Jeremy Jordan on Floyd Collins and the Freedom of Being Stuck on Stage

Jeremy Jordan has been all kinds of characters on stage: an orphaned newsboy leading a revolution, an infamous outlaw on a cross-country crime spree, an OBGYN with a penchant for pie, and an enigmatic millionaire pining for the green light of lost love.

However, his latest role as Floyd Collins has the leading man plumbing the depths — both literally and figuratively — like never before.

Based on true events, Floyd Collins revives the life story of the titular cave explorer, whose work during the Kentucky Cave Wars of the early 20th century led to the establishment of Mammoth Cave National Park.

With its Appalachian setting and beloved songs like “The Call” and “How Glory Goes,” the cult favorite musical occupies a fairly unique place in theater history.

Floyd Collins originally opened in February 1996 Off-Broadway for a limited run at Playwrights Horizons, marking the first major work of Adam Guettel and Tina Landau, who met while attending Yale University. The composer and playwright/director would go on to create respective Tony-winning hits like The Light in the Piazza and SpongeBob Squarepants: The Broadway Musical.

Nearly three decades later, Collins’ story is finally getting its long-deserved Broadway premiere with a starry revival as part of Lincoln Center Theater’s landmark 40th anniversary season. Led by Jordan, and with Guettel and Landau reuniting alongside original music director Ted Sperling, the musical’s 2025 iteration also stars Lizzy McAlpine, Jason Gotay, Marc Kudisch, Taylor Trensch, Jessica Molaskey, Wade McCollum and Sean Allan Krill.

And while Floyd’s original run was just 25 performances, the revival seems to have struck gold at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, earning six Tony Award nominations including Best Revival of a Musical and Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical for Jordan, along with a nod for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical for Trensch.

Below, Jordan chats exclusively with Ticketmaster about playing the century-old cave explorer, the show’s “singular” score, unlocking Floyd’s signature Appalachian yodel and his surprising Skid Row connection to fellow Tony nominees Jonathan Groff, Darren Criss, Conrad Ricamora and Joy Woods.

Floyd Collins closed quickly during its original Off-Broadway run before developing a surprising second life as a cult favorite. Growing up as a theater kid, how familiar were you with it and its place in theater history?

I didn’t know a whole lot about it. I mean, I knew that it had a big cult following — especially amongst theater lovers. I knew the song “How Glory Goes” from Audra [McDonald]’s album [2000’s How Glory Goes]. And I knew that people said that I would be great in that show one day — people have told me over the years. And that’s really it. I’ve never had a chance to see it and I never really listened to the record for whatever reason. And, here we are! I got the opportunity for the audition and figured it was probably worth a shot.

You were starring in The Great Gatsby when this revival came calling. What appealed to you about the opportunity to play Floyd?

Yeah, I had been with Gatsby for a while. And I had done Gatsby out of town, and it was big, fun, commercial theater. I knew that if I did Floyd, I’d really only be leaving the last couple months of my contract, and it just seemed like an opportunity that was too great to pass up.

It’s an incredibly emotional part and a completely different kind of character, and everything in me was like, “You have to take this.” It’s just on another level. Like, it’s just a different thing and it allows me to do things that I would’ve never had the opportunity to do before — just emotionally and character-wise and even musically. It offered all of these new opportunities and I couldn’t say no.

So obviously, Floyd Collins was a real person. But how do you describe him as a character?

I think Floyd, at his heart, he’s a bit of a dreamer. And he’s very quiet. He’s an individual kind of person, you know? I think it takes a very specific kind of person to go wandering alone into the depths of the earth, and I think he’s very happy in that sort of solitude. He takes his family very seriously, but at the same time, he has grown up — he’s in his late 30s when we meet him — and he’s never really had a girlfriend or any kind of a relationship in that regard. He kind of has his relationship with the earth, in a weird way.

And his only real goal is to find something new, to make a living and discover something that could change his life and his family’s life forever. He’s a little bit stubborn. I feel like he’s got a little bit of a hot streak. Like, he’s really quick to any kind of emotion; it kind of boils near the surface for him. So we see him vacillate a lot in the show between anger and elation and wonder and fear — he kind of lives from moment to moment in that regard.

Considering that you’re playing a famous cave explorer, have you ever gone caving or done anything like that before?

Not anything like that, no. I mean, he squeezes into the tiniest little holes with a little lantern and a prayer. When I was a kid, I used to like climbing over stuff, climbing up trees and crawling around in the dirt, but there weren’t any caves or anything where I grew up. We would sneak into old abandoned buildings and explore around, so there’s a little bit of that explorer, danger, adventurous side to me when I was younger.

