Tina Landau Is Answering the Call and Bringing a New FLOYD COLLINS to Broadway

Only heaven knows how Tina Landau's rehearsal schedule goes. The acclaimed director and writer is playing double duty this spring, working on the creative teams of the new musical Redwood and the first major revival (and Broadway premiere) of Floyd Collins.

After spending much of 2024 (and the first two months of 2025) developing Redwood with Kate Diaz and leading lady Idina Menzel, Landau headed 20 blocks uptown to Lincoln Center to begin rehearsals on one of her oldest projects. She reunites with her friend Adam Guettel, with whom she created the musical when they were students at Yale. Now over 30 years later, and exactly 100 years after the true events of the show took place, they are making a Floyd for 2025. She took a break from rehearsals to tell BroadwayWorld all about the process so far...

What a year you're having, Tina! 

Yes, I know. Floyd Collins rehearsals started for me on February 20th, which was just a few days after Redwood opened.

And how are they going so far?

Fantastic. The chemistry of this particular group of actors and the creative team feels very magical and special. It's a company full of true unicorn beings who are all doing something very unique. We were very fortunate to have done a workshop several months ago and have laid the groundwork for what is really turning out to be a very closely knit ensemble, in addition to all the wonderful solo turns that exist in the show.

I feel like you can always sense that as someone in the audience, when the cast has that special bond...

I do too. That's why I, I really live for and support and cherish and champion ensemble work. I honestly do feel that when a company as a whole feels charged to tell their story and have a kinship with each other on stage and then to share that with the audience, it's always palpable, even if it's not explicit.

So full disclosure, I've never seen Floyd Collins on stage... 

Join most of the people in the world!

I'm still such a fan. I have to be one of those many people who are so excited to finally have the chance to experience it.

I mean, certainly there have been productions of Floyd throughout the last decades all over, but Adam and I have really kept the show to ourselves and for ourselves for a New York production. Our dream was always to do it at the Beaumont and from decades ago, Andre Bishop said he was interested, and for any variety of reasons and seasons, it never really came to fruition. I think all three of us all feel like this was meant to be. This is the time. This is the moment. We're in the right theater at the right time. 

Why the Beaumont? 

The Beaumont feels like an open, expansive cavern! It has tremendous height, depth and width. It feels like a big open space within which one can play both on a stage surface but also play vertically to some extent. Our dream was always to be able to have Floyd do an actual rope descent during "The Call", and in this case, we'll get to do it. So I'm very excited. 

The sheer fact that so many more people get to see it now must be overwhelming to you. 

Absolutely. After Playwrights, which was a very short run, we were able a couple years later to do a little mini tour where we went back to Philadelphia, where, where it, um, actually originally premiered and then to The Old Globe and to the Goodman. But still, I would say, the lore of the show was really created from that Playwrights production that Sophie saw and from the album. And, um, it's a very odd thing because most people know so little about the show and yet at the same time, feel so familiar with it and love it so deeply.

I'm just really grateful and happy to be, to share it with all the people who say, Floyd Collins, what's that? That's the audience I'm looking forward to. 

It's funny, the people who have heard of it and cherish it a lot are within the theater industry. (And really spanned age ranges too). It's not just people who were there during the 90s. It's young people who are just coming out of school, who have come into rehearsal saying, I can't believe I'm part of this. 

So what does Floyd Collins look like in 2025? 

We're not doing an overhaul. Adam and I are trying to honor what worked  about it then and what our crazy 25-year-old selves did without thinking much. There was something intuitive and audacious and a little naive about how we approached it back then. We find great value in that! At the same time, we are both 30 years older and have a lot more experience, and we're trying to apply our knowledge to the show in little ways that improve it and deepen it and enrich it.

We have really looked at the language in the piece, the way the characters speak, and we addressed that in a somewhat new way. I think in our younger selves, we were determined to get every little idiom we could possibly find or slang from the period. So it was chock full of all this vernacular. We've streamlined some of that out to help make the show a little more accessible and relatable. We have also written some extensions to some music. Some of the original music of the show was short, almost shards of things that existed that we have now turned into more full-bodied song.

