Can you hear the call? Tina Landau and Adam Guettel’s 1996 Off-Broadway musical Floyd Collins is making its long-awaited Broadway debut this season via Lincoln Center Theater, with performances set to begin March 27 at the Vivian Beaumont ahead of an April 21 opening night.
The show’s plot is based on the horrifyingly true story of a Kentucky cave explorer (to be played by The Great Gatsby and Newsies star Jeremy Jordan) who got stuck inside what he’d thought would be his major discovery. Ultimately (spoiler alert), he died there—it's not exactly what one tends to think of when imagining a typical night out to watch a show. Floyd Collins first ran Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, eventually winning an Obie Award for music and a Lucille Lortel Award for Best Musical—with its ending song "How Glory Goes" becoming a standard in many singers' repertoires.
But in the beginning, “Steve Sondheim said he thought it was a good idea for a show,” says Guettel smiling, his go-to response when asked about the why of this award-winning cult favorite musical. The composer-lyricist has an impressive musical theatre lineage, counting Richard Rodgers as his grandfather, Once Upon a Mattress songwriter Mary Rodgers as his mother, and one of her closest friends—Sondheim—as a mentor. “He loved Ace in the Hole [a 1951 film partially inspired by the event], and he said, ‘That’s a fun idea for a show.’ And I thought, well that’s reassuring.”
The project's initial spark came from a 1976 American Heritage article titled “Dark Carnival,” with only a brief recounting of the Floyd Collins story. The darkness in Floyd's tragic story is pretty clear. The carnival aspect invokes the media circus—perhaps our country’s first-ever true media circus—that developed above ground, breathlessly tracking the efforts to rescue Floyd. “As a director, I like anything with the word ‘carnival’ in it, because that immediately implies a kind of theatricality,” Landau says. “And I just thought it was so unusual and dramatic. How can you beat the drama of a ticking clock and the highest stakes imaginable, a person’s life?”
Guettel says his fascination with the story ultimately was more personal, and linked to his esteemed Broadway pedigree. “This is right when I’m starting my career in musical theatre with Richard Rodgers as my grandfather,” he says. “I think I was writing it, on some level, to process the likelihood that I wouldn’t match his career, to answer if there’s nobility in failing at something noble.”
Guettel, of course, has been anything but a failure as a Broadway writer. If his musicals—which include The Light in the Piazza, Myths and Hymns, and Days of Wine and Roses, with the newest one, Millions, readying to begin a world premiere run at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre next month—haven’t been as prolific or as wildly profitable as the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon, they have won Guettel two Tony Awards. Piazza in particular has spawned countless new stagings around the world. And it bears mentioning it would be a fool’s errand to expect anyone to repeat what Rodgers and Hammerstein did on Broadway in the ‘40s and ‘50s. In today’s Broadway landscape, it’s doubtful that would be even possible, regardless of how much talent and skill was in the mix.
But that’s what makes it heady to see Guettel and Landau returning now to this work that was so formative in their early careers. The two met as students at Yale, quite literally at the genesis of their now storied careers. Landau's post-Floyd resume has included directing SpongeBob SquarePants and Mother Play on Broadway, and developing an original musical based on the Amazon Prime series Transparent—and that's only in just the last few years. Even now, she’s juggling another new Broadway musical this very season; Landau co-conceived, co-wrote the lyrics, penned the book, and is directing Redwood, currently in previews at the Nederlander Theatre starring Idina Menzel. That show opens a month before Floyd begins previews at Lincoln Center.
Landau says that timing is coincidence, but she can’t help but view the two projects as intrinsically linked. “They’re almost inverse versions of the same story," she says. "In one, you have a man who travels into the earth and stays there. In Redwood, you have a woman who travels up into the air, in a tree and stays there—but both are the story of an individual who hears a call to adventure and follows that call and ends up.”
But that’s her latest work. As for returning to one of her first musicals, it's been emotional. Landau hadn’t read or listened to Floyd in years, because, she says, she was afraid of what that would bring. “I just had a feeling that when I opened the whole piece, something big was going to happen to me.” That something big ended up being a rush of emotions. Landau says re-listening to the cast album of the original production made her burst into tears. “When you have something you love so much and it’s not there, you put it aside because you don’t want your heart to hurt and so you don’t miss it, even if it’s your baby.”
