#adam guettel

[madisoncounty]

"On a central square, in a city made of statues and stories" "Go on and tell me what they mean" KELLI O'HARA and VICTORIA CLARK Statues and Stories, THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA

[nothingunrealistic]

taylor trensch shamelessly rpf shipping on the main is soooo good. live your truth king

“rpf is fine” — taylor trensch

what’s really wild to me, though, is which members of the cast and creative team have or haven’t said anything about [The Truth Come Out: Does Floyd Collins Is Gay?], because after weeks of reading + watching + listening to as many interviews as possible, we’ve got:

taylor trensch: calling the show “kind of Brokeback Mountain” because of “a kiss that you’ll just have to come and see,” totally unprompted; responding to a question about the “electric homoeroticism between Floyd and Skeets” by citing the bit of Trapped! about floyd never being married or taking interest in women and possibly being gay and saying “some elements of that must have subtly crept into the show” but that he didn’t think it was “intentional on Tina or Adam’s part” (relatively restrained compared to the brokeback mountain comment, but wild on its own)

jeremy jordan: reminding us over and over that floyd’s in his 30s and has never been in a relationship and never really had a girlfriend and realizes that he’s missed out on a kind of personal connection he never looked for before, once even saying that “there’s a little bit of a question mark” in whether floyd would seek relationships “with the ladies… or otherwise,” again totally unprompted

ted sperling, music director of the 1996 and 2025 productions: commenting in a 2021 cast & creative reunion that doing the original run at the peak of the AIDS crisis meant there was a certain resonance in a story about “losing a young man in the prime of life”

martin moran, who played skeets in 1996: also in that 2021 reunion reflecting on doing the original run during the AIDS crisis, as well as cracking a joke about “crawling down a hole on top of Chris Innvar [the 1996 Floyd], which was a pleasure in and of itself,” very much like taylor trensch commenting re: working with jeremy jordan that “I get to lay on top of him and give him a little smooch! I’ve had a worse Tuesday night!”

note that 1) basically all of this is about floyd’s sexuality, while largely avoiding talking about skeets, and 2) tina landau and adam guettel have had nothing to say about this in all the interviews i’ve come across, which checks out with taylor saying he didn’t think it was intentional on either of their parts. i can believe it for adam, who didn’t write much material for skeets anyway (and is straight, as far as i can tell.)

but tina? a whole gay woman?? who wrote the libretto and created the sequence of “skeets is exhausted after hours of trying and failing to free floyd and floyd tells him to go up and rest but asks him for a kiss goodbye first, which skeets gives him, and promises to see skeets in heaven, and skeets just barely escapes before a cave-in cuts him off from floyd forever” by cutting & pasting together four separate historical moments, half of which didn’t even involve skeets in real life??? who directed the 1996 and 2025 productions and decided for the latter that floyd’s dreamed reunion with family and friends and rescuers should include skeets running to floyd and leaping into his arms and floyd spinning him around??? if she wasn’t skoyding it then what was she doing????

[itsgrapes-exe]

is anybody still up floyding they collins in 2026

[pierreism]

'How Glory Goes' performed by Jeremy Jordan

Featured on the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Floyd Collins. Available July 11 via Center Stage Records

via LincolnCenterTheater

[unproduciblesmackdown]

sure it's somebody who'll encounter something with themes about Being Alive & go "this is kinda like floyd collins...." who has that very reaction playing the Things To Ruin cast recording on my CD player & listening to The Bar Song but also consider this!

ft. The Original Recording Doesn't Feature A Banjo Or Those Strings Orchestrations Like For This Performance

[nonesuchrecords]

It was 25 years ago today: composer Ricky Ian Gordon's Bright Eyed Joy was released on Nonesuch. On these pieces, Gordon—whom the New York Times has likened Gordon to Bernstein and Sondheim—pairs his music with words from James Agee, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, and others. Singing on the album are Audra McDonald, Dawn Upshaw, and Adam Guettel, Darius de Haas, Theresa McCarthy, Judy Blazer, and Chris Trakas. You can hear it here.

[sondheim-girly]

adam guettel was like what if i wrote music. and it was weird.

[twittercomfrnklin2001-blog]

Floyd Collins

FLOYD COLLINS, book and additional lyrics by Tina Landau, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, directed by Tina Landua, choreography by John Rua: After watching this revival of the musical tale of the mine explorer whose entrapment in a cave became a national sensation in 1925, I asked, “What does Jeremy Jordan have to do to win the Tony? Cure cancer?” The more likely answer would be that he has to bring half the energy and expertise he displays here to a feel-good musical with hummable tunes.

Landau’s book uses the true story of Floyd Collins’ death to explore the twisted dynamics of the Collins family (bible-quoting patriarch, sensitive step-mother, upwardly mobile brother and fragile sister who’s spent time in a mental institution) and the community’s attempts to capitalize on the attempts to rescue him.  There’s a measured generosity to the work. The cub reporter hoping to make his name out of the situation bonds with Collins, while the engineer from a mining concern out to garner publicity by rescuing Floyd becomes so obsessed that he stays on with Miller to dig in the cave long after the rest of the rescue crew has given up. The play doesn’t go all Pollyanna, however. Even Floyd’s father is shown trying to make a buck out of the situation.

Guettel’s score is difficult for both singers and audiences. In a way he seems to be writing an opera, but he just hasn’t dropped the other shoe by scoring the dialogue scenes. Of course, if this were an opera, we’d lose some of the fine musical comedy voices for which he wrote the male roles (the two principal female characters sing in head voice, so they’d make the transition more easily). He works with leitmotifs for characters and situations that may seem repetitious, though there’s one repeated passage in which Floyd sets up a round singing with is own echo that I found utterly enthralling. He also uses a lot of dissonance, which makes sense in depicting a fractured community but can be hard on the ear.

There’s a lot of good work in this production. Landau stages it sparsely. At times the stage is bare, and she loves putting characters in the background silhouetted against a plain backdrop. I kept thinking of the visuals in Charles Laughton’s THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955). Taylor Trensch as the cub reporter, and Jason Gotay as Floyd’s brother are particularly fine.  And standby Kristen Hahn made the sister’s role seem as if it had always been hers. But the real center of the production is Jordan. He’s stuck in one position for much of the show but still manages to find physical variations. And when he gets out of position during two fantasy scenes, he maintains a stopped posture, as if he were still stuck in that cave. He’s also totally committed to the character’s emotional life, even while wrapping his beautiful voice around that very difficult score. Now if he could just find a role like this that survives to the final curtain and makes us all feel good about ourselves.