And of course the show itself, the meaning of it, remains universal in some ways and also has changed so much in the context of our cultural landscape. It's really interesting looking at the media aspect of it because the events unfolded at a time when radio was the new media. It was one of the first great American media circuses where the press and businesses and entrepreneurs found a way to use someone's personal tragedy for their own gain or entertainment or profit. And the whole question of what's reported in the media and is it true and who do you believe and is there such a thing as the truth and is there fake news? And how does that impact people's lives? Is alive in a way now that it perhaps wasn't for us as much when we wrote it in 1992.

Oh sure- so many parallels can be drawn, I'm sure. 

We are living now right through the exact month. This happened 100 years ago this month. And actually, in honor of that 100th anniversary, there's also going to be a re-release of a book called Trapped, which is the seminal book about these events. They asked me to write the forward to the book, which I was very, very honored to do. And the new edition is being published and released to coincide with our opening.

Can we talk about the force that is Jeremy Jordan?

It's thrilling being in a room with him. We had a two hour rehearsal yesterday where we were just working on the opening. I left that rehearsal feeling like, "Man, have I found gold in this person, who is so willing to throw himself in and learn about and become this character!" What I'm excited about, of course, is not only his singing, but his entire sensibility and his acting and his sense of mischief and fun and heart that he's already bringing to the character. I think it's both. A wonderful stretch for him, but also something entirely in his wheelhouse, where he will get to show fully many colors of who he is.

And inevitably there will be people who come to see this just to see Jeremy, and they'll be in for so much more. 

Yes, on the forefront on our minds, obviously, when casting the show, is: Who can do this? And there are very few people that exist that have the skills necessary to sing and perform this role. I feel the same thing about Lizzie McAlpine, who I didn't know really until she came in and auditioned, and then to discover she has this entire other career and following and it's like, wow, and now we get all the Lizzie McAlpine fans too!

And of course, aside from all of this you also have Redwood happening. I was thinking about how they kinda seem like sister-shows thematically.... was this all on your vision board for 2005? 

No! The ways in which these two shows speak to each other only became apparent to me after they were both scheduled. I really didn't realize one is one of the very first things I ever wrote. The other is one of the newest things I've ever written. And at their core, they both track an individual who is in search of something- in Floyd's case, glory; in Jesse's case, escape. They both go on these incredible journeys where they end up finding and embracing something that is not what they originally had in mind, but which transforms them in inexplicable and beautiful ways. 

Even visually, we have a man who goes into the earth and stays there underground for the bulk of the show. And here's a woman who goes up into a tree and stays there for the bulk of the show. I sometimes imagine Floyd and Jesse talking to each other. [Laughs]

If only!

The design approach of the shows is extremely different, but there's something in the spirit of 'the seeker' and writing a piece that's both about the individual, but also about something much larger around the individual that has really fed me and helped me in approaching both. 

Redwood is open now- you must feel so proud of everything that you put out there onto the stage. 

I am very proud. But that's not to say I don't have a few ideas that I might go into the theater and sneak in in terms of little rewrites in the coming months. [Laughs]  I love the show and everyone involved in it so much. And of course, Idina is my dream collaborator of a lifetime. We've become so close and I'm super proud of the work she's doing.

What do you think about each of these shows is going to surprise audiences? 

Well, I think both shows have, at their core, somewhat unconventional stories. So I think that is surprising. They're full blown musicals that don't subscribe to the traditional formulas of what makes a musical by way of structure or number of characters or the role of dance, let's say. They are character-based musicals that I hope audiences are surprised by how they can enter into and care about and relate to the main characters and still have an experience that relates to the world around us and to nature and the cosmos. I think they both shared those traits and I hope that is, if not surprising, I think a little unusual. 

Redwood is running on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre. Floyd Collins will open on April 21 at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. View the full 2025 Spring Preview!