This revisit has been in the works for years. Landau says that she and Guettel never really felt done with Floyd, even when they stopped working on it after a 1999 post Off-Broadway mini-tour. The duo was still tinkering with the show then, cutting a song and replacing another. But there’s more coming for this momentous Broadway bow.
“We’ve done a rewrite, but with care for the original,” says Landau. “And care for both what worked and things that we don’t know if they worked or not, but feel part of the DNA of what made this what it is.” In other words, they know better than to start tinkering too much. With three decades of theatrical work now under their belt, both Landau and Guettel say they feel older and wiser, but they’ve been purposeful in making sure they retain the ever-elusive magic of the fearless, young, pioneering spirit they had when writing it originally.
In fact, Landau says, that youthful spirit is likely the only reason this unusual and beautiful musical even exists. What to some may seem like a musical with the most unusual and unlikely of subject matters, to this duo was just exciting. “One of the blessings of being the age we were, we didn’t question if we could write a show about this,” Landau says. “It interested us and we had passion about it, and so that was just what the story was going to be.”
But like anyone who cracks open their high school yearbook for the first time in years, both Guettel and Landau report finding some things they were eager to change. In this case, it was mainly what Landau calls “colloquialisms and idioms and written out dialect.” The original book and lyrics had lots of a supposed Kentuckian dialogue written in, ironically much in the style of Oscar Hammerstein II (whose Oklahoma! lyrics include such nuggets as “You c’n keep yer rig if you’re thinkin’ ‘at I’d keer to swap fer that shiny little surrey with the fringe on the top!”).
With fresh 2025 eyes, both were keen to see that go. “You’re speaking to a technique and a tradition that is no longer really making sense,” Guettel says. “We are in a time and a place, but we don’t need to legislate those things on the page as often.”
Adds Landau: “I consider that a young thing we did. We were so excited about the research, coming across how people spoke, and I just tried to get all of it in there.” That dialect, Landau says, was one of the only surviving elements of that youthful enthusiasm for historical dramaturgy. Apparently their first draft of the show was more of “a musical documentary” (says Landau) that was far too long and had way too many characters. “We needed to allow ourselves permission to leave exact facts behind and write the spirit of what we feel and know, and the story we want to tell," she says.
In hindsight, the written-in dialect made Landau concerned that her characters, mostly “hardscrabble” (as Landau puts it) Kentuckians, might veer into caricature. Particularly in this political moment, Landau wanted to make sure she was leaning into the empathy for people whose lives looked very different than the audience members who will end up seeing this Floyd.
“We want to respect them and know that they are as full and contradictory and smart and funny as we are, not less so,” she says. “It’s very easy to look at a certain kind of person that lives in a different environment we do and, consciously or not, have some judgement there. We’ve really tried to put that aside and understand from their soul outward.”
That “soul” bit is what Landau and Guettel are preserving as they return to this show. For as much as Floyd’s subject matter might seem unlikely or surprising, it tends to be eminently indelible—an experience that sticks with you long after you’ve left the theatre.
“Adam’s music bypasses my brain and it goes right to, not even my heart but my soul,” Landau says. After working on some early projects together at Yale, the two continued to work together as they started their careers, on Floyd Collins but also an adaptation of A Christmas Carol that both wistfully say is something they should also bring back. “I think what appealed to me [about Guettel’s music] then and always was how witty and fun and clever and sophisticated and modern it was. But also inside of it, it holds a yearning—I always described it as a desire for up. I think we share that. I felt like this person can express that desire for something beyond what is, and it was always that.”
That quality is maybe why Floyd was an excellent choice of material for this team. Guettel connected most with the title character, and found the most excitement in dreaming up the musical world of an underground cavern. “He was alone down there, free to associate or to elaborate, to extemporize and be completely himself,” describes Guettel. That quality allowed Guettel to make Floyd’s music the most emotional, the most operatic. Above ground, things veer more towards folksy bluegrass with a hint of pop. When Floyd’s in focus, Guettel gets a chance to give us something more singular, something more musically adventurous and even experimental.
