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By Karen Sharpe
"How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over, in states unborn and accents yet unknown!"
(Cassius in Julius Caesar III.i)
Even a soothsayer could not steer the ruler of Rome from the fatal dangers of the Ides of March. And neither could Shakespeare be spared a skewering when The Crusadists brought the bard's lines to life in their Helium Theatre interpretation of Julius Caesar.
Sucking on giant, helium-filled balloons and wearing togas, the original Crusadists were a group of five friends just looking to entertain themselves and, perhaps, some classmates. And, with their squeaky delivery and ability to make fun as they had fun, they sent Shakespeare into the stratosphere and lay the groundwork for the College's irreverent sketch comedy troupe The Crusadists.
That was back in 1984 when Ned Crowley '85 and Scott Beightol '85 roomed together as resident assistants in Wheeler Hall. Both liked to "goof around" and have a good time laughing and making people laugh—and both wanted to figure out a way to make some money and meet girls more easily. So after some late-night bantering and the recruitment of a few more cut-ups, Crowley and Beightol—along with Paul Connolly '85, L.J. Mitchell '85 and Kevin Browne '86—hatched a plan to perform a series of original comedic skits in the spring of 1984. If all went well, they'd have plenty of dates and would be able to rent a beach house in the summer with the donations collected at showtime.
And the group's name?
"It was a play on the Crusaders, but with an edge," says Crowley, who is now a group creative director at the Leo Burnett advertising firm in Chicago, where he writes and produces commercials for the likes of Disney, Nintendo, McDonald's and the United States Army. "We thought we were doing really daring stuff, but we were really tame."
Among their most memorable skits was a takeoff on a visitor's weekend—"All's Quiet on the Domestic Front"—when a set of parents shows up on campus, dragging their neighbors along, on the wrong weekend. Beightol, who is now a trial lawyer in Milwaukee, appeared in drag as the shocked mother who found some unexpected items in the dorm room of Crowley.
"We had grown up watching Monty Python, and, so, we put on the dresses," Crowley says.
Women performers eventually became part of the Crusadists' crew, but, in the beginning, it was just the guys.
"We wrote our own material, we rehearsed ourselves, booked the Pub and did it," says Mitchell. "People loved it. There was no precedent. It wasn't nasty, and it wasn't overtly sexual. It was smart, well-written characters."
Videos were also part of the Crusadists' repertoire. A takeoff on Michael Jackson's famous "Thriller" video—featuring the Crusadists cavorting in the Jesuit cemetery—almost got the group kicked out of school, but the gang persevered.
The skits and videos didn't end then. Nor have the memories.
"It shaped who we became, and our careers became the extension of that," says Browne, who has worked in advertising in New York, writing and producing commercials, since his Holy Cross days. "It started because there wasn't a lot of entertainment at school. We had no idea what it was going to turn into. We thought it would be a couple of weeks writing skits, and it turned into something that became the most attended event of any year. It really meant a lot to us. We packed the pub continuously."
Like Browne, Crowley went into advertising, but not without also going through the SecondCity comedy troupe program in Chicago and forming his own sketch comedy troupe called White Noise.
"Then the job started taking over and family life taking over. But if I'm writing commercials and selling them, I'm up and performing all the time," Crowley says.
Mitchell, too, found that even after becoming a lawyer, the stage kept calling him back and, up until this past fall, he was acting in various productions in New York. Now, though, he's taken a break from the stage to become the full-time director of the Churchill Center, a school for kids with learning disabilities.
"It's a bizarre intersection of my legal background and my writing experience and my creative side from my acting background," he says.
The year after Crowley, Mitchell, Beightol and Connolly graduated, Browne kept the skits and shows going, and those who came after did the same.
"It fell to me to run the show my senior year and that was a big key. I never thought it was going to keep going on, but I had to be careful with who I handed it off to," Browne says. "I think about it all the time. I don't live in the past, but it's such a cool thing."
Today the Crusadists can claim a stable 22-year history, with alumni that include numerous performers, comics and an MTV vee-jay.
"I think it's amazing," Mitchell says. "It's really terrific that the spirit of this thing that we created has lived on and become a way for kids at the school to express themselves. It's fun to think that with something we started 20 years ago, we left a legacy. You don't set out to do that—you just set out to do something really cool with your friends."
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