Troupe turns infamous “Crash at Crush” railroad stunt into a stage musical
Normally, crashes are not good things to see onstage, from actors colliding with props to productions that, metaphorically, crash and burn before their audiences.
In Texas Comedies’ “The Crash at Crush,” however, the crash is the whole point: the historic 1896 head-on collision of two locomotives near West as a promotional stunt.
That spectacular McLennan County event killed two people and injured dozens in an audience estimated at 40,000, many of whom did not expect to be under a shower of metal shrapnel from exploding boilers.
For Austin-based Texas Comedies, the crash is source material for song, dance and story, part of a company repertoire that also includes musicals on outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Prohibition, the Austin moon tower murders, a Texas oil boomtown, a long-running blood feud and what happened after the Alamo (other than, well, Texas).
And while “Crash at Crush” has the strongest Waco flavor of those shows, it pops up in the company’s other tales of Texas history. “It seems like almost every show we do Waco comes up,” said John Cecil, the company’s founder and head.
Cecil got the idea for his company while a musician in New York City, stumbling across the city’s low-budget theater scene with productions that drew inspiration from all sorts of subjects. After moving back to Texas after several years of creating music and theater in New York and Europe, he found his English-born wife, a Texas history teacher, kept sharing stories that begged for stage treatment. “The stories kept coming,” he said.
He started Texas Comedies five years ago and those stories have sent his company across the state, performing in places like Uvalde, Borger, Carthage, Dalhart, Pittsburg, Goldthwaite and Beeville.
And now Waco, at the invitation of Historic Waco, which has added murder mysteries and plays to its repertoire of events connected to Waco history.
The company’s “Crash at Crush” centers on William George Crush, an agent with the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, who dreamed up the locomotive collision as a way to sell tickets and put the MKT in the public’s eye.
He did both. Katy trains brought some 40,000 people to a site about three miles south of West, with a carnival midway and food stands built to occupy the spectators before the collision.
The crowds were kept about 200 yards away from the crash, a distance that engineers felt would be safe. They didn’t anticipate, however, the two engines’ boilers exploding on impact, a blast that showered metal fragments over those closest to the crash. Two people were killed and many others were injured.
The railroad fired Crush that day — then rehired him the next.
“Crash at Crush’s” characters include Crush, his wife, fellow MKT employees and John Ringling of Ringling Bros. Circus fame, who was present. A trio of fiddle, guitar and bass provide live accompaniment for the actors in the one-hour show which includes time for refreshments both before and after the show.
“Our biggest challenge was how do you do a train crash onstage?” Cecil said.
So how do you do it?
Cecil declines to say, perhaps channeling Crush in saying people will have to buy a ticket to see.