In many ways, that makes Ride the Cyclone play like a jokey Fringe Festival entry that has somehow lucked into a top-drawer production.ĭirector-choreographer Rachel Rockwell provides distractions with her gorgeous, ghoulish staging, aided by Scott Davis’ atmospheric set, Greg Hofmann’s spookhouse lighting and by clever use of Mike Tutaj’s video elements to suggest the lives beyond the characters’ limbo state. The young cast is talented and appealing enough, but their characters and their sketchy back-stories too seldom escape the cartoonish, even when their vulnerabilities are put on display. That impulse toward the easy, cheesy laugh means that unlike other teen-angst musicals, such as Spring Awakening, the emotional stakes remain flat. Virgil plays bass in the production’s four-piece band, because “there is nothing more base than death.” Groan.
The machine then foretells its own demise by introducing Virgil, the rat that will chew through its power cable. Karnak (Karl Hamilton) sets the arch tone by pushing way too hard in a deadpan intro that reflects on the irony of a novelty attraction designed to predict the cause, time and place of someone’s death. The unwieldiness of that mix is less of a hurdle for the show than its strained humor, which becomes tiresome pretty much from the outset. Their musical musings on death and dying, eternity, lives cut short and the importance of valuing every moment owe a debt to Thornton Wilder (both Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey), while the adjudicator of their fates is a penny-arcade fortune-telling machine called The Amazing Karnak, a direct steal from Zoltar in Big.
#Ballad of jane doe tv#
The contest is reversed in Ride the Cyclone, as a half-dozen Saskatchewan high school chamber choir members (think Glee), hurtled to their deaths when a rollercoaster derailed at the apex of its loop-the-loop (see Final Destination 3), chill in purgatory awaiting a vote to decide who gets to return to the world of the living (take your pick of reality TV models). In terms of musicals, their show has structural echoes of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which also throws together a bunch of familiar childhood types in a competitive environment, giving each of them a signature song to reveal their foibles and Cats, which weaves the slenderest thread of plot around song-and-dance turns by a string of felines all competing to ascend to the afterlife.
Maxwell and Richmond, who co-wrote the music, lyrics and book, evoke a grab bag of different influences, intentional or not. In that sense, it shares some creative DNA with Carrie, the legendary Broadway flop based on the Stephen King novel, which MCC took a bold stab at resurrecting from the ashes in 2012. The show is certainly bizarre enough to seduce an admiring audience, and those still in touch with their high-school memories - of peer pressures, insecurity, popularity contests and private hells - might be especially responsive. Unions Take Broadway Show 'Paradise Square' to Court for $350,000 in Unpaid Benefits, Wages
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