Floyd Collins

I went to Floyd Collins expecting a gritty American musical steeped in the keening fiddles and finger-picked guitar of a song like "Collins Cave," one of the highlights of Dave Alvin's 1986 record Unsung Stories. I went, in fact, expecting to hear the song, a Tin Pan Alley-style ditty about a Kentucky man, Floyd Collins, who died in a cave in 1925 after a press-hyped project to save him. Anyone who could elaborate the song's melody and instrumentation into a full-length musical exploring this oddly American death would have a thing of beauty. Instead, Floydamounts to an interesting failure.

The story is simple. Floyd finds a cave not far from home and goes spelunking. He thinks the cave might make a nice tourist attraction. With his head full of dreams about fortune and fame, he gets trapped by the ankles in a partial collapse of the sandstone-and-lime cave walls -- and no one in town can yank him out. His crisis becomes a national story. A carnival assembles around the cave entrance, peopled by concerned local citizens, reporters, food vendors, souvenir salesmen, prayer-book hawkers, and men standing behind an awkward new invention called the movie camera. It was the first modern press frenzy -- a transition point between the old-time county fair and the modern media circus -- but it can't help Floyd. Deep in the ground below the blaring merrymaking, after 15 days, he dies.

Adam Guettel and Tina Landau have written an interesting version that mixes folk songs and a little bluegrass with unmelodic clashes of classical music and dialogue sung, modern-opera style, with no particular symmetry. This is daring stuff, partly because Guettel is the grandson of Richard Rodgers (who wrote old warhorses like Oklahoma! and South Pacific), and partly because musical audiences can be as set in their tastes as country-music fans; they don't like anything new. Guettel refuses to write sweeping Broadway melodies like his granddad did, and in fact Floyd Collins has never gone to Broadway. It premiered elsewhere in Manhattan in 1996, and since then it's enjoyed what Guettel likes to call "grass-roots" -- meaning "regional theater" -- success.

But "grass-roots" sounds colorful, and Floyd Collins lacks color. It's a minor-toned story told in a major key. Guettel has enough Broadway in him to give poor Floyd an overlong, too-obvious duet with his brother ("The Riddle Song") -- recalling a rope swing at the swimming hole, and building up to pompous Christ imagery that has nothing, really, to do with Floyd Collins' mode of death -- or to give him a big, bland dream about heaven (where everyone wears white) just as he loses hope. The ideas would be fine if they fit, but Guettel's lyrics and Landau's book toy with religious motifs that lie on top of Collins' story instead of rising out of it, and the result is not a humble scrap of Americana raised to high art so much as an eloquent tale made complicated.

Instead of "Collins Cave," the musical turns on a song called "The Ballad of Floyd Collins," by Guettel. The tune is folksy and simple without being moving: It sounds like what it is -- a traditional song written by a carpetbagger. "Lucky" is a more experimental number sung by Nellie, Floyd's hopeful but slightly crazy sister; its balance of dissonant rhymes and twangy folk touches makes it a successful example of what Guettel wants to do. (Elizabeth Snyder, unfortunately, sings it too stiffly.) "Heart an' Hand" strikes another nice balance between dissonance and folk melody; it's sung by Floyd's father, Lee (Patrick Flick) and a woman called Miss Jane (nicely played on my night by an understudy, Narelle Yeo). And "Is That Remarkable?," a strong, satiric number by the city-slicking yellow journalists, seamlessly works in Weill-esque elements of swing.

But too much of the show is conceptual: It seems to ignore its characters. Floyd is just a corn-pone Kentuckian in overalls with generic dreams and a generic fear of death. To say Matt Farnsworth is perfect for the part is only to say he has a good voice and looks about 37. The figure of Floyd's overbearing father is pure cardboard, although his religion serves as an excuse for Guettel to weave in subtle Christian motifs; Flick doesn't bring him to life. H.T. Carmichael, played effectively enough by Robert Rossman, is a self-promoting millionaire drawn straight from an op-ed cartoon. The clearest character is Skeets Miller, the tiny cub reporter who can fit into the cave and actually talk to Floyd, which gives him an edge on the other journalists and makes him temporarily famous. Francis Jue plays Skeets with energy, full of earnestness in the first act and sagging with grief in the second; his harsh, death-foreshadowing solo number, "I Landed on Him," is a highlight.

New Yorkcritic John Simon called Floyd Collins "the original and daring musical of our day, concerned with saying something in words and music, not merely bringing in da noise or paying the rent." He's half-right. Guettel does test the possibilities of the American musical by trying to make a point. But it comes across as formal experimentation instead of stirring poetry. Floyd goes on for 2 1/2 hours without working up to the visceral punch of "Collins Cave," which takes three minutes to deliver its unpretentious memento mori: "We may not be like Collins/ But you and I must die." Too much of Floyd feels, for all its grass-roots success, unrooted.