I’ve been in a couple of caves, but they were very much developed for tourism. And unfortunately, because I went from one show to the next, I didn’t have time to go into a real cave like this. I really wanted to go down to Kentucky to Mammoth Cave, which is kind of the closest proximity and something that Floyd helped develop back in the day. But unfortunately, I just didn’t have the time.

The music of Floyd Collins is uniquely rooted in Appalachian folk and bluegrass. Did you tackle this music any differently compared to some of your past roles or look to any references in approaching the style of the score?

I think the music is kind of singular. There’s not really anything like it, and it goes all over the map. I mean, there is that sort of Appalachia hillbilly folk that comes into play, but then in other moments, it’s almost operatic. And then it gets so modern that it could be anything. What was fun was just to play with it until we found the right energy and the right vibe, the exact placement, and how it all feels coming out of your mouth.

What’s really cool is that [Adam Guettel] has written it so specifically, and every note and every measure is plotted within an inch of its life, that if you follow the blueprint, the sound that he intended you to sing will come out, you know? And I had to sort of just trust that, which was really a new experience for me, because I generally like to play around a lot. It was a lesson in trust. The whole show really was.

The show’s musical director, Ted Sperling, recently mentioned how the score has really evolved from what it was 30 years ago. How has the show changed from the original production to the revival?

All I have for reference is the recording, which I’ve only listened to a couple of times. But I know that the orchestration was pretty sparse early on, and so they’ve developed it and added a lot more instruments to it, and sort of built it out more so that it was able to have more sounds.

I think another thing that was sort of shifted was the accents and how the songs — and even the scenes themselves — are approached from an acting standpoint. I think [the original Off-Broadway production] wanted to be really genuine in what they might’ve sounded like a hundred years ago, which in turn put a little bit of distance between the cast and the audience. They were so “other.” They were so, like, “Oh those people from there,” that it was hard to relate to them.

So we’ve intentionally sort of calmed down the accents and made it a little bit more accessible, I think, in that way. A lot of the lyrics and the dialogue in the script really reflected the dialect and all the little “-isms” from the day, and I think we’ve toned it down and kept it a little bit more natural. I think it’s made it feel a little bit more real, a little bit more romantic, a little bit more like something that we can understand in 2025.

One of the most well-known elements of the score is “The Call.” Did you specifically learn how to yodel for the show, or was that a secret skill you already had in your tool belt?

I think I realized that I could yodel pretty quickly. I’d never really tried to do it much before, but I think yodeling is really just cracking on pitch, if I could put it really, really simply. And the way that my voice is structured and the way that I have learned to sing in my sort of modern contemporary musical theatre [training] is I kind of, like, crack into notes a lot, like— [vocalizes]. It’s just something that I’ve always had, and I really realized pretty quickly, “Oh, that’s basically yodeling.”

And then following the score and just leaning into it, it came really naturally to me. I listened to some yodel-y stuff, but the thing with professional yodelers, it’s just insane what they do. It’s not what I’m asked to do in this show. It’s not this weird, like, alpine, almost atonal communing with God kind of thing. It’s very measured in our show.

When I was listening to Floyd’s particular yodel in “The Call,” I kind of thought of it a little bit like his Elphaba war cry.

[Laughs] For him, it’s the Appalachia of it all. But also, he uses it to sort of gauge distance within the caves — it’s almost like echolocation in a strange way. And it also, I think, really highlights the joy that he has for what he does, and for life. He really is just full of energy and hope. He’s kind of like a kid. Like, he never really grew up.

Do you have a particular favorite song to perform in the show?

It’s hard. There are songs that I don’t like to perform, not because I hate them, but because they’re really hard. “How Glory Goes” is one of the most beautiful songs ever written for modern musical theater, so I would probably say that. But at the end of “The Call,” there’s a little snippy song called “Time to Go,” which is also really fun to sing and just so bouncy and silly. It’s like the calm before the storm, I love doing that. “The Carnival” is this weird moment in the show where it’s literally just yodeling. But it’s, like, manic, insane, crazy fever dream kind of yodeling. It’s really fun and makes me feel like a crazy person to do it, which is exciting!

The show requires so much of you physically: You start out spelunking down into the cave and then eventually, without giving everything away, you’re rendered pretty much immobile for the rest of the show. How does that physicality, or lack thereof, inform your performance?

Yeah, it’s kind of remarkable, you know? I think I realized really early on that, at least for me personally, I tend to fall back on physicality a lot on stage. It’s a little bit of a defense mechanism in a way, it’s a little bit of a wall. Like, I can do something with my body, and then that’s my choice for that thing. Or I can turn this way or have this moment with this person, or go upstage and hide a little bit.

