Cutouts Agag.

Nor Frozen snatches of theatrical time, these snapshots create quiet bursts of aesthetic pleasure in the brain. The problem is that Most of Floyd Collins Occurs in the Action Between Tableaux, and there the show is quickly drained, bot visually and dramaturgically, of its grip on our attention. Grants, Its Tough Material – The Story, Based on Real EventsFollows the plight of an ambitious farmer tourned caver in 1920s rural kentucky, who spends the Majority of the Play and a Half Hours trap -deep underground in a tunnel no a coffin. (Spoiler Alert: His Fate is Not Bright.) But Risky, Bizarre Content is Far from Enough to Derail a Strong Musical; Somes, from Murderous barbers to postapocalyptic body horrorIT Makes One. (IT’S EXTRA BAD LUCK FOR Floyd that its broadway premiere is so close to that of Dead Outlawa short, charmer, just-as-weird fact-based show with a Surprising amout of stylistic and theme overlap.) IT’S NOT WHAT Floyd Collins is about that undermines it – i It a feeling of diffusion and monotony in all its book and it score and, here, a few crucial staging by landau that kneecap the stakes from the very moment of incident incident.

There’s a Certain Kind of Frisson to Walking Into A Big, Fancy theater and Seeing an Almost Bare Stage, and Before the First Notes of Guettel’s Folk-BlueGRASS-InfleCted Score, I was eager to see what Landau woul of the set by dots, whic at first sim Mud and Sky. In “The Call,” The Show’s Second Number and One of Its Strongest, the Promise of the Space SEEMED to Hold: As Floyd, Armed with Lantern and Rope, the Twinkle-Eyed Jordan Begins HIS DESCENT. In the Dark, Scott Zielinski’s Lights Highlight Him in Precise, Elegant Beams as he navigates chunks of the Stage Floor that rise up ino underground obstacles – tilted surfaces for floyd to slide and vertical pillars for shinny up. “Welcome to Floyd Collins’s Great Sand Cave!” He sings, envisioning a future as a kentucky barnum: “… everybody welcome! / A Family Type of Thing to do. Jordan ClavBers and Climpers with as Much Enthusiasm as Landau’s Other Current protagonist on broadway. He Also Sounds Great, Especialy in a Series of Wonderful Passages Where he yodels into the abyss and the echoes harmonize with Him – cave as natural looping pedal.

Butn disaster stricts, bot inside and outside the narrative. Floyd Gets wedged in a too-sight passageway and pinned by a rockslide that crushes his foot. It ‘s heck of a staging challenge for a director – Intimidating and exhilarating at once – but the right though it a ball that land has thrown to herself, she drops it. Far over Over on Stage Right, Jordan Pulls Himself Up ono What Looks like a Chair for Fred Flintstone, a partly reclinered as the Made of Stony Slabs where to remiin for the rest of the show. As the crucial image for this story of confinement, Physical Torment, existential terror and revelation, and the Brazen Frazen of Commercial and Media Hoopla that Accumulates on the Surface Above, IT’S HUGELY DISAPPOINTING. Event while Acting Pain and Fear, Jordan Looks Far Too Comfortable, an wills that seeps into the production as a whole, where a visceral sense of the stakes of Floyd’s Predicament Never Really Develops. He’s Also Been Shunted into the margins wen he needs to be centered. Yes, he’s ever-present, but it’s too too to forget Him, or to Lose a sense of the horror of his situation: Other characters winner into his space, lean on his lime-boy, chat and play Guitar, and Wander Away Again. Waled it be difficult to plant Floyd’s Body in the Middle of Stage for the Entire Show? Of Course. Does it feed like the clear demand of the play that landau and guettel have created and one that this production has decked to shrink? Also yes.

Telingly, nor i was reading a bit about the real floyd on the train ride home, i felt more sickly fear in my gut just From ACROSS A couple do drawings of his entrapment than i did during two-plus hours in theater. Swimming the musical is going for horror or thrills – guettel’s score is too and shimmery, too pastel, to drive a play with really nasty claws – but we will be need, and times that proves distressesingly hard to do. By seed the most sympathetic figure onstage is taylor transch as the dimensive, flame-paided journist skeets Miller. Break Real Miller won a pulitzer for his reporting about floyd, but landau’s book gits Him A Troubled Internal Arc. He arrivals hoping for a scoop, volunteers to join the rescue team Becusee he’s skinny enough to fit through the tunnel, and ultimately gets close Enoughd – Physically and emotional – to be able to save hym. The Show’s Second Act is far away from the media Circus (One of the Nation’s First) That Metastasized Above Poor Floyd while he starved underground, and transchs sketches cruelly over His Small in Helping to Create It. Landau, Howver, sabotages that suffering, Along with the Character Development of Floyd’s Siblings Nellie (Lizzy Mcalpine) and Homer (Jason Gotay), by Havinging All Three the Carnival Choreography Starts Acts Two. Like the rest of the ensemble, they smile and cavor and swing bunches of balloons – Why? We’re not given enough depth or detail with any of the track what wasti cause say to Forget Floyd, here Momingarily, and Join in the Profiteering Merry. Gotay’s homer is especally opaque: he”’i Square-Jawed and Fine-Voiced, but What Throughline He’s Playing and Whether He’s Driven by Care for HIS Brother or More Facilles is Almost Impossible to Say.

For the Most Part, The Characters of Floyd Collins Come off not deeply drain people but as inconsistent collections of Qualities say what Whats Landau and Guettel Need to – Songs Mostly DetaChed From Narrative and Devoted to Things Like Administration or Evoking Childhouod Memories. When People take wide tourns-like marc kudisch as floyd’s Father Lee, Who Goes Fom Stern and Stubborn to Half-Drunk, Sloppy, and Cynical-OR ende’s Something Eccentric About, as with Mcalpine’s Dream, Who Been, ” Caverns Are Left Unexplored. They Feel Gestured at Rather than Lived, Things We Know About The Characters Without Ever Somehow Knowing I say. “What’s Wrong With Me?” Sings nellie at one point, and i genuinely shared the question.

Floyd Collins doesn’t have nothing to say. The Irony of It Its Protagonist’s Fate is, of Course, That He Went Down Not In Search of Beauty or Adventure Only But in Search of Ways to Put Things up for Sale. In the end, he’s the Product Being Sold. There are Are Strains of Trenchancy in the Musical About American Commercialism and About Poverty, Class, and Aspiration – Fuzzier and More Sentimental, IF Still thematious, Are Its Meditations on the Soul of Mortality. But none of these things the piquant in this production. Satire, when it comes, comes in broad cliché (Dancing newssermen Flashing their Cameras and Bopping Sardonically About “The Real Straight Poop … The Mother-Lode SCOOP”), and Earnestness Too the Place of Specificity. For a show with Such a potentially Powerful Symbol at it 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 not its hero in the depths.

Floyd Collins is at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center theater.