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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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The passion according to Adam Guettel

June 10, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a Washington-area revival of Floyd Collins. Here’s an excerpt.

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“Floyd Collins,” the 1996 musical in which Adam Guettel and Tina Landau told the tale of the hapless spelunker who got himself trapped in Kentucky’s Sand Cave in 1925 and so triggered the first modern media frenzy, is greatly admired but has never been popular and is rarely revived professionally. I’ve reviewed the show only once in this space, in Chicago four years ago, at which time I called it “the first great post-Sondheim musical.” Even that was an understatement: “Floyd Collins” is the finest work of American musical theater, not excluding opera, to come along since Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.” But it is also, for all its surface simplicity, harder to produce than you’d think, which is one reason why stagings of this genre-transcending masterpiece are so uncommon.

035_press_Collins-ZF-3844-37022-1-017It is, therefore, very good news that 1st Stage, which operates out of a 100-seat theater located in a suburban strip mall not far from Washington, D.C., has given “Floyd Collins” a worthy revival, one as emotionally compelling as the production of “Side Man” that first brought the company to my attention in 2012. The cast is strong, the musical preparation impressively thorough, and notwithstanding certain weaknesses in design, the show itself, plainly and effectively directed by Nick Olcott, comes through with tremendous force. It’s hard to imagine anyone not being touched to the heart by this revival.

“Floyd Collins” has little but its subject matter in common with “Ace in the Hole,” the 1951 movie in which Billy Wilder portrayed with fathomlessly black cynicism the hoopla whipped up by Collins’ plight. To be sure, it does show us what happened above ground at Sand Cave, but that pop-culture circus is presented by Mr. Guettel and Ms. Landau not as a “Babbitt”-like skewering of the Roaring Twenties but as a melancholy episode in the inexorable coming of modernity to rural America. Moreover, the focus of the show is on Collins himself (played at 1st Stage by Evan Casey). His desperate struggle becomes a parable of purification by suffering, a not-quite-secular passion play that ends with a soaring aria in which the dying Collins sings of his hallucinatory vision of the substance of things not seen: “Has a shinin’ truth been waiting there/For all the questions everywhere?”…

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Read the whole thing here.

A preview of the 1st Stage production of Floyd Collins:

A scene from Ace in the Hole, starring Kirk Douglas:

Romain Frugé, who played the title role in the 1996 Playwrights Horizons production of Floyd Collins, sings “How Glory Goes” at the 2003 reunion concert by the original cast:

Replay: Groucho Marx sings “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady”

June 10, 2016 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAGroucho Marx sings “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” in At the Circus, directed by Edward Buzzell and released in 1939. The words are by Yip Harburg and the music is by Harold Arlen:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

Almanac: Mark Twain on hot weather

June 10, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“I believe that in India ‘cold weather’ is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.”

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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