But the way that I am — I mean I’ll just say it — the way that I’m stuck is I am literally open to the audience. I can’t even look at other people when I’m talking to them, I can only look straight out, and for a lot of it, my arms are even stuck and sort of attached to my sides. It leaves me no choice of physicality at all, except for a little bit with my head. And what that does is it forces me to open up and tell the entire story with just my voice and the words and the music and my face. So it limits your options but at the same time, because you have no other thing to do, it’s so freeing because I only can do it this one way. There’s no endless possibilities: this is what it is. And so how do I find it within this? It is very vulnerable. I can’t turn away, everything is right there.

While Floyd is stuck underground, the show also portrays the media circus happening aboveground, which was really the first of its kind in history. Do you see any parallels to the constant media circus we’re living in today?

Yeah, I think it’s really the beginnings of that. In the ’20s, radio was there and you could wire your articles in the same day and get them printed out. It was, like, almost instantaneous access across the world to what was happening. And right now, we are so tied to instant access to everything, to be able to click a button or tap a search on our phone and we know what’s going on. And we have to know — if we don’t know, it’s like we’re not connected.

So I think this began to sort of highlight the excitement of that connection, but also the danger of falling into the need to know versus the human aspect of it. That these are real people suffering and going through something in real time. It almost becomes entertainment to us because it gives us something to do. It gives us something to look forward to, to doomscroll or death-watch. It’s only, I think, gotten more highlighted over the years.

This is your second Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical. What does this one mean to you in particular?

It’s been 13 years since the first one [for Newsies in 2012], so I didn’t realize how much I had been sort of hoping it would happen again — until it did happen again. I’ve done a lot of things in between that did not get the award or the recognition or the nomination or any of that stuff, and you start to tell yourself that it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t, but it definitely feels like, “OK, I’m doing something right. OK, a lot of that sort of in between and a lot of the strife and pain and hardship and work, it means something.”

Without trying to give it too much meaning, to be honest with you. I mean, I’m still trying to just do my show every day. But I am trying to enjoy it. The cynic in me is like, “You don’t need to have this recognition to feel whole or to feel worthy,” but it is nice to be recognized.

I also have to point out that you, Darren Criss, and Jonathan Groff are all nominated together, and all three of you have played Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors at the Westside Theatre in the last few years.

I know! And Conrad Ricamora, who’s in the play category, too.

Oh yeah! So it’ll be a little bit of the Seymours Club at the Tonys this year.

And we have one Audrey in Joy Woods. I guess it’s a little bit of a nesting ground for future Tony nominees! So I suppose you just have to look at the list of people who have played those roles and you’ll know who’s gonna be up next!

This revival of Floyd Collins has given Adam Guettel and Tina Landau the opportunity to revisit their first major work. Is there a project from earlier in your career that you would love to circle back to and revisit if you had the chance?

Yeah! For me, one thing that I’ve always wanted to do again, I did it in college — and I know they just did this, so maybe this is a weird answer — but I’ve always wanted to do Urinetown again. I got to play Bobby Strong in college, and it was the most fun and silly and goofy thing ever. Yeah, that was fun, I would love to do that again.

I also have to ask if you’ve seen Smash yet. I interviewed Krysta Rodriguez recently, and she mentioned how close you guys still are after filming the original series together.

Aww — yeah, she’s coming to my show tomorrow. I probably won’t be able to come to hers until after my show closes, just because we have almost the exact same schedule. But yeah, I’m excited to share it with her. It’s gonna be weird and surreal, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.

At least you can take the Hit List element out of it, ’cause it’s all Bombshell.

[Laughs] Yeah, I always joke that at the end, they should bring on one of the ensemble guys and be like, “I’m Jimmy Collins and I wrote Hit List!” Curtain.

What have you taken away from this experience of playing Floyd?

Oof… I’ve learned a lot about myself. I’ve learned a lot about how I handle certain emotional things. I think I’ve also learned that it’s okay to be open — as open as I have been forced to be in this show. I’m a little bit of an introvert and tend to close myself off a little bit. And so I’m trying to open up a bit more.

The other thing that’s been really wild about this show is that people will share with me their experiences, either with the show or that the show reminded them of. It’s very evocative — especially at the end, he sings a song about wondering what heaven might be like and just the trapped nature of it all. A lot of people have stories about loved ones they’ve lost or that feeling of being trapped themselves, and they’ll share it with me after seeing the show. It’s the first time that I’ve been in something that I feel like I carry those stories with me into the cave every night. And they all sort of become part of the fabric of Floyd Collins, and it’s really beautiful and haunting and heartbreaking, but also kind of wonderful.