Floyd Collins
No, it’s not Titanic: A New Musical, the heavily hyped, big-ticket Broadway behemoth at the Civic Opera House–it’s Floyd Collins at the Goodman Theatre. And just as the Goodman and the Civic are at opposite ends of the Loop, so Floyd Collins and Titanic are polar opposites in terms of quality, originality, and dramatic impact. Where Titanic’s script, by Broadway veteran Peter Stone, relies on caricature and cliche, the book by relative newcomer Tina Landau for Floyd Collins–which she also directs–consistently steers clear of formulas despite the story’s potential for soap-opera sentimentality. Where Maury Yeston’s shallow Titanic score spoons out predigested emotion in dumbed-down lyrics and tedious tunes that alternately recall Elgar at his most pompous and Andrew Lloyd Webber at his most puerile, Floyd Collins melds Appalachian folk idioms with modernist compositional techniques, reflecting the influence of but never slavishly following Copland and Barber. The show’s gifted composer–Adam Guettel, grandson of Richard Rodgers, whose groundbreaking semioperatic Carousel is a precursor to this ambitious, artful work–creates spiky yet lyrical, unpredictable yet logical melodies, given exquisite instrumental textures by strings and harmonicas. The lyrics, by Guettel and Landau, work seamlessly with the script to drive the story forward, employing the blend of dreamy optimism and melancholy fatalism characteristic of mountain ballads.
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Floyd’s entrapment certainly reveals the human nature of those surrounding him. His father succumbs to despair, feeling that he could have somehow prevented the accident; brother Homer breaks away from the family, drawn by the lure of fame and driven by pressures at home; a publicity-seeking mining engineer named H.T. Carmichael insists on leading the rescue mission, only to be humiliated when it fails; and Skeets makes his name as a reporter but must live with the sorrow of losing a friend. The great strength of Floyd Collins–whose script is as lean and nourishing as a venison steak–is that it treats the characters’ experiences credibly, simply but never simplemindedly. At a time when too many big musicals force-feed audiences processed emotions in bombastically sentimental songs belted out by characters whose one-dimensionality is intended to make them “accessible,” this moving, intelligent work sticks to the details, striking universal resonances through them instead of sweeping generalizations and bathetic platitudes.
