Musical-theatre innovator Adam Guettel has an apparently foolproof strategy for overcoming creative inertia: try something new.

“Since my 20s, I’ve tried to learn a new instrument every couple of years,” the musician and librettist explains in a phone call from his New York City home. “And when I say learn, I mean own. I’ll buy one and then out of guilt I start trying to learn it. And I often find that some of my best music comes from the early stages with that new instrument, because I’m not bringing the great history of Paganini to the violin when I pick it up. Instead, I’m bringing some kind of scratchy, hanging-on-by-my-fingernails attempt to gain entry into that musical language.”

Not every score requires a fresh start, however. When it came time to assemble his most popular show, Light in the Piazza—given a smash Vancouver run in 2011 by Patrick Street Productions—Guettel stuck with his first instrument, the piano. But the writing sessions for its predecessor Floyd Collins coincided with his learning to play the guitar—and according to the composer, that shows.

“The first song I wrote for Floyd Collins was ‘The Ballad of Floyd Collins’, and it has five chords,” he says, laughing. “And then I ended up doing a song called ‘Lucky’ toward the end of the process, and that has about 5,000 chords.”

It’s obvious that Guettel has a quietly wicked sense of humour: at one point he describes Floyd Collins—set for its own Vancouver run this month—as “totally family fare” with “lots of fun stuff for kids”. True enough, if your idea of wholesome entertainment includes watching someone die after a spelunking expedition goes horribly wrong.

The 1996 script is based on the real-life story of its title character, a charismatic daredevil with dreams of turning a Kentucky cave into a tourist attraction. This was not to be—but given that Collins died in 1925, just as radio was becoming America’s prime source of news and entertainment, his underground accident and the fruitless rescue attempts that followed commanded unprecedented levels of media attention.

Collins’s story prefigures the contemporary cult of celebrity, but Guettel notes that it also carries a degree of personal resonance. “A story about a guy who spends all his time alone, trying to discover something no one else has discovered?” he says. “That’s very much what a composer tries to do.

“The other thing, which I only realized halfway through, was that it’s really about a guy who has a pretty noble goal,” he continues. “I mean, he’s part poet and part mercenary, but the goal of discovering something and showing it to the world is noble enough. And the question of the piece becomes ‘If you fail in the pursuit of such a goal, is there any nobility in that?’ ”

That’s an issue Guettel has yet to settle—but despite his own self-doubt, he’s going to keep writing musicals until he can no longer hold a pen. For one thing, there’s his family heritage to consider.

“Being the grandson of Richard Rodgers and taking up a career in musical theatre seems a little bit Sisyphean,” he acknowledges. “I’m perfectly sanguine about that at this point, perfectly comfortable. But when I was writing Floyd Collins I think I was really trying to sort that out: ‘What if I don’t do as well as he did?’ I mean, he did so extraordinarily well—and when you’re in your 20s you think you actually might do justice to that. Now I’m 49, and I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen, but I love the work.”