As soon as I saw the title of this post, I had to click.
FLOYD COLLINS was the first musical I performed in my college career (after a 3-year hiatus) at San Francisco State University.
I don't know how often this piece is produced (I'm willing to wager about 5 times a year in America somewhere). It's so obscure and the music is extremely difficult to learn, and the staging is so up-in-the-air.
But I must say (and I say this humbly) that the production I was in November 2006 (directed by Tony Award-nominated director/composer Barbara Damashek) was just astounding. We performed 8 shows to sold-out audiences and were [-this close-] to bringing it to the Scotland Edinburgh Theatre Festival (but the funds didn't come through).
It's quite simply one of the most beautiful musical scores in the obscure off-Broadway world. Anyone who "accidentally" stumbles across a staging of this show or the cast recording is in for such a treat.
The Shaw production photos (link below) look fantastic (with the set built of newspapers). Their staging sounded like it had similar aspects, with actors doing the yodeling around the theatre and the crazy "Carnival" scene with everything happening at once. I saw photos of a Chicago production last year where the "cave" was in wood-work below an on-stage platform.
When my college staged it, we had a small 8x8-foot wood platform center-up-stage, a wooden plank stage-right (with a paint-ladder behind it), two wooden-crates stage-left, a bucket of water and a sand box. That's it. Later in Act 2 we lowered a canopy. We wrapped rope all around the stage to simulate the rope-pull scene. We covered Floyd with a burlap bag during the above-ground scenes and sometimes talked and sat on him. We hung a swinging rope from the ceiling for "The Riddle Song."
We used very "organic" staging, creating almost all the sound-effects by hand. The cave noises, the wind, pouring water, the crickets, whittling wood, dropping rocks, ruffling newspapers. We poured sand from a bottle onto the stage during "Through the Mountain." All of the echoes were human voices (not a sound-effect).
All of the in-cave lighting was done by the cast hiding around the theatre shining flashlights onto the actors. Floyd climbed through the cave in darkness with a rope and a lantern, rolling and sliding around the floor of the theatre. Fortunately our theatre-space was just excellent, with the stage down below the stadium-seating chairs and little alcoves in the walls. We also created roles of "ho-dags" which were Kentuckian cave-spirits, who were "responsible" for the hi-jinks in the cave and kept an eye on Floyd. Very eerie.
Our orchestra was a fiddle, a keyboard, a cello and a guitar.
Our cast was phenomenal and it will forever be one of the most challenging and rewarding pieces I've ever had the utmost pleasure to perform.
I have TONS of photos from the following production, if you were interested:
SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY
THEATRE DEPARTMENT PRESENTS
FLOYD COLLINS
Directed by Barbara Damashek
November 2006
Updated On: 11/30/07 at 01:35 AM
