When Jeremy Jordan played a young, naïve cop in the Broadway show “American Son” alongside Kerry Washington, in 2018, he was fresh off several seasons on the “Supergirl” series. And so he tried to apply some of the techniques that worked for him on TV to a taut drama about police violence.
“I had been making it work for so long, trying to mine gold from every moment, and I think that had stuck with me,” Jordan said. The director Kenny Leon intervened, with advice that Jordan still carries with him. Literally.
“He gave me this note on some old piece of script,” Jordan said, fishing a tiny scrap of paper from his wallet and carefully unfolding it. “It says ‘you are good enough to just say these words.’”
Leon’s counsel may be evergreen, but it particularly resonates with Jordan’s new project, where he is often unable to use many physical acting techniques.
In “Floyd Collins,” which is at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Jordan portrays the title character of Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s musical, a hardscrabble Kentuckian who becomes trapped while exploring a cave in 1925. As a media circus forms on the surface, Floyd withers away underground, stuck between rocks. (The musical is based on a true story, which also inspired the Billy Wilder film “Ace in the Hole,” from 1951.)
In Landau’s new staging (she also directed the Off Broadway version in 1996), Jordan spends large chunks of his stage time laying down, almost immobile, on what looks like the most uncomfortable therapist’s chaise longue ever created. It’s a rendering of the character’s claustrophobic predicament that’s abstract rather than naturalistic, and had a direct impact on Jordan’s performance.
It is flat on his back on that contraption that Jordan sings two of the show’s most wrenching numbers, “And She’d Have Blue Eyes” and “How Glory Goes.” No pacing the stage, gesturing with his hands for emphasis — he cannot use his body to help communicate feeling or meaning.
And Jordan was spurred by the restrictions.
“It’s so freeing not being able to move,” he said in his dressing room at the Beaumont at Lincoln Center. “When you take that option off the table, you’re left with just the words and the emotion, just the song and the character and the music.”
This may sound ironic for an actor whose breakthrough came in the famously kinetic Broadway production of “Newsies the Musical” in 2012, where his performance earned Jordan a Tony Award nomination. But it was his polished, impassioned tenor and old-school charisma that won over audiences and critics — The New York Times’ Ben Brantley called him “a natural star who has no trouble holding the stage, even without pirouettes.”
Communicating purely through his voice is how Jordan, 40, became interested in performing to begin with. Growing up a shy child in Corpus Christi, Texas, he was always singing, so his mother put him in choir, which he attended in middle and high school. So it was a bit of a shock when he was cast as the Mute in a local production of “The Fantasticks.”
Jordan was frustrated but with nothing better to do the summer before senior year, he signed on anyway, and ended up discovering the full scope of musical theater.
“I don’t think I had ever really listened onstage before,” he said. “I was in my head, singing the songs, listening for the pitches, that sort of thing. It wasn’t until I was forced to stop talking that I was like, ‘Oh, there are other worlds I can actually enter.’ That was when the bug bit me.”
After studying musical theater at Ithaca College, in Ithaca, N.Y., he moved to New York City. In a recent phone interview, the director Jeff Calhoun recalled that Jordan made him think of “a singing James Dean or a singing Marlon Brando” when he first saw him. “He has an edge both on and offstage, and I mean that in a positive way,” Calhoun added. “He’s the opposite of bland and milquetoast.”
They ended up working together on “Newsies” and “Bonnie & Clyde” at pretty much the same time in the fall of 2011. At one point, the actor was rehearsing “Bonnie & Clyde” in midtown Manhattan by day and performing in “Newsies” at the Paper Mill Playhouse by night. When Frank Wildhorn’s notorious outlaws made an early exit after just 69 performances, the Disney newsboys were ready to move to Broadway, and Jordan jumped back in.
He has not stopped working since, both onscreen (the film version of “The Last Five Years,” the TV series “Smash,” the Neil Bogart biopic “Spinning Gold”) and onstage (with credits including the popular revival of “Little Shop of Horrors” and, most recently, “The Great Gatsby” on Broadway).
Like most actors, Jordan has had his share of failures, near-misses and, well, derisive snickers. He was still basking in the “Newsies” glow, for example, when Season 2 of “Smash,” in which he played the troubled songwriter Jimmy Collins, aired. It was a turbulent landing for a show whose debut season is associated with peak “hate-watching” in 2012.
“It was my first series regular role, and I hadn’t yet learned to not look at stuff online,” Jordan said. “It was not fun to be a part of. People think of the theater community as a family, so supportive, and it couldn’t have been more not that,” he added. “In fact, people were leaning into the vitriol and the daggers of it all. It was strange.”
At least Jordan got some good numbers out of it. In a phone interview, Joshua Safran, the Season 2 showrunner, said, “You had to hear Jeremy sing. We would just make sure he had a song in each episode.” One of them, “Broadway, Here I Come!,” has joined “Santa Fe” from “Newsies” as a favorite at Jordan’s concerts.
Also disheartening was the outcome of his involvement in the development process for the movie “The Greatest Showman,” which Jordan has milked for comic effect in his live show — he had been eyeing a part that ended up going to Zac Efron.
Another plum role that got away was Fiyero in the “Wicked” movie. “I didn’t show up with what they wanted so I had to try to make last-minute adjustments and it was clearly not going well,” he said of the audition. “They were like, ‘Well, you sound great. Goodbye.’”
By contrast, his “Floyd Collins” audition was such a good experience that afterward he called his wife in tears of relief and joy.
Landau saw in Jordan qualities that she thought would be perfect for the character. “There was something about the combination of his kind of dark, brooding nature and sensibility with the twinkle in the eye and the mischief and the zest for life that to me felt like the Floyd cocktail,” she said.
The two bonded over their exacting process. “I give a ton of notes as a director,” Landau said. “Jeremy not only takes them, but I get full, detailed emails from him in response. I’ve never had an actor do that, not fighting me but being in dialogue. ‘Well, when I did that, what I was thinking was that, and the reason that happened is this, so if you really think that…’”
“I don’t know when he writes these things,” Landau continued, laughing.
Perhaps it’s the weight of Leon’s note in his pocket, but Jordan understands that the point of preparation is to not calcify into shtick, or even visible effort. “He does the work beforehand so he’s free to be instinctual in the moment,” Calhoun said.
This is evident in another “Floyd Collins” challenge that is very different from the scenes Jordan delivers without moving: He must sing “The Call” while scrambling up and down mobile set elements, and stealthily hooking and unhooking a safety harness — a veritable obstacle course that represents Floyd’s exploration of the fateful cave. So Jordan spent hours figuring out the logistics with the creative and safety teams.
“It became like a fun little problem-solving adventure, which I love,” he said. “I’m a big puzzler person, I love an escape room.” He also had to build up his upper-body strength, pointing out that his right forearm had become “stronger than it’s ever been.”
Yet the audience’s attention is directed less toward the athleticism than to his voice. One of Jordan’s assets as a singer is his ability to express emotion in a way that can feel deceptively conversational because he has unerring control over a tune’s peaks and valleys. “For Her,” from “The Great Gatsby,” is a good illustration of his approach.
In that sense, “Floyd Collins” is a perfect match for Jordan, who yearns for artistic demands like the ones in Guettel’s score and Landau’s staging.
“I left ‘Gatsby’ early to do this,” Jordan said. “I left a much better paycheck to do this. But sometimes, when something like this comes calling, you just have to listen.”
