NEW YORK – 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.”
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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.”
‘In her own world’
“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.”
Broadway lured her
McAlpine, who was raised in a suburb of Philadelphia and attended the Berklee College of Music, did theater in high school. Her grandparents would take her and her siblings to Broadway every year, and her mom would sing “Wicked” in the car. During the pandemic, she livestreamed Broadway covers on Instagram.
“She had a kind of unaffected directness and purity and honesty in how she approached the reading of the role, to say nothing of the singing,” says Tina Landau, who directed “Floyd Collins” as well as supplied the book and some lyrics.
“I really felt that there was something in how unfettered and organic and unadorned her approach to it was that was perfect for the character, because Nellie just speaks truth.”
McAlpine remembers seeing “My Fair Lady” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center — the same theater she graces in “Floyd Collins.” “Sometimes I’m on stage and I’m just thinking about I was in the audience one time, and it is just so crazy.”
After the musical, she plans on another album, and the music that's coming out has been touched by the show. “It feels like it’s becoming more complex because I’m singing these songs that are so complex every day,” she says. After that, she's open to ideas, even to more theater.
“It has to be the right thing. This felt like it came to me at the exact right time in my life, and this was the exact right show for me. And so, if something else comes along, it would have to be the exact set of circumstances.”
If that sounds like a singer-songwriter who is taking charge of her career, McAlpine would agree. She's done, for example, with an unhealthy pace to her tours.
“I’m finally at a place in my career where I can make decisions and do things that really align with myself. There was a while there before my last album where I was kind of just being pulled along, and I was just doing things because that’s how everyone does them,” she says.
“I feel like I am now more sure of myself, and I know what I have to do to make myself feel comfortable. Even if it’s outside of the norm or what other people do in the industry, I’m going to do it anyway.”