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Buckle up, folks: a new Rusical is now playing in a theater near you. Well, kind of. Stop! That! Train! is the new disaster comedy film directed by Adam Shankman, and also marks the first film from the world of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The filmmaker, whose credits include Hairspray, was eager to bring his song-and-dance flair to the big screen— even if he had little time to put it together.
“Creating a musical number for drag queens very quickly did not seem like the craziest thing in the world,” the director told BroadwayWorld. To accomplish the task, the director teamed up with Drag Race veterans, songwriter Leland and choreographer Jamal Sims, to invent and bring to life two songs from moments only alluded to in the script.
Ginger Minj, who leads the film alongside fellow Drag Race alum Jujubee, agrees that, even with little rehearsal, the process was not far removed from the competition series. “It felt like another episode of Drag Race in that sense because it was like, ‘Here’s your song, here’s your lyrics, record it, learn it, shoot it.’ It was fast, but it felt comfortable.”
As the title indicates, the plot of the movie revolves around a runaway train, with Minj and Jujubee at the center as a pair of best friends and train attendants. In between the musical moments, the movie (like the train) barrels ahead at full speed, with fast-paced humor and abundant visual gags that follow in the tradition of 80s-era slapstick comedies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun. RuPaul even joins the party, playing the President of the United States herself.
Amid all the manic fun of shooting the film, Jujubee shares one thing that would have added to the experience. “I wish I got to be slapped by RuPaul again,” admits the performer. “She slapped me on season two of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and it still hurts, but I wanted her to slap the other side to balance it out.”
Watch Shankman and the leading duo discuss the new film in our exclusive interview, where they also share which Broadway artist they would personally recruit to sit in their train cabin. Stop! That! Train! is now in theaters.
Photo Credit: World of Wonder/Bleecker Street
