“Floyd Collins” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The Vivian Beaumont stage stands wide and empty as the audience comes in for the long-awaited Broadway debut of Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s Floyd Collins. This small chamber musical that premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 1996 is now on a much bigger stage, carrying nearly thirty years of anticipation due to its beloved original cast album. The gaping mouth of the Beaumont’s proscenium and the tongue of its thrust could swallow up a musical of this size. It’s a space accustomed to massive sets and huge casts. But, in this case, the shadowy expanse is appropriately – and thrillingly – cavernous.

As with its long ago premiere, Landau directs this production and, with the assistance of scenic design collective dots, evokes the Great Sand Cave in all its imposing, dangerous glory. An extended sequence at the top of the musical depicts Floyd Collins sliding, climbing, and slithering through the cave’s nooks and crannies while singing (and yodeling) Guettel’s “The Call”. It’s a vocal tour de force, a twelve minute monologue performed alone on the stage, and it needs an actor of immense vocal talent to pull it off. Luckily, they have Jeremy Jordan.

Here, “The Call” is a physical challenge as well. The seemingly bare stage floor reveals itself to be full of traps (in the ensnaring and the stagecraft sense) that Jordan has to navigate. At the climax, Jordan climbs a structure all the way to the top of the Beaumont and, as he grabs a rope, the structure collapses back into the stage floor and he climbs the rope all the way down. Once back on terra firma, he meets his fate – a rock slides onto his foot and he’s trapped. As that opening gives way to the rest of the musical, already that yawning blankness has been filled. Immediately, an overwhelming rush of theatrical creativity has swept in to show us why Floyd Collins is here.

It’s not the kind of role Jeremy Jordan usually takes on, but as the two and half hours of the musical elapse, it’s clear that he was born to play it. Like most of Guettel’s music, it’s a hell of a sing, requiring power and stamina and a soaring range. Even though Floyd spends most of the musical stationary, it requires a palpable presence. To care about Floyd is to care about his rescue. Jordan exudes a star power that is all his own. He is magnetic, drawing eyes and interest to his every shift, to the beads of sweat that form on his brow. He’s very clearly not trapped – it’s a musical – but his fear and pain is palpable. His singing is confident and he finds a way into Guettel’s melodies that make them feel spontaneous, as if this is the only way Floyd could possibly communicate. The entire production sits on his shoulders and he keeps it aloft through the final seconds. 

The Kentucky farmland under which Floyd is trapped slowly devolves into a carnival, with reporters and spectators coming from across the country to gape at the man stuck beneath a rock. dots, lighting designer Scott Zielinski, and projection designer Ruey Horng Sun slowly fill the void with pipes, twinkle lights, and carnival games, obscuring the ultimate goal of rescuing Floyd. From seeing only Floyd onstage to then having it filled with stuff powerfully renders that shift. To watch it then strip away again as Floyd meets his tragic end hollows out a core in the heart of the show and leaves us remembering what a force of life he was at the beginning. 

Guettel’s music and the iconic orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin are given beautiful life by music director Ted Sperling. At times, though, Dan Moses Schreier’s sound design favored the (albeit stellar) vocals over the orchestra when they beg to be heard in tandem. Particularly in the first act, I was missing a swell in the orchestra to match the singing, which left the vocals a bit adrift. The rest of Landau’s production meets the challenge of the Broadway scale. The sound design should get there, too.

I’d never seen a production of Floyd Collins before, despite loving the score for almost two decades. This one really gives the term revival the full breadth of its definition. Here’s Floyd Collins, the man, born again in front of our very eyes, thanks to a stunning performance from Jeremy Jordan. And here’s Floyd Collins, the musical, expertly gradated up, but still true to its emotional center.