Lizzy McAlpine makes her Broadway debut, coming at a perfect time

Lizzy McAlpine is surrounded by music these days. She’s making her Broadway debut in a daring stage musical, and when she retreats to her dressing room, her own songs demand attention. “When the inspiration hits, I’ve got to write. I’ve got to have a guitar there or else I’ll go crazy,” she says. “I just kind of have to wait for them. I can’t really force a song.” The folk-pop singer-songwriter is following-up last year’s release of her third album, “Older,” with a role in “Floyd Collins,” a musical about life, death and fame. She calls it perfect timing.

“I was starting to feel like I wanted to do something new, and this kind of came at the perfect time. It’s the first and only Broadway show that I’ve ever auditioned for,” she says. McAlpine has been building a sonic reputation for raw, stripped-down tracks and intimate, deeply reflective lyrics. Her single “Ceilings” went viral on TikTok, and “Older” has been hailed by critics.

Broadway made sense for a woman who grew up watching shows in New York and who has an “ability to infuse each song with character, as if acting,” the AP said in a review of “Older.”

“I feel like all of my music has musical theater in it because I have loved theater for so long,” she says. “I saw my first Broadway show and I was like 8, and so, it just kind of seeps into my music whether I am conscious of it or not.”

“Floyd Collins,” which just earned six Tony Award nominations, tells the tale of a hapless explorer who gets himself trapped in a Kentucky cave in 1925, triggering the first modern media frenzy. McAlpine plays Floyd Collins’ sister, a woman who doesn’t fit in. “She is strange, definitely, but it’s just because she’s in her own world, and she sees the world differently than everyone else. She sees the beauty in it. She’s like a sponge. She picks up everything that everyone is throwing out. She’s just different. Not necessarily in a bad way,” McAlpine says.

“It explores being a young woman in the 1920s and being misunderstood and not listened to and not heard, and that’s like been a theme in my life because I’m working in the music industry. I’m surrounded by men all the time.”

McAlpine, 25, didn’t know much about “Floyd Collins” — it deputed off-Broadway in 1996 — but was a fan of its composer and lyricist, Adam Guettel, who created “The Light in the Piazza,” one of her favorite musicals.

“I saw his name and I was like, ‘Oh, I love him.’ So I listened to the cast recording on Spotify from the original production and immediately was just hooked,” she says. “It just sounded like nothing that was on Broadway now. It was just so unique, and I love that kind of stuff.” McAlpine, who was raised in a suburb of Philadelphia and attended the Berklee College of Music, did theatre in high school.

Associated Press