Review: (Winnipeg) Ride the Cyclone

(photo credit: Barbara Pedrick)

Cyclone Hits Winnipeg!
...the dead rise and sing
by Edgar Governo

Ride the Cyclone: A Musical arrives in Winnipeg with hype worthy of a carnival barker—the media coverage of its current tour across Canada has a very catch-a-rising-star quality, as if you are witnessing the birth of the next great musical theatre classic. Even its programme write-up compares it to The Drowsy Chaperone, whose humble beginnings eventually led to a Tony-award winning Broadway run.

With that much build-up, disappointment might appear inevitable, so it's a great relief to be able to say that this lives up to its promise.

Victoria's Atomic Vaudeville has put together a show that is more innovative and entertaining than anything else I've seen staged at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre this season. Despite various statements by its creative team that it remains a work in progress, the production carries you along at a pace that never seems to lag or come off the rails.

Review: (Vancouver) Ride the Cyclone (PuSh)

(photo credit: Fairen Berchard)

Ride the Cyclone is one roller coaster worth riding

Anything’s possible in a show where all the characters are already dead.

by Chris Lane

Ride the Cyclone begins with a mechanized fortune-teller (richly voiced by Carey Wass) telling the audience about six teenagers who plunged to their deaths on the Cyclone coaster. The computer brings them back to life in order to play a game.

The game is to decide which of the six adolescents the machine will allow to keep on living, while leaving the other five to remain dead. The deceased youth, who had been members of a choir together, then proceed to tell their stories, dreams and fantasies through a series of songs, each one wildly different from the others.

Review: (Toronto) Ride The Cyclone

The Singing Dead

A musical becomes the "It" show of the season

by Beat Rice

Ride the Cyclone, a 2010 SummerWorks hit is back in Toronto. Running in the cavernous space of Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace this explosive musical fills every nook and cranny of the old found space. 

First-Person: Jacob Richmond on Ride the Cyclone

It’s Just A Ride 

(About the creation of “Ride the Cyclone”)

Jacob Richmond

The initial seed of the idea for writing “Ride the Cyclone” was my desire to dramatize an accident.

I seem to recall Aristotle said in the Poetics there was nothing dramatic about an accident, or a natural disaster… that structurally there is nothing interesting about such events, for they have no real rhyme or reason, and the best they could achieve is a form of spectacle.