Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Cast recording from hit Ride the Cyclone musical to be released digitally

After years of anticipation and never-ending requests from diehard fans, the madcap cast recording of the Victoria-born song-and-dance spectacle Ride the Cyclone is coming to streaming platforms worldwide May 7.
TC_224328_web_ride_the_cyclone_cover.jpg
The soundtrack to Ride the Cyclone, an acclaimed off-Broadway musical written by the Victoria-based duo of Brooke Maxwell and Jacob Richmond, is being released today. GHOSTLIGHT RECORDS

After years of anticipation and never-ending requests from diehard fans, the madcap cast recording of the Victoria-born song-and-dance spectacle Ride the Cyclone is coming to streaming platforms worldwide May 7.

The soundtrack to the acclaimed off-Broadway musical written by the Victoria-based duo of Brooke Maxwell and Jacob Richmond is being distributed by Warner Music Group through Grammy Award-winning label Ghostlight Records, an imprint home to cast recordings for everything from The Book of Mormon to The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

The recording came to life under the direction of Maxwell and Richmond with a healthy contingent of musicians from Victoria, which is fitting. Ride the Cyclone, with book, music and lyrics from Maxwell and Richmond, had its world première in Victoria in 2008, with Atomic Vaudeville.

The show grew into one of the most successful Canadian-made musicals in history, with productions eventually moving from Victoria to Toronto to Chicago and New York, where it ran off-Broadway in 2016. It has also been staged in Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis in recent years.

It won awards and gained a substantial cult following, but the missing element was a cast recording — until now.

“We had talked about it for forever,” Maxwell said. “We’ve got these rabid fans asking for either the score or the soundtrack, as soon as possible, even in the early days. But to record an album, it’s not like you push a button and there it is. It’s a major process, as I found out. It’s a theatre production on its own.”

Ride the Cyclone: The Musical will be released in digital and streaming formats today, with a CD release to follow. Pre-orders for hard copies are being taken at the Ghostlight Records website, which will satisfy hard-core fans, Maxwell said. But he’s interested in seeing the response to the cast recording popping up in places like Spotify and Apple Music, with its stirring cover art from Butcher Billy, the Brazilian artist and graphic designer.

“I wrote the original music on a laptop on my home studio [in Victoria],” Maxwell said. “And it sounds awesome. But when you get it to the page, and want people to play it with all the things that make it smell funny and sound cool, that was always a challenge.”

Maxwell said he convinced executive producers Kevin McCollum and Morris Berchard — two Broadway veterans with decades of experience — to let him hire musicians from Victoria whom he could trust. Getting the sound just right on the cast recording was of the highest importance to Maxwell.

“I pushed to have it recorded here. I didn’t want to have to go to New York and get in with a bunch of musicians I don’t know, in a situation where I wouldn’t get to be the boss.”

Maxwell and veteran Victoria producer Joby Baker, who co-produced and engineered the recording, oversaw the pre-production process. The two synched recordings made in Victoria with remote recordings by cast members from the U.S. stage production, which took place in New York, Chicago, Nashville and Denver studios.

Added into the mix were contributions from more than a dozen Vancouver Island singers and musicians, including Richard Moody, Aaron Scoones, Kholby Wardell, Adam Dobres, Adrian Dolan, Nick La Riviere, Joey Smith and Kelby MacNayr, among others.

Maxwell and Baker each did a little bit of everything, from playing and producing to singing. It was an exhausting process, but a worthwhile one. “We could have done a [passable] album, just with my original backing tracks. But we upped it by getting these people, who added this fire of vitality, really made this music come alive.”

To pre-order the album, visit ghostlightrecords.com.

mdevlin@timescolonist.com.