“Well, for about 10 years we've been doing Texas stories – [stories] that come from Texas, not so much like the story of Texas, but things that happened in Texas,” says John Cecil of Texas Comedies. Their newest musical comedy, The Crash at Crush, is running now. “And so this one [has] been floating around with us for a long time.”
The Crash at Crush is based on the strange but true story of William Crush, who in 1896 decided to stage a train crash as a publicity stunt. The resulting event drew some 40,000 people to the site, which made the temporary town of Crush the second most populous city in Texas; it even inspired Scott Joplin, who was nearby at the time, to compose a song about it.
“I read somewhere [or] I heard somewhere that in theater, if you put together any kind of show you have to think about what the central problem of the production would be,” writer/director Cecil says. “And so for The Crash at Crush, the central problem is how do you do a train crash on stage? And I figure if people pay their… money to come see a show… they get out of the house, they go see a show called The Crash at Crush, they gotta have a train crash. You can't go, ‘Oh, the crash just occurred off stage,' you know? And I think a musical comedy especially should be a bit of a spectacle. It's a bit of an action movie, so you gotta have something. So how to build the trains? So finally we committed to doing the show and then started looking at various ways to get trains to crash on stage. And we got it! We crashed them last night.”
In the musical, Katherine Crush, played by Tatyana Smith, is not a fan of the proposed crash. “She is obsessed with trains and the railroad,” Smith says. “That is her… like when little girls were playing with dolls, she was playing with toy trains. And she's just, she's been in love with trains for her whole life and her husband is fully aware of that. So for roughly half of [the musical], she's kind of in the dark. Like she doesn't know that he's planning on crashing these trains, and that's gut-wrenching to her because trains are her thing. She loves them. She doesn't want him to get hurt.”
Smith says she and the entire cast and crew are having a good time with The Crash at Crush. “Yeah, it's a blast,” she says. “I love being on a stage to begin with, be it doing something dramatic or comedic, but working with Texas Comedies in particular is always an experience. In the best way!”
'The Crash at Crush' is onstage at the Dougherty Arts Center through February 15.