For instance, in the musical's opening scene Guettel has Floyd singing a “cave quintet,” with the caver yodeling into Sand Cave and ultimately singing with himself as those yodels echo back to him four times over. This was another place they drew inspiration from their extensive research; it’s a musical realization of “sounding the cave,” something real cavers did and do to discern the nature of the often pitch-black caverns they're exploring, not unlike bats and dolphins echolocating.
It’s perhaps the earliest example of what would become a Guettel trademark. The Tony winner is uncommonly fond of having his characters sing without words, either nonsense syllables as in Floyd Collins, or just “ahs” like in The Light in the Piazza. But it’s not merely because Guettel is obsessed with music absent language. Just as Floyd’s comes from the story of the show, The Light in the Piazza’s “ahs” become a vehicle for the show’s characters to communicate with each other beyond their very real language barrier. “I love the human voice,” he explains. “Not attaching a word to a certain kind of melismatic singing, I think, makes it stand for something slightly larger. It’s not confined to what is a finite language.”
For Floyd, the “slightly larger” is the metaphorical quality, the greater meaning his echo canon takes on. He uses it to find his way forward while exploring caves, pursuing his planned destiny of fame and fortune. Once tragedy strikes, that destiny turns out to be wholly different than what he’d envisioned, and the echo canon comes back to carry him forward to the beyond, in the musical’s breathtakingly emotional climax, “How Glory Goes.”
That, Landau says, is the true story of Floyd Collins, the reason why it’s a story that needed to be musicalized, the reason why they’re coming back to it, and the reason why she doesn’t consider it a tragic tale.
“The most freeing and ultimately most glory-filled act is that of letting go,” she explains. “We were in auditions recently and men were coming in and singing ‘How Glory Goes.’ We had to keep giving direction for how to play the end of the song, because the tendency was to lean into the sadness of letting go of life and dying. No. He is finding a kind of joy and release and surrender in leaving his bodily and earthly concerns behind. I remember sitting there and realizing, ‘Oh my gosh, our musical has a happy ending.’” Landau's take aside, maybe still remember to bring tissues.
That Floyd Collins is coming back now is mostly happenstance. Guettel and Landau have both considered the cavernous Beaumont the perfect space for the show and were willing to wait until they could get it, so much so that they axed several tries at an Off-Broadway revival. “A lot of people from all over wanted to direct it themselves,” Guettel says. “And I always was like, no, it’s Tina’s show and she has to do it.” Just as Landau has long been especially affected by Guettel’s artistry, Guettel remains a longtime fan of Landau’s. “She’s a complete, all-around theatre person and knows every aspect of it,” he says of his collaborator. “She is very practical, but also very emotional and attentive to every detail. The director in her helps her as a book writer, and the book writer in her helps her as a director.”
For Floyd, the pair say it's been an excellent collaboration because while Guettel focused his efforts underground, Landau was most fascinated with the story going on above—the media circus obsessed with the ill-fated rescue efforts. “I think that time was very particular,” she says, “because it was not only the first great American media circus, it was the beginning of media as we know it. Radio had just begun. People didn’t have radios in their home, but from Sand Cave, radio broadcasts started happening. The whole notion of how a story could be told through the press, through newspapers, through radio, really began there and feels relevant to me now.”
It’s a story that exposes the beginning of our modern understanding of the effect of reporting, even “non-biased” reporting. Facts are facts, but how do we navigate which facts are worth reporting, that are ethical to report? How can a thirst to be the first and most read turn assumptions or misconceptions into outright lies with a huge impact on real human beings? “I think it’s only become more reflective, more timely with the advent of what we call fake news, and, now, A.I.,” Landau says.
Though, Landau adds, to focus on the “now more than ever” of it all, while very real, is ultimately just an added bonus on top of the truer, deeper meaning of the show.
“It’s the story of an individual’s journey along the hero’s path, and that tale is a roadmap that we all travel through our lives,” Landau says. “It’s what it means to receive a call to adventure, to go on a journey, to encounter obstacles—and to find some kind of meaning and transcendence or gift to bring back to the world of it. It’s not why now. It’s why ever—and always.”
