Synopsis
Floyd Collins tells the true story of a Kentucky cave explorer in 1925 who becomes trapped underground while searching for fame and fortune. As rescuers and reporters gather above, the incident turns into a national media frenzy, exposing both human compassion and exploitation. Blending haunting folk and bluegrass influences with soaring, modern harmonies, the musical explores courage, isolation and the yearning to be heard beneath the surface.
Reviews
“Landau and the design team make remarkable use of the tiny Playwrights stage, ingeniously giving breathing space to a definitively claustrophobic show. But “Floyd Collins” itself remains the earthbound effort of a clearly gifted team. I can’t wait to hear what Guettel comes up with next.”
Variety
Playbill’s My Life in the Theatre
On 2 December 2025 Playbill released an interview with Brian on Youtube under their My Life in the Theatre playlist. Below is a transcript from the video about his time with Floyd Collins – you can watch it here.
“Floyd Collins, Adam Guettel, the genius that he is, and Tina Landau, boy, this was a remarkable experience, because it was a small show, and it was a tight-knit group, and it was the music, you know, his music, in general, is like nothing I’ve ever come across in the canon of the Broadway world.
So I did a workshop of this. When I was doing Blood Brothers, I got a cassette tape of three songs by Adam Guettel for this show called Floyd Collins, and they needed people to audition for these roles. And I actually played Homer who is the brother to Floyd, uh, played ultimately by Jason Danieley per-fectly, perfectly. Per-fectly? Is that a word? What happened to my empha-sis-es?!
I did a workshop of this in Adam’s loft but I remember, what I remember, was listening, again, the cassette tape, of the Ballad of Floyd Collins, and just thinking, oh, my God, this is music that I absolutely love, and it just sounded so, unto itself, it had a pop, kind of sensibility, it had the kind of Appalachian feel to it, but it was just so beautiful. And then, of course, was followed by, um, [singing] as we enter in, the lights on the sky died down, and that kind of just took me to a whole nother level. It was just unbelievable I was listening to these things and having a chance to audition for it. So, um, but then again, I mean, you’ve got such an extraordinary cast, Chris Innvar played Floyd, uh, Terry McCarthy played Nellie, unbelievable. Matt Bennett, James Bohanek, and I were the reporters.
Last thing I’ll say about this is that the reporter song was, I believe, one of the last things written for the show in this iteration. We, Matt Bennett and James Bohanek and myself were using a lot of viewpoints, which is what Tina uses to kind of create her beautiful masterpieces. So we were establishing a lot of the language, physical language, without any song present. So we had all this physical vocabulary that we were able to devise waiting for the song. And so we kind of plugged that into the song after we had this physical language. But what was really interesting is I’ll never forget Adam Gettle coming in with his guitar, saying, oh, here’s a song, [mimics song], you know, the kind of [Django Ryan Hartfield?]. And in one of the uh, one of the um, newspapers that he references in the lyrics was the Saginaw Globe. Saginaw is my hometown in Michigan. And I was, like, I was flummoxed because I couldn’t believe that that word had ended up in this lyric and I said, did you know that I was from Saginaw? And he said, absolutely no idea. It just sounded like a funny name. I was looking in an almanack. Sounded funny. It sounded perfect. And I always thought that was wild that that should end up. Maybe, uh, maybe kismet.
Adam Guettel. Genius.”