TEXAS Outdoor Musical

The show began with a magazine article. In 1960 Margaret Harper of Canyon read in Reader's Digest about Paul Green, a playwright who wrote outdoor historical dramas with music and pageantry for particular places. She wrote to him about the canyon, a few Canyon families paid for his first trip to the Panhandle that year, and he took on the project. The Pioneer Amphitheater was set into a natural basin on the canyon floor, and the musical has played there every summer since 1966. Its producers call it the Official Play of the State of Texas.

TEXAS is fiction set in the 1800s: invented settler families, their quarrels and courtships, songs, dancing, comedy and fireworks, with a cast of more than sixty. It opens with a rider carrying the Texas flag, who appears on top of a 600-foot cliff and gallops along the rim. The canyon wall is the backdrop, lit after dark.

It is a settlers' story told from the settlers' side. The people whose canyon this was a generation earlier, the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne families driven out in the army's attack of September 1874, are not its subject; their history is told at the Comanche National Museum and Cultural Center in Lawton and the Kiowa Tribal Museum in Carnegie, Oklahoma. A barbecue dinner is served on a covered patio before the show, and in recent summers the company has also staged Shakespeare in the amphitheater.