El Cruce (the crossing)
A New Musical
One night. One restaurant. One block that won't stay quiet.
The food keeps coming and the band keeps playing. Outside, the street the ICE protests are filling up and getting harder to ignore. Inside, Sofia has a developer at table four, a stack of mail she hasn't opened, and a dining room full of people she has no intention of losing.
Before closing, everyone in that room finds out what it costs to keep a door open when everything outside is trying to close it.
About This Show
It takes place over a single dinner service in a small Latino-owned Chicago restaurant, a staple of the neighborhood. There's a protest in the street, an enforcement action working the block, and a developer who has been circling the building for months. Sofia has run this room for thirty years. Tonight she finds out what it's worth to her, and so does everyone who works for her.
Eleven songs — cumbia, bolero, son montuno, retro RnB, milonga, tango, and indie folk — played live by a band that never leaves the stage.
About The Author
Doug Holmes is a doctor, musician and writer based in Chicago, making his musical theater debut with El Cruce. Performing and recording as the Duncan Holmes Band, he has released three albums of original music and spent years writing songs about power, inequality, and the pressures that shape ordinary lives. He has also written comedy sketches, television episodes, and non-fiction. Doug spent many years experience as a line cook. When ICE enforcement intensified in Minneapolis, Doug watched it reach people he knows — friends, neighbors, patients. This is what motivated him to write this play.
The El Cruce Blog:
WHERE THINGS STAND
The score is finished and recorded. The script is in its fourth major revision and ready for its initial script reading. Casting notes and a date will go up here when I have them.
TWO STRANGERS, ONE SONG
I watched a woman in a restaurant treat her waiter badly while drinking champagne. The phrase "champagne cool" arrived almost fully formed and sat in a notebook for a long time without anywhere to go.
Years earlier I'd met a man who described himself as a hobo. I asked what was hardest about his life, expecting him to say the cold, or the hunger. He said it was that people don't look him in the eye — they look past his face.
Both of them ended up in Sophia's mouth in the same number. One became the accusation; the other became the answer.
Listen to: This Is My Place
YEARS ON THE LINE
I spent years as a line cook. The vocabulary in A Reputation Preserved is real because I used it, but that's not really what those years gave the song.
What I remember is the particular experience of executing something difficult, correctly, at speed, for people who will never know you did it — and who will send it back if the garnish is wrong. Carlos's pride isn't defensiveness. It's what fifteen years of getting it right actually feels like from inside.
That's the argument of the song. The guest doesn't run the kitchen.
Listen to A Reputation Preserved
PERFORMANCES
UPCOMING
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