Book, Music and Lyrics: Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell
Director: Lizzi Gee
There is an old parlour game in which everyone is given one minute to justify their life before the group must collectively decide who they would cast out of a hot air balloon to save the rest. Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell’s show Ride the Cyclone: The Musical, receiving its UK premiere at Southwark Playhouse, riffs on that same notion. However, in their 95-minute theatrical version, only one of the six teenagers killed in a fairground accident can return to life. Fantastically inventive in the telling, this particular thrill ride itself reaches a bumpy anticlimax.
Six very different members of the Saint Cassian Chamber Choir of Uranium City in 2009 must explain to The Amazing Karnak – a kind of purgatorial adjudicator – why the potential in their life is greater than any of the classmates, and Richmond and Maxwell’s musical is smart in making this about teenagers with big dreams who want to live rather than adults bragging about their successes and achievements. It also makes for a series of endearing if quirky songs as their contrasting personalities, interests and wild fantasies take the show in surprising directions and make it impossible for the audience to root for any one ‘winner.’
And who deserves to live is an emotive question, albeit one that gets rather lost in the exuberant liveliness of Ricky, Mischa, Noel, Constance, Ocean and Jane Doe’s stories. Even their songs rather forget the competition element, saying less about why they deserve to fulfil some stunted potential than just creating a really diverse bunch of kids all with wilder imaginations than you might expect from the dull, ordinary Canadian town that they come from. There’s a sweet message of a kind in that: everyone is extraordinary in their own way.
But Ride the Cyclone spends a little too long setting up the scenario, building to Constance’s (Robyn Gilbertson) beautifully staged but rather underwhelming finale solo Sugarcloud, suggesting her tale will eventually reveal more than it does. Likewise, Ocean’s (Baylie Carson) opener What the World Needs reduces her to a fairly typical smug mean girl who believes her grades make her better than everyone else, something the unfolding narrative gives her the opportunity to address, but compared to the more exciting lives beneath the uniforms of her fellow pupils, it makes for a pedestrian start.
All the stuff in the middle is filled with its own kind of joy as the story moves from Noel’s (Damon Gould) rather wonderful desire to be a Marlene Dietrich character in a seedy French club to Mischa’s (Bartek Kraszewski) hip hop online romance and Ricky’s (Jack Maverick) space ballad in which he becomes a disco god of the cat women. The creative team in this Southwark Playhouse production embraces the weird brilliance of it all, most notably Ryan Dawson-Light’s set and costumes. And the musical retains a masterstroke, a sombre operatic number for Jane Doe (Grace Galloway), the only character without a story to tell, who brings a sense of loss and darkness at just the right moment to counterbalance the glitzy dreams of her friends.
Ride the Cyclone is a lot of fun, packed with great ideas and hosted by a suitably animatronic Karnak played by Edward Wu (think the Zoltar fortune-telling machine from Big), but having set out to take the audience on the ride of their life, it doesn’t quite make it to the end of the tracks.
Runs until 10 January 2026
