In fact, I think it would have been more successful.  Staging this problematic story on this gigantic bare stage really diminished rather than enhanced the experience.  I now can understand how the story began and had such success when it was a small, experimental musical in the cramped quarters of Playwrights Horizons in 1996.

As to plot, it comes down to be an elegy for a man (Jeremy Jordan as Floyd Collins) that we barely meet and hardly get to know – who seems totally unremarkable other than just being the victim of some serious bad luck and circumstances.  What happens to him is sad, but that is it – it is just sad and really doesn’t mean must more than that.  The show sets itself up as a parable but never completes the job of shaping and delivering this parable.  It seems like the meaning is lost somewhere down there in the cave with Floyd.

Visually the play gets swallowed up by the massive empty stage.  The play begins with its finest visual moment of Floyd burrowing his way into the cave and getting himself snagged deep into the bottom but from that point on it visually is rather dull – – and odd that Floyd spends most of the remainder of the show “lounging on a chaise lounge of rock” as scenes play on around him.  

I enjoyed myself in the theatre.  My ears were thrilled; my eyes quickly got bored; and my sense of story just fell flat.