![]() ![]() One that makes him consider the challenge of building the railway. He says that’s a particularly solemn moment in the train ride. Better than probably any gravestone that could have been created.” They died during the blasting and their bodies have been left there as what was deemed to be actually a fitting monument. “And it is known that there are some of the workers under that slab of rock that were never able to be excavated. “There’s a point where you go along and there’s a huge slab of granite on the down mountain slope,” says Lien. Lien says there’s one piece of history that has always affected him. They’ve both ridden the railroad themselves. “Take the ferry up the inside passage and over the Haines Pass to dad’s home at Dezadeash.” “I used to do this pilgrimage from San Diego in the summer,” says Lien. Boyce used to live in the Yukon, and so did Lien. Lien and Boyce have personal memories of the region where the railroad was built. But to have it also be fresh in some way.” “Trying to both be period clear, that when people listened they’d know right away that was from the Klondike era. “It was a matter of creating the energy, the passion, the humor, the folly – you know two people falling over themselves, what all was going on,” says Lien. And then through the White Pass, but they couldn’t find a way to build it.”įor Lien, composing the show’s music sometimes required a certain balance. Initially across the Chilkoot, until that proved impossible. “There were many people that had contemplated building a railway. “It probably would not have happened at all, period,” says Boyce. He says without him, it might not have been built. “The mountains were the formidable obstacle.”īoyce says Heney was the driving force behind the building of the railroad. “Stone cliffs were also the major obstacle that he had to overcome in order to build the railway,” says Boyce. That’s also the area Heney was from – he was from Stonecliff. Boyce is home in Ontario’s Ottowa Valley right now. “Whenever anything stood in his way, and obstacles came into his way, he blew it up or found a way to get around it,” says Lake.Ĭanadian playwright Conrad Boyce wrote the production. “I think really what appeals to me is not how spectacular of a man he was, but how he was just a regular man who did spectacular things,” says actor Billy Lake, who portrays Heney in the musical. But this musical focuses on one: Michael Heney, an Ontario man born to Irish immigrants, who made his way to Skagway during the gold rush. ![]() Thousands of people were involved in the construction of the railroad. He composed the music for Stonecliff – a production that looks at just that, how in the world the railroad was built, creating a route to interior Yukon. “Clearly the challenge of putting that railway through these mountains, it stuns everything, I think that goes on that train, to wonder ‘how in the world did they get this done,’” says Matthew Lien. A new musical tells the story of the building of the railroad in the late 1800s, and the man responsible. Today, tourists from around the world come to the small Southeast town to ride the Gold Rush-era train through a mountain pass and into the Yukon. White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad has been a prominent fixture in Skagway for more than a century. ![]()
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