Floyd Collins review: Jeremy Jordan stars in a Broadway musical about a forgotten American tragedy

Two hours and 35 minutes, with one intermission.At the Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 West 65th Street.“Floyd Collins” is a story split in two.There’s the claustrophobic and cold Kentucky cave where the title spelunker, played by a golden-voiced Jeremy Jordan, becomes trapped after the rocks around him collapse. Then, above that subterranean prison is his sunlit town, which, as Floyd’s harrowing 1925 true story turns into a frenzy of front-page news, plays host to a carnival of opportunistic human leeches.That poor Floyd, like many a forward-thinking American explorer, got stuck “finding his fortune under the ground” while the predatory folks upstairs profited off the man’s suffering.

It makes for a robust juxtaposition, and an always relevant one.Yet “Floyd Collins,” receiving an ear-pleasing revival at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre, is also a musical split in two — and not for the better.Adam Guettel’s soaring 1996 score does to a dank, bat-dropping-filled cavern what composer Ennio Morricone did to 1960s frontier in films like “Once Upon a Time in the West” — packs it with unexpected romance and spellbinding allure. As 37-year-old Floyd’s situation goes from “the stones are alive with the sound of music!” to dire and dark, his songs transition, too.Euphoric yodeling gives way to sanguine distractions and escapist fantasies.

His prognosis is bleak, but Floyd knows he was doing what he loves most — caving.Guettel’s sumptuous early work, although lyrically too “there’s gold in them, thar hills,” is enough of a reason to see the rarely performed show.Harder for the audience to love is the other, rockier half: Writer-director Tina Landau’s hokey book that, like many history-based musicals of the 1990s — “Parade” and “Ragtime,” among them — flatly treats characters not as textured and relatable persons, but as mechanical stand-ins for weighty ideas. That’s why “Floyd Collins,” audibly lush ...