How a Kentucky Man Trapped in a Cave Became a Broadway Musical

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.