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Ride the Cyclone ‘just plain delightful,’ New York Times critic says

Although the overall reviews are mixed, The New York Times loves the Victoria-grown musical Ride the Cyclone.
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Rdie the Cyclone composer Brooke Maxwell, left, with playwright Jacob Richmond.

Although the overall reviews are mixed, The New York Times loves the Victoria-grown musical Ride the Cyclone.

Times theatre critic Charles Isherwood on Wednesday described the off-Broadway black humour romp as “delightfully weird and just plain delightful.”

Ride the Cyclone opened that day following three weeks of previews at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in Manhattan’s West Village.

Isherwood wrote that the show provides “the kind of thrills we look for in all musical comedies.” He praised its “engaging and varied score, knocked out of the park by a superlative cast, and a supremely witty book.”

He concluded: “For a musical about dead teenagers, it’s high-spirited and just plain fun from start to finish — like an all-access pass to Disneyland.”

Other critics were less enthusiastic.

David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter described Ride the Cyclone as “more of a patchy diversion than a sustained thrill ride.”

Rooney portrayed the show as being “physically striking,” benefiting from director-choreographer Rachel Rockwell’s “gorgeous, ghoulish staging.” However, he was lukewarm about the score, suggesting it “lacks cohesion, mostly sounding like inferior versions of numbers you’ve heard before in more thoughtfully crafted shows.”

Newsday reviewer Linda Winer described Ride the Cyclone as a “goofy, extravagant, bad-taste musical comedy.

“And if you don’t think about the utter cruelty of the concept and the pasted-on smile-button conclusion, it may be altogether possible, oddly enough, to enjoy the audacious foolishness and admire the gung-ho excellence of cast and the campy, over-the-top staging,” she wrote.

“More of the time, however, I just couldn’t overlook the sadism behind the upbeat reach of a project that, clearly, yearns to be a grisly, fun-loving bonanza in the offbeat tradition of Little Shop of Horrors and Urinetown.”

Reporting for Vulture, an online site, Jesse Green wrote: “You get the feeling that the show, which was in development in Canada for years before getting its American première in 2015, has been rewritten so much that, like a corn dog, it has lost any sense of whatever it started out as.”

Created by Victoria playwright Jacob Richmond and composer Brooke Maxwell, Ride the Cylone is about Canadian teens who die in a freak roller-coaster accident and find themselves caught in a post-life limbo.

Produced by New York’s MCC Theatre, the show suffered a recent setback when cast member Taylor Louderman (subsequently replaced) left the show due to reported “creative differences.”

A Chicago production of Ride the Cyclone staged by Chicago Shakespeare Theatre a year ago drew more positive reviews. These included favourable write-ups from the Chicago Tribune, Time Out Chicago and Isherwood in the New York Times.

The original version of the show debuted at Victoria’s Metro Studio in 2009.