Producer's Note
It is truly our honor to present the third musical produced by The King’s College Media, Culture, and the Arts Program. Since we debuted in 2016 with the New York City Premiere of the first Charles Strouse and Lee Adams musical ever written, A Pound in Your Pocket, musical theater at Kings has been growing rapidly. This year we had the challenge of finding a show that would meet our needs for a growing number of talented students, and one that could be set effectively in the Salvation Army’s Theater 315, with whom we are grateful to be partnering for the first time. After sifting through various scripts and ruling almost all of them out, it felt more like the show chose us than we chose the show. That said, there’s not a show we would be more thrilled to share with the next generation of musical theater lovers than Floyd Collins.
Introduced to the New York City theater world in 1996 by the acclaimed Off-Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons, Floyd tapped into a niche of musical theater enthusiasts who had been raised on the deeply provocative work of Stephen Sondheim, who were hungry for fresh new musical theater voices with the level of artistry, as well as intellectual and emotional depth of Sondheim. Tina Landau and Adam Guettel’s maiden voyage in the New York musical theater scene showed the world that they could carry that torch. Ben Brantley of the New York Times described Landau as having a “lyrical and lucid sense of stage imagery”, and said “Mr. Guettel establishes himself as a young composer of strength and sophistication, weaving strands from the Americana of Copland and the uneasy dissonance of Sondheim…” Many musicians at the time marveled at how Guettel took the style of blue grass music and textured it with harmonic and rhythmic sophistication in such a way as to make it theatrical, operatic even. It opened a door that revealed more of what Musical Theater could do - tell a story that was real, in this case gritty and even tragic, while taking the imagination to a place deeper than mere narrative could, rich with layers of subtext as deep as the cave where Floyd was trapped.
The story of Floyd Collins comes straight from the news headlines of 1925. Our protagonist was a man like any other, a dreamer, who sought to find his treasure underground, which would bring him and his family fame, fortune, and most significantly, glory. His passion to realize this dream would lead him to take great risks in his caving escapades. There was something deep in his heart that not many others understood that made it worth the risk to him. I see this as a metaphor. The human heart is like a cave with many chambers and passageways deep below the surface of our consciousness. There are some chambers of our hearts so deep, no one can reach them. Some are so dark, we don’t even know what’s really there ourselves. And when no one could reach Floyd, not his brother, not his friends, not the engineers, nor his beloved sister, at least not enough to rescue him, he met his God. We all, as humans, long for a connection, an intimacy that comes when we are able to share what’s in that deep cave of our hearts. We may or may not find that in a human connection. But what we can absolutely find is something greater - an eternal connection with our Creator, who knows us better than we even know ourselves. That is the glory Floyd ultimately found.
It is our desire that this exploration of the soul of a small Kentucky town in 1925 will lead our audience on a journey of seeking and finding hope and true love where it’s needed the most. The cast, crew, and production team offer this show to the King’s College community with the prayer that it might minister some healing in our time of communal grief. We dedicate this show to the family and friends of Leah Arrasmith, and the House of Ten Boom. May the Lord bring His light of hope, peace, and comfort to every dark place.
Virginia Hart Pike, Faculty Producer. Lecturer in Musical Theater
Harry Bleattler, Executive Producer. MCA Chair
