WISH-LIST WEDNESDAY: Floyd Collins

Artwork for the broadway premiere of Floyd Collins

To celebrate its first preview on broadway, this week we are looking at Adam Guettel's 1994 musical Floyd Collins, a show about eponymous real life cave explorer who tragically lost his life after becoming trapped in what later became Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, USA. Unknown publicly for most of his life, it was only during the rescue efforts and subsequent passing that he was memorialised, with the words "Greatest Cave Explorer Ever Known" apearing on his tombstone.

The musical is Guettel's first major work, conceived whilst he and fellow writer Tina Landau were still students at Yale University, and premiered in 1994 at the American Musical Theater Festival in Philadelphia, later playing at Playwrights Horizons off-broadway two years later, with a cast that included five time Tony-nominee Brian d'Arcy James. It has had two separate off-west end runs, the latter being at Southwark Playhouse in 2012 starring Glenn Carter as Floyd.

The original off-broadway company

In spite of its largely positive response from critics over the years, Floyd Collins is a show that has rarely enjoyed mainstream success, with its original run in New York only lasting for 25 performances, and the most recent London run only running for around 5 weeks, though this production received more mixed reviews. With the show having just began performances on broadway for the first time, currently running at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at the Lincoln Centre, only time will tell if it can be a success enough to spark further interest in the UK, so we shall see...