Ride the Cyclone World Premiere Cast Recording Review (Album, 2021)
Back in 2016, I saw this delightful, weird, and ultimately moving musical called Ride the Cyclone at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in NYC. I don’t often get to go into New York for shows because of the cost, but I’ll make an exception when I know I have the money and can stay for a two show day plus a gallery visit or two. I’m pretty sure Ride the Cyclone was an exception to the rule as I had to see the show for myself.
If you’ve never heard of Ride the Cyclone, you’re in for a trip. This is a dark fantasy musical written by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell. Six choir students die while riding a rollercoaster. They wind up in a sort-of Purgatory run by Karnak, a fortune telling machine that can specify the exact time of anyone’s death. He sets up a competition between the classmates that will allow one of them to return to life. Each character gets a chance to plead their case in song as they reconcile the end of their lives and what lies ahead.
Last Friday, 7 May, the World Premiere Cast Recording of Ride the Cyclone was released on all streaming platforms. This album has been a long time coming. The show premiered in Toronto in 2011 and has gone on to major productions in Chicago, New York, Seattle, and Atlanta. Each production saw new revisions to the materials to make the show work as well as possible. While I absolutely adored the show I saw in 2016, the version represented in the 2021 cast recording (and the licensed version that became available in 2020) is as perfect as this show can be.
Ride the Cyclone is a performative show that needed a different approach for the cast recording. The characters in the stage show know that they are telling their stories, and each of the stories has a very different voice to match the characters.
Ocean is the hyper competitive straight A student with an upbeat pop theatre song that explains why no one else deserves to live but her.
Noel is called “the most romantic boy” and has a Kander & Ebb-styled, super vampy song about his dreams of being a night club singer post-WWII.
Mischa is a Ukranian immigrant who starts with an autotuned rap song about being awesome and transitions into a traditional folk song about how much he loves his girlfriend.
Ricky is a disabled student who imagines an entire space rock opera that he could never share when he was alive.
Constance is the super nice and supportive friend who finally opens up about her life in a powerful rock belting number.
And Jane Doe doesn’t remember who she was, so she gets this heartbreaking Brechtian/Kurt Weill-styled song that rips your heart out while commenting on the entire form of the show.
The show itself is set up to connect these disparate songs in really clever ways. Obviously, the six teenagers and Karnak are the only characters onstage, so they all slip into different roles in each of the songs. Since they’re a competitive choir, the style of harmonies they sing throughout each of these songs is consistent. You have four or five part harmonies following all the rules of Western music theory regardless of the style of the song surrounding them. Karnak runs the competition, connecting the different characters and how they fit into the structure of the choir, the school, and their hometown.
The cast recording takes it a step further. Karnak does speak directly to the audience in the show, but the Ride the Cyclone recording has all new narration. The fortune teller speaks to you, the listener, about how some things just aren’t going to make sense without the book and staging. The Brechtian elements of the show are recreated with callouts of the structure of cast albums, the habits of the listeners, and even the concept of releasing a cast album at all. This is so true to the tone of the show that it feels more complete than it is.
The book of Ride the Cyclone is just as important as the score. It’s a modern musical in that way, like Once or Come from Away, where the score supports the needs of the story, but the story is mostly told through the dialogue. The cast recording doesn’t reveal all the twists in the story or even who wins in the end. That’s the strongest decision of all. This is a representation of the sound and experience of the show and it succeeds.
I’m especially fond of the trunk song section at the end. You get to hear some alternate songs that didn’t wind up in the final version of the show.
“Be Safe, Be Good (For Rachel)” is a lovely song on its own, given more significance with that tribute. Rachel Rockwell was the director and choreographer for many of the Ride the Cyclone productions. Her contributions to the show helped shape it into what it is today. Sadly, she passed away in 2018 after the Seattle production at ACT. The song is a ballad about doing all the right things and “things not [happening] quite the way they should.”
The entire recording is a triumph. I can only hope more theatres will be willing to take a risk on this beautiful and bizarre little show when it’s safe to perform live again. Ride the Cyclone is on my bucket list of shows to music direct and I will proudly be sharing this album with anyone who can help make that happen.
Ride the Cylcone is streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Pandora.
