16 July 2018, Monday

[KathyB]

I just spent 20 minutes reading a fascinating article about Floyd Collins. A good way to pass the time if you're bored, or if you're procrastinating. (Or both.)

http://mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-that-captivated-the-united-states-floyd-collins
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As far as I can tell, Spotify doesn't have Floyd Collins.

[DiveMilw]

I started the article but had to stop because I was starting to feel claustrophobic. I never knew exactly how stuck he was.  That would have been terrifying.  

[scenicdesign71]

Fascinating -- thanks for posting this, Kathy!

As a longtime fan of Guettel's score, I've read some other accounts of the Collins story online -- but after following your link just now, I'd say this is one of the better ones I've come across: informative and gripping; concise, but long enough to delineate the main figures and events in a fair amount of detail.  Reilly offers a clear and compelling sense of the tragedy as it unfolded in real time and space.

Perhaps at some point I'll actually dive into the books suggested at the end of the article, for more detail (over the years I've considered buying one or both of them, but haven't yet done so) -- but as Tom says, it's such a harrowing tale: I'm not sure I could stay with it for the length of an entire book.

[Leighton]

Utterly horrifying to read.  It makes me feel sick just thinking about it.

[scenicdesign71]

The musical is one of those shows whose original productions I still kick myself for having missed.

While neither Landau's libretto nor, I gather, her production seems to have leaned unbearably hard on the sheer animal terror of Collins's final weeks, she and Guettel don't overly prettify it either.  (On the recording, Miller's monologue "I landed on him...", with its skin-crawling underscoring, provides a brief but pungent taste).  Even without ever having seen a production, I've always wondered whether John Guare, in his liner notes for the OCR, wasn't perhaps too quick to dismiss his own straw-man description of it as "a Samuel Beckett musical?".  Personally, that characterization intrigued the hell out of me, but I always wondered about Guare's eagerness to assure listeners that Floyd Colllins isn't anything of the sort: something about it smelled like a well-meaning attempt to neutralize the off-putting subject matter and thereby help sell a few more CDs.

To be sure, "Beckett musical" probably isn't exactly the right way to describe FC.  Not exactly... but, while it remains high on my short list of Shows I'd Love To Design Someday, I certainly wouldn't want to render it instead as "approachable," chockful-o'-heart Americana.  Somewhere on the old board, I seem to recall writing about my deep ambivalence toward the staging conceit of physically "freeing" Floyd even at the moment of his death, to yodel his way joyfully into the great beyond.  I've since softened a bit on that stance, but not entirely.  Meanwhile, the Beckett comparison, however inexact, still strikes me as helpful in suggesting the ineluctable difficulty, existential seriousness, and innate, pitch-black poetry of the material.

Contra Mr. Guare, and in lieu of Samuel Beckett, I'm trying to imagine what my straw man would be: the sentimentalized travesty of the Collins story that would set my teeth on edge (and which, in an actual production, I'd be so anxious to avoid that I might willingly err on the side of darkness-unto-unwatchability).  Notwithstanding Guettel's family connection, a hypothetical "Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-ized" version seems largely irrelevant, since it's hard to imagine R&H ever being remotely attracted to anything about this story...

Anthony Newley-ized, maybe?