The Daily Telegraph 16/7/99 Kate Bassett

Electrifying musical debut delivered on a shoestring.

Floyd Collins was a fortune-hunting Kentucky farm boy with a passion for potholing. Courtesy of a sensation-hungry press, he became a national celebrity for two tragic weeks in 1925.

This debut musical by New York's Adam Guettel, who wrote both lyrics and score, tells the story (familiar from Billy Wilder's film Ace In the Hole) of how Collins was caught up in "cave wars", when Kentucky land owners scrambled to find vaults to vie with the Mammoth Cave, a big tourist attraction nearby.

In Cive Paget's British premiere we find Collins (played by the sturdy Nigel Richards) crawling through uncharted tunnels and joyously discovering a magnificent cave that's a potential pot of gold. But as Collins triumphantly heads for the surface, his ankle is trapped by a falling rock.

While he lies way underground, slipping ever-deeper into delirium, a media circus gathers overhead, set in motion by a local cub reporter called William Miller (Jeremy David, looking strikingly like a young Dustin Hoffman). Miller's career takes off, but he finds himself increasingly personally involved, and ethically troubled as 1,200 American newspapers syndicate his story about the struggles of Collins's would-be rescuers, and 30,000 spectators come to gawp.

Louise Belson's set, creating the cavern's slippery slopes from blackened plywood and scaffolding poles, is ingenious....yet these rough edges somehow make the discovery of this musical gem more thrilling, and they're offset by Richards's superb, exuberant, full-throated performance. Guettel's score is unsentimental and often experimentally electrifying, sliding stylistically between edgy dissonances in the style of Benjamin Britten and lovely American folk tunes.

This composer has felt his way deeply into the music of Collins's world but remained wonderfully freewheeling, interweaving bluegrass harmonica and banjo with orchestal strings, playful yodellings and eerie, almost tribal, ululations.

News of the World 25/7/99 Bill Hagerty

The real life tragedy of Floyd Collins, the centre of a media circus when he was trapped in a Kentucky underground cave in 1925, was the basis of the 1951 Kirk Douglas movie, Ace in the Hole.

It seems an unlikely subject for a musical, but at the enterprising Bridewell theatre in London, Adam Guettel's songs and Tina Landau's script are sensitively handled by director Clive Paget-a talent to watch- and there are some terrific performances, most notably from Nigel Richards as the hapless Floyd.

It's as sombre as a wet sunday afternoon and the songs wont hang around in your head for long, yet I found it captivating and moving.

The Independant Friday Review 23/7/99 David Benedict

Floyd Collins represents a giant leap forward for musical theatre. The production..has knock out performances from Nigel Richards and Craig Purnell.

The Sunday Telegraph 25/7/99 John Gross

Grim subject makes a splendid musical

Floyd Collins was a farmer's son who took part in the cave wars in Kentucky in the 1920s- the search for new caves to be exploited as tourist attractions. In 1925, he was trapped in a narrow passageway 150ft underground. (His leg was wedged by a falling boulder.) Seventeen days later, after a rescue operation failed, he was brought out dead, but not before swarms of reporters and thousands of onlookers had descended on the area. And now he has been commemorated in a musical- Floyd Collins, which is receiving its British premiere at the Bridewell Theatre.

The authors, Adam Guettel (music and lyrics) and Tina Landau (book and additional lyrics have set themselves a hard task. Its a grim subject for a musical, made all the grimmer by their decision to concentrate unflinchingly on Floyd and his family: they allot an amusing song to the reporters ("you ready for the low-down? The real straight poop?"), but in general the media carnival remains on the sidelines....

Yet against all the odds, the show is a striking success. You are thoroughly caught up in the drama. You care about Floyd the individual, not just the victim: to a lesser extent, you care about his family. You go on hoping, as everyone involved had to, that there can somehow be a happy ending.

Guettel ...has produced an admirably twangy score, full of folk and country elements, entirely appropriate to its subject.

Tina Landau views her characters with sympathy but without sentimentality. There are some piercing moments- Floyd, in a situation out of Dante, reiterating his boyish belief in his luck: Floyd and his brother trying to cheer eachother up by singing a song made up of riddles.

Nigel Richards gives a powerful performance in the title role, the rest of the cast ar admirable (it's hard to believe they are all English), and Clive Paget's production makes up in imagination for what it lacks in resources. The clamberings, the echoes, the strange yodellings really persuade you that you're down in the caves.....Its a splendid show, a genuine original.

The Independant 15/7/99 David Benedict

Hold the front page!

"Forgive me for turning you into a story," cries Skeets, the newspaper man. Happily, our hero does indeed forgive him. At first sight, Adam Guettel and Tina Landau might also seem to need forgiveness for daring to turn the true story of Floyd Collins, who died after being trapped in a cave 150 feet below ground, into a musical. Not a bit of it. At one point, Floyd's sister Nellie (a tensely passionate Anna Francolini) sings about following diamonds. Well, Floyd Collins sparkles like a rare jewel amidst the gloom of most recent blockbuster musicals.

