A look back: Tony nominees Jeremy Jordan and Taylor Trensch at opening night of 'Floyd Collins'

The pair star in Adam Guettel and Tina Landau's bluegrass musical, now debuting on Broadway after 30 years and earning a nomination for Best Musical Revival.

"When we talk about great American musicals, I think you you have to talk about Floyd Collins," said Taylor Trensch, speaking to New York Theatre Guide at the April 21 opening night of the show making its Broadway debut after 30 years.

Ten days later, Floyd Collins would be nominated for the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival and Trensch would earn a nod, his first, for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. It's full-circle for Trensch, who listened to the cast album from Floyd Collins's 1996 Off-Broadway production while driving to high school.

"I would sing the 'Riddle Song' so loud, blood would spray on my windshield," Trensch said with a laugh. "This has been one of my all-time favorite musicals as long as it's been available to the masses, so I feel very lucky."

What resonates with him about performing Floyd Collins now is "how the media can capitalize and vulturize — that's not a real word, but I just made it up — terrible tragedies for profit and gain," he said. "It's something we're all a little familiar with." The show recounts a real-life story from 1925 of how cave explorer Collins got trapped underground, attracting nationwide news coverage and sparking the first major media circus in the radio era. Trensch plays Skeets Miller, the only journalist who spoke with Collins directly in the cave and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

Jeremy Jordan, who earned his second Tony nomination for playing the title role, appreciates that the musical can essentially bring audiences underground, too. (Jordan described Floyd Collins theatregoers as "all my little cave crickets.")

"They're a part of the show, at least for me — when I'm trapped in the cave and I'm all alone, there's still all these people here," he said at opening night. "It's like we breathe together. There's such an intimacy to the Beaumont Theater, even though it's a big stage, that you feel their energy as they follow you through the story."

That story — of a man propelled into the cave by curiosity and ambition, then left only with visions of his impending mortality — is what moves him the most. "He's going out to find his glory and find success for himself and for his family, but in the end, he realizes all the important things in life he already had, and has, maybe passed him by.

"His acceptance of his own humanity, his acceptance of not knowing what really is out there, and the joy he finds in everything is really, really lovely."

More than anything, though, what gave Floyd Collins its devoted cult fanbase is the stirring bluegrass score by Adam Guettel, coupled with a compassionate book by writer/director Tina Landau that illuminates Collins's story without sensationalizing it all over again.

"And they were 25 when they did it!" Trensch enthused.

Jordan, too, acknowledged that doing justice to a 100-year-old story, not to mention a beloved 30-year-old musical in its long-awaited Broadway debut, is no small feat.

"It has been a wonderfully joyous and challenging and heart-opening journey," he said. "I'm just so incredibly grateful that I was given this opportunity and, frankly, honored. I've tried to accept the challenges with my whole heart."

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Photo credit: Floyd Collins on Broadway. (Photos by Joan Marcus)