When Roger Brucker heard that the story of a trapped Kentucky cave explorer who slowly starved to death was being turned into a musical, he was doubtful. “Aren’t musicals supposed to be fun?” he thought.
Brucker, 95, knows more than most about the doomed explorer Floyd Collins. He co-wrote the book “Trapped!,” which is considered the definitive history of the events that unfolded during the so-called Kentucky Cave Wars, a period of rapid subterranean exploration in the 1920s when the state commercialized its extensive cave systems for tourism opportunities.
Collins was an accomplished spelunker in 1925 when he entered Sand Cave alone, only for a 27-pound rock to pin his ankle and trap him underground. Over the course of 14 days, he died of thirst, hunger and exhaustion, compounded by hypothermia.
Turning that story into “Floyd Collins,” which made its Broadway debut at Lincoln Center Theater this week, was an exercise in bringing a bleak history to life through song.
Tina Landau, the show’s director, bookwriter and additional lyricist, was an undergraduate student at Yale University — decades before she conceived “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical” and “Redwood” — when she came across a blurb about Collins in an anthology on American history. It focused on the media circus around the failed rescue, one of the most prominent national news stories between the two world wars.
Landau, 62, said her perspective on the story was different from when she wrote the show, which premiered in 1996 at Playwrights Horizons, in her late 20s. She understands it now as an individual confronting his mortality.
“When we began, I was more attached to Floyd’s hopes and dreams and aspirations,” she said. “Now, I just personally am more invested with the journey that takes him to a place of surrender and letting go.”
Brucker, who has seen at least 20 productions of “Floyd Collins” since 1996, has firsthand experience interviewing some of the event’s central characters, such as Skeets Miller, the young Louisville Courier-Journal reporter petite enough to descend into the cave and interview Collins directly. At a technical rehearsal, he spoke with the actor who plays Miller, Taylor Trensch, to stress the reporter’s empathy in writing about Collins. “He changed an anonymous farmer into a real live person called Floyd Collins,” Brucker said.
Collins, of course, was not alive for an interview when “Trapped!” was written, but Brucker has a good sense of how the man compares to the musical’s character. Earlier actors in the role of Floyd, Brucker said, were too tall, too short, too leaden in affect or overly enthusiastic (Collins was generally reserved, he said, but lit up when talking about caves).
But he thought the actor Jeremy Jordan, a Broadway heartthrob who recently starred in “The Great Gatsby,” combined the best parts of Collins the character with Floyd the man. One cannot sing show tunes while beneath a rock, so Jordan spends the portion where he is resting on a tilted platform belting and yodeling.
“I thought he was the best Floyd character I’ve seen,” Brucker said.
The musical’s original title, “Deathwatch Carnival,” came from the headline of the blurb Landau read at Yale, referring to the spectators and vendors who visited the mouth of Sand Cave while Collins was trapped inside. Journalists hungry for a scoop exaggerated details such as the size of the rock trapping Collins.
As “Floyd Collins” developed, Landau said, she and Adam Guettel, the show’s composer-lyricist, leaned more into Floyd the man. The musical has been particularly lauded for its songwriting, with a final song, “How Glory Goes,” that sees Collins accepting his death and imagining a heaven with his mother waiting for him. (The song is the name of the second studio album by Audra McDonald, who covered it.)
When Landau and Guettel were in Kentucky doing research, Guettel was inspired by the cave to incorporate echoes from Collins’s singing as a kind of chorus into the score. While in the state, they also came across “Trapped!”, written by Brucker and the historian Robert K. Murray, who died in 2019.
The book, first published in 1979, was both a vivid and comprehensive account of the story, Landau said, which she used as a resource and inspiration. But she said turning all of that history into a musical required editing, like cutting the women who gathered at the cave mouth to propose to Collins. She synthesized a wide range of people, including Collins’s extended family, into more central figures like Homer and Nellie, two of his siblings.
The show is split between the cave’s interior, represented by set design components that evoke the Mammoth Cave system, and its mouth where rescuers and spectators gathered. But although Sand Cave and the tight, muddy squeeze that trapped Collins are on the grounds of what is now Mammoth Cave National Park, it was not even a true cave.
“Sand Cave is presented as a giant panorama of stuff, and it isn’t,” Brucker said of the show. “You have to start thinking of it as the opening under a kneehole desk.”
David Kem, who worked as a guide for the National Park Service leading tours of Mammoth Cave for more than 15 years, saw a recent touring production of “Floyd Collins” in Bowling Green, Ky., in an audience that he said included many approving spelunkers.
“That’s a unique challenge to try to convey the cave environment onstage, a place that’s so cramped and otherworldly,” he said. (He had one nitpick: “By and large, nobody walks around singing in the cave.”)
Kem said he appreciated that the musical presented a broader picture of Collins. “It isn’t flippant with the whole topic of Floyd’s death,” he said. “I think it does do him service.”
A new edition of “Trapped!” was published this month in honor of the 100th anniversary of Collins’s descent into Sand Cave. Landau wrote the foreword.
“For me today, a hundred years after his death in Sand Cave, Floyd lives,” she writes. “He lives in this book; in our musical; in our imaginations; in our fears and aspirations; and in the questions we continue to ask of ourselves, each other and of the universe.”
