How Tina Landau juggles 'Redwood' and 'Floyd Collins' on Broadway
Landau is the director and co-creator of both musicals now on stage this spring, one a new, original show and one a revival of a 30-year-old piece.
Broadway director and writer Tina Landau has her hands full this spring, overseeing the Broadway journeys of two musicals in parallel. Alongside star Idina Menzel and composer Kate Diaz, Landau wrote and directed Redwood, a journey that began over a decade ago but kicked into high gear during the pandemic, when she finally had downtime to pen the book and lyrics for a story she and Menzel devised about a grieving mother. Once writing began in earnest, Redwood came to life in just a few years — a relatively efficient page-to-stage process for an original Broadway musical.
Simultaneously, she was in talks with Lincoln Center Theater to revive Floyd Collins, a musical about an imperiled cave explorer she wrote with composer Adam Guettel that premiered off Broadway in 1996. Although Landau hadn’t staged Floyd Collins since a brief U.S. tour in 1999, she and Guettel have never given up on it.
“Adam and I had been pursuing to do it at Lincoln Center for decades, truly,” she said, and scheduling conflicts and other factors meant it hadn’t worked out until now. But of course, when it rains, it pours, and Landau found out within weeks of each other that both Redwood and Floyd Collins had been greenlit — not just for the same season, but for the exact same time.
“When I first got the dates, they were scheduled to open within the same week,” said Landau. “I thought for a while I would have to choose.” But she and her team were able to finagle some separation, allowing her to do both.
Still, it was a tightrope walk. “If I had my druthers, I would've spread them out by months, if not a year,” she said. “But when things like this come along and you have the opportunity to do such shows back to back, you just say a big yes and hop on the wagon and hope you don't fall off somewhere along the route.”
The first step was revisiting Floyd Collins after having set it aside for so long. “Even after we knew it was booked, it was months before I would crack the script or listen to the music,” said Landau. “I knew it was going to be a big emotional deal for me when I reentered the piece. The ‘me’ that wrote it is both the same me at the core and also a very different me.”
It wasn’t until she took a road trip with her partner, who had never heard the score in its entirety, that Landau was willing to reenter the world of Cave City, Kentucky. They listened to the music together on their two-hour trip: “I sobbed the entire car ride,” said Landau.
A road trip would also help Landau shape Redwood. The central character, Jesse (Menzel), suffers the death of her adult son and finds herself on a destinationless drive that lands her in Redwood National Forest, where she finds solace among the giant trees. Landau’s road trip was less aimless, but it also concluded in the California redwoods. She was already dreaming up plot lines for Redwood, largely inspired by a loss of her own: Her nephew died of a drug overdose, and she, like Jesse, took comfort in the life cycles of nature.
Jesse’s journey takes place in the canopy of a tall tree, while Floyd’s takes place hundreds of feet below it; he's trapped underground in a cave he had hoped would be his family’s financial salvation. Both protagonists strive to give themselves over to a force greater than themselves, and the plot parallels were impossible for Landau to ignore.
“What Floyd does embrace is surrender. And I think that's ultimately what Jesse does in Redwood too,” she said.
Only when the musicals were scheduled to open back-to-back did the similarities hit Landau, and she was initially afraid the stories might be too alike. “I quickly turned that to my advantage,” she said. “They're both true to me and my experience in the world, and I'm going to embrace that and allow the echoes and reverberations between them to work to my advantage.”
The characters’ motivations aren’t the only parallel; Landau’s stagings have echoes as well. Menzel and her co-stars notably scale a redwood on stage using real climbing techniques taught by vertical choreographer Melecio Estrella and his dance company BANDALOOP. Jeremy Jordan, who plays the titular Floyd Collins, descends into the earth using a similar harness system across a moving set that opens and closes to reveal new sections of the cave.
While there’s an exciting element of danger in the staging, Landau stressed, “The climbing in Redwood and the descent in Floyd are both choreographed within an inch of their lives, with safety being the guiding principle.”
Both stories saw major moments of flux throughout their development. Between a pre-Broadway run at La Jolla Playhouse in early 2024 and its New York opening, Landau and Diaz wrote six new songs. And in dusting off Floyd Collins after 25 years, Landau and Guettel knew they had work to do.
“We worked on it almost as if it was a new piece,” said Landau. “Adam and I had developed a nice little list of things we knew we wanted to approach whenever we had the chance to do it again. We never felt the piece was 100% finished.” The duo restored a cut song, and Landau reworked the script. Still, the core of the piece remained intact.
“We wanted to honor a piece that, on some level, we no longer understood how we made and why,” said Landau. “We knew there was something intrinsic in its alchemy and the way it was built out of a thousand million decisions we made eons ago that we wanted to respect and honor, even if we didn't understand it completely at this moment.”
Through all the logistical challenges posed by putting up two shows at once, Landau fought to make it work, even if she had to disappear for longer than she’d have liked to focus on one show or the other. She credits the creative and stage management teams of both projects for keeping her grounded and keeping things moving when she couldn’t be around.
“When you're doing work like this, it's all about the teams that you have in place surrounding you who really can support the work — and me — in the process,” she said. And now that both Redwood and Floyd Collins are open on Broadway, maybe Landau will take a breather. But probably not.
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Top image credit: Tina Landau. (Photo by Marc J. Franklin)
In-article image credit: Jeremy Jordan in Floyd Collins and Idina Menzel in Redwood on Broadway. (Jordan photo by Joan Marcus; Redwood photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)
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