Floyd Collins, Southwark Playhouse - review

As last year’s Parade proved, the Southwark Playhouse knows a thing or two about the atmospheric staging of a musical. The dank railway arch reaches of the Vault, here with an impressive system of ladders, is ideal for Tina Landau and Adam Guettel’s 1994 work about a caver trapped underground in 1925 Kentucky.

Floyd Collins (Glenn Carter), who went merrily into Sand Cave on the hunt for both pleasure and treasure and got his leg stuck, became one of the first American “media sensations”. Anxious, interested and on-the-make parties gather above ground, among them “Skeets” Miller (Ryan Sampson), a cub reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, who tried to help rescue the man he wrote about in daily dispatches.

The show clearly has impact, and is confidently directed by Derek Bond, but it could be streamlined. Too many of the songs drift into oblivion; Lucky, a peppy country-inflected number sung by Floyd’s free-spirited sister Nellie (Robyn North), is a stand-out. What the piece lacks — but what the similarly themed Danny Boyle film 127 Hours had in ample doses — is a sense of time passing. Languor too often replaces urgency, in the musical as well as the rescue effort itself.

Until March 31 (020 7407 0234, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk)