Extra! Extra! Hey, look at the headline! Historical news is being made! The breathless lyric is Stephen Sondheim’s, from Gypsy, but the craving for media hype has been driving storylines of American musicals since forever. (Chicago, anyone? Annie? Born Yesterday?) Floyd Collins dramatizes a deadly incident from the Kentucky Cave Wars of 1925. While exploring a cave he wanted to develop as a tourist attraction, the eponymous spelunker got trapped underground. The press descended, kept news junkies coast-to-coast briefly spellbound, and moved right along when efforts failed. As conjured up in Tina Landau’s book and Adam Guettel’s music and lyrics, the tale became a parable for regular folks’ hopes and dreams in hard times. Though the Off Broadway incarnation of Floyd Collins in 1996 had its champions, the show didn’t catch on. The original cast album, on the other hand, with its lineup of songs by turns wistful, brassy, punchy, and full of longing yet never mawkish, established itself as a lasting cult favorite. With Guettel’s coronation for A Light In the Piazza and Days Of Wine and Roses well behind him, a Broadway premiere for Floyd Collins feels way overdue, and the Lincoln Center Theater is just the company to mount it. Landau, who directed three decades ago, is back to recreate the magic with a new ensemble. The new Floyd is Jeremy Jordan, charismatic yet down-to-earth. It’s pitch-perfect casting if you ask us, given a Broadway song-and-dance card that has included, over the past decade and a half, the Depression-era Clyde Barrow of Bonnie & Clyde, the urchin firebrand Jack Kelly of Newsies (based on the Newsboy Strike of 1899), and, on a more elevated social plane, that great dreamer, the Great Gatsby. —Matthew Gurewitsch