An Underground Movement

“Lucky’s what I am,” Floyd Collins tells his sister before descending far beneath the rural Kentucky earth to seek his fortune.

As it turned out, Collins was legendarily unlucky in his cave exploring 75 years ago. He was looking for a huge cavern he could turn into a gold mine as a tourist attraction. Instead he found his death trap.

“Floyd Collins,” the musical receiving its Orange County/Los Angeles premiere this week in a production by the UC Irvine drama department, tells the true story of Collins’ entrapment and the subsequent two-week rescue effort that turned into one of the first media circuses of the modern era.

Unlike poor Floyd, director Mark Valdez, a graduating master’s candidate, and Dennis Castellano, UC Irvine’s head of musical theater instruction, have enjoyed uncanny luck during their nearly yearlong preparation to the production.

Castellano, the show’s musical director, fell in love with “Floyd Collins” after a student turned him on to the original off-Broadway cast recording several years ago. His admiration for the 1994 musical by composer Adam Guettel and writer Tina Landau proved contagious for Valdez.

Both regard “Floyd Collins”--as do some critics--as a vanguard work that opens new possibilities for multilayered storytelling in the musical. Rather than lining up an array of showstoppers and production numbers calculated to leave an audience humming and put a skip in its step on the way out the door, “Floyd Collins” wagers everything on the strength of its story and themes.

Among those are the ties of family and how they can fray under pressure, the age-old dilemma of whether it’s more rewarding to work diligently at a humble, honorable calling or go for the risky big score, and the American propensity to turn any situation into an opportunity for commercial exploitation.

“It’s a challenge to have a man stuck in a cave and go through the whole thought process he goes through,” Castellano said during a recent interview in his office on campus. “I don’t go away whistling ‘Hello Dolly,’ but the piece can touch me and move me. The plot and music can unfold simultaneously and don’t necessarily have to reprise into a hit song.”

“Pardon the pun,” chimed in Valdez, an enthusiastic, amiable 28-year-old who hails from Dallas, “but this musical goes to new depths.” Valdez and Castellano had to dig out of a hole just to get approval to stage “Floyd Collins.”

They knew it might not fly with the drama department’s play selection committee of students and faculty because it was so heavily weighted toward male roles--11 of 13 parts. UCI productions need to offer a balance of opportunities for male and female students.

The two “Collins” enthusiasts also feared the play’s publisher would not grant performance rights to a student production, preferring to hold out for a splashier professional staging as the Los Angeles/Orange County premiere. The musical had its Southern California premiere a year ago at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego.

Valdez solved the first problem by switching the parts of several reporters and a teenage, ballad-spinning novice caver from male to female. He thinks a bit of luck--a friend-of-a-friend connection to the musical’s publisher--helped free up the rights last spring, just at the deadline for setting this season’s schedule.

Lucky’s what Valdez continued to be when he went to New York City last fall to accept a Princess Grace Foundation Award, which is underwriting a year’s salary for him to work at the Cornerstone Theatre Company in Los Angeles.

At the reception, “A woman said, ‘Hi, I’m Tina,”’ he recalled. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, Tina, I didn’t get your last name.’ ” It was Tina Landau, librettist of “Floyd Collins.”

The chance meeting led to an e-mail correspondence that netted the UCI production several new revisions and additions, including a new song, “Where a Man Belongs.”

The additional number “really helps ground the show [in] the tension between the family, who would rather Floyd be a farmer, and his friends who want to make money underground.”

In perhaps the unlikeliest chance connection of all, the title role was won by one of Valdez’s fellow grad students, Neil David Seibel--a Kentuckian who happens to be a distant blood relation of the real Floyd Collins.

“My great-great-grandmother was Floyd’s aunt,” Seibel said in a separate interview. Growing up in Coldspring, Ky., he was aware of the legend of Floyd’s entrapment. “I didn’t know it was national history,” he said. “I just thought it was family history.”

Cave exploring was a big part of Seibel’s upbringing from the time he could walk. A graduate of Northern Kentucky University, he is deeply rooted enough in the Bluegrass State to have written and staged a one-man show, “My Appalachia,” about characters he knew growing up.

His parents will fly out to see him in “Floyd Collins.”

Doing the play has given him a close-to-home feeling, he said. “Plus, I really like the way [the musical] unfolds. I like the story. Even if I wasn’t from Kentucky and I wasn’t related, this is the kind of work I’m attracted to.”

Among the role’s demands are being constantly on stage--and acting while immobilized for much of that time.

It’s tough on the backside, Seibel admitted. “I wait for the dream sequences [when Floyd breaks free in his imagination]. I get to get up and stretch.”

The music is unusually demanding as well, said Castellano, who rates “Floyd Collins” as one of the most difficult musicals staged in his 18-year tenure at UCI. Guettel has taken strains from folk, bluegrass and Western swing, and merged them with sophisticated, dissonant music that draws on the traditions of modern classical composers and Stephen Sondheim.

“Upon first hearing the CD, I thought, ‘Folk music, how nice,”’ Castellano said. “But upon opening the score, it’s very complex and very intelligent. There’s a lot of thought behind each bar.”

The cast will have to pull off complex, contrapuntal vocal passages. As Floyd, Seibel will have to coordinate his voice with synthesized echo effects that, in the most distinctive musical passages of all, create the cave’s essential presence.

“It has high demands on singing as well as acting,” Valdez said. “The music is so much an extension of the story. You can’t go into a star moment and say, ‘Everybody just enjoy this song.’ The acting has to be in the music as well.”

Valdez’s zest for the musical led him to Kentucky last year on his summer vacation. He spent a week spelunking, visiting Collins’ homestead, and conversing with one of Floyd’s nieces.

“I went on an eight-hour cave tour where we went 10 miles,” he said. “It’s frightening. There were passages about 2 feet wide and 1 foot tall, and you have to fit through there completely flat.” He said the experience has helped him coach actors on how to move as if they were in a cave.

In one more stroke of fortune attached to the production, “Floyd Collins” will play on the 75th anniversary of the most desperate hours of the saga, when time was running out and hope of salvation dwindled as rescuers dug in the February rain and cold.

“It’s serendipity, absolute coincidence,” Valdez said. “The day we strike the set [Feb. 13] is the day Floyd died. They reached him on the 16th, but they believed he died on the 13th.”

Referring to his thick folder of research material on Floyd Collins, Valdez provides the remarkable postscript of what happened after the chapter recounted in the musical.

Collins’ dream, in essence, came true: His corpse was retrieved about 10 days after his death, embalmed, and placed in another cave that did, indeed, become a successful tourist attraction.

Collins’ father sold the cave and body to a man who charged 25 cents admission, plus an additional nickel for an open-casket viewing.

“Floyd Collins was big business,” Valdez said.

This went on from 1925 to 1961, when the cave was closed. Finally, in 1989, Collins was buried in the Kentucky earth, next to his mother’s grave at Mammoth Cave Baptist Church. The internment ceremony, said Valdez, was one of four funerals Collins had: the first when his body was considered irretrievable, the second when it was raised and transplanted for display, the third when the tourist attraction closed, and the fourth when he was buried.

How lucky can you get?

* “Floyd Collins,” by Adam Guettel and Tina Landau, at the Claire Trevor Bren Theatre, W. Peltason Drive and Mesa Road at UC Irvine. Thursday and Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 p.m. $6-$10. (949) 824-2787 or (949) 824-5000.

* IN CALENDAR: Lewis Segal finds the Stuttgart Ballet’s “Onegin” supported by thrilling duets at the OCPAC. F3