Guettel and Landau's recipe is salted with a bitter portrait of the sensation-seeking media carnival which descended like vultures on Cave City, Kentucky in 1925. Yet surprisingly, their prevailing mode for this tragedy is of innocence and hope. Guettel's master stroke is his creation of a musical vernacular; his music dramatising his idiomatic lyrics so that the two are welded together with astonishing assurance and grace. You hear it in the long-spun melodic lines which gather emotion as they curve and dip and rise up again.

The score has the authentic twang of country music, but without the sentimentality...whenever the music really takes over, particularly in the spine-tingling duets, the show takes wing, thanks to the outstanding lead performances.

Craig Purnell as Homer, Floyd's brother, seizes every opportunity, attacking complex rhythms with relish and utter conviction. He uses music to achieve dramatic effects, not just to sound good, which he manifestly does. The same is true of Nigel Richards, who captures both Floyd's burly bravado and his fatal naivety from the tremendously demanding opening number onwards. It is impossible not to share his joy as he discovers the cave he believes will make his fortune. As his powerful voice opens out at the top it raises the hair on the back of your neck. "Remarkable...is this remarkable enough?" sing the newspaper men. Yessir, it sure is.

The Times 19/7/99

Intriguing is the epithet best applied to Floyd Collins, a new American musical given its UK premiere at the Bridewell. Based on a true story, the scenario certainly breaks fresh ground...

The music, by Adam Guettel, grandson of Richard Rodgers, also holds many attractions. His quirky imaginative score- an eclectic mixture of bluegrass, folk and modern musical modes- evokes the echoes of the caves and the dissonance of the culture clash.

Louise Belson's solid set places Floyd centre stage... happily then, the talented and charismatic Nigel Richards triumphs over his lot as Floyd. As his sister, Anna Francolini's flighty, breezy tones are appealing; Jeremy David and Derek Bell are fine as the two most interesting characters, a cub reporter and an engneer with misplaced faith in his machines...Clive Paget's alternately laconic and suspenseful direction hits most of the right notes.

The Guardian 28/7/99 Lyn Gardner ****

The collapse of the American dream and the birth of the modern media circus is detailed to sometimes electrifying effect in this musical...Guettel certainly knows how to tell a story through music and libretto, and in drawing strongly on the local country sounds he gets to the emotional heart of a hillbilly culture shot through with religious fundamentalism and an almost animal-like resignation that you must accept the lot you have been given.
A wonderfully economic production which is sung with particular panache by Nigel Richards as Collins, and Craig Purnell and Anna Francolini as his siblings who, in their own way, are just as doomed as their brother.

The Herald 20/7/99 William Russell

The reputationof the Bridewel theatre as a place where innovative, difficult musicals get staged rests secure with this award-winning Off-Broadway show by Adam Guettel and Tina Landau based on a real-life story...Landau's book, unlike the film, concentrates on the plight of the trapped man, sung with tremendous power and conviction by Nigel Richards....the large and hugely talented cast work hard, and the set by Louise Belson..is very effective indeed. The hunky Richards dominates the show, but there is good work from Craig Purnell, as his feckless brother Homer, and Jeremy David as the journalist who sets the whole thing in motion.

The Stage 22/7/99 John Martland

Ever since the show opened Off-Broadway in March 1996, owners of the original cast CD have been extolling the virtues of Adan Guettel's score, with its additional lyrics by book writer Tina Landau. Presumably, continual exposure to this mixture of bluegrass and Broadway- along with curious yodelling and echo effects- gives the complex music...greater appeal.

Nigel Richards is splendid as the doomed Collins and has one of the best numbers, a thrilling ballad, How Glory Goes. Jeremy David, along with Craig Purnell and Anna Francolini as Collins brother and sister stand out in a cast which is generally fine. Francolini joins her step-mother (Jill Martin) for the appealing 'Lucky' and there is further merit in the reporters' cynical Act II opener, 'Is that remarkable?'.

Louise Belson's ingenious set and Robert Bryans lighting do the trick, and the show is imaginatively directed by Clive Paget.

Midweek Nick Smurthwaite

Thankfully there is more to this musocal than its plot. The score is full of delights..Its as ambitious as anything by Sondheim. The singing is mostly terrific, especially when its done by Nigel Richards (Floyd) and Anna Francolini (Nellie, Floyd's sister). Either of them could easily carry a West end show....Clive Pagets production...gradually builds to a gripping climax...as well as the show's best number in which the dying Floyd imagines how heaven will be. Well worth seeing at the Bridewell.