Douglas Messerli | Lost in Space: The Little Musical Still on the Road to Oz [Introduction]

LOST IN SPACE: THE LITTLE MUSICAL STILL ON THE ROAD TO OZ

As I observe below, Jacob Richman and Brooke Maxwell’s odd musical contribution named Ride the Cyclone began with a Canadian arts grant and a stay on a rather isolated island where Maxwell was running out of ideas. He’s lost a great many family members and friends recently, along with a friend revealing that he was suffering from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. How might he write a tribute to these deaths while still fitting the needs of the small theater company with which he was involved and had previously written a small production? Perhaps a volcano might explain why all these people died so closely in time, but then that would have involve hundreds of others, with a far greater cast than the little British Columbia theater for which he was writing. So perhaps a carney ride, a cyclone might crash with several students inside, all of them dying. But how to tell a story about dead people, not a very appealing subject even for his small loyal audiences? What he and fellow musician Jacob Richman finally came up with was perhaps even more bizarre, a story about the deaths of 5 St. Cassian Choir students from Uranium, Saskatchewan—his mythical but also real burned-out mining town where only a few families remained—that might still be oddly funny and even uplifting! Eventually titled Ride the Cyclone, it became a Victoria, British Columbia hit with no expectations of moving any further. Yet when the director of an experimental theater festival in Toronto, who’d seen the performance, invited them to perform it, how could he and his cast refuse the invitation? There it won the major award as the best production, and thus began, following a review from New York Times critic Charles Isherwood, it became a strange underground hit, eventually traveling throughout Canada before its US premiere in Chicago, New York Off-Broadway, Seattle, Atlanta, the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, Arena State in Washington D. C., Sydney, Buenos Aires, London’s Off-West End, Sweden, and numerous small amateur companies throughout the US.       

     Along its wandering route, a filmed musical version (which I review below) posted to YouTube found its way to the hearts of hundreds of YouTube and TikTok viewers creating a sort of cult audience who began taping imitations of certain of the works characters and joining with others online in celebration of the work the way young viewers of a previous generation had with another unorthodox theater work brought to film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Suddenly this little engine who thought it could had made a trip down the golden lane of theater production that demanded enormous changes and alterations to the characters and script. Eventually taken out of the creator’s hands by producers who had bought the rights, the work became something that began to transmute in a way that Richman and Maxwell no longer completely controlled.

     This musical which referenced dozens of other musicals and movies has never to date reached its Oz, but nonetheless, continues, sometimes without a head like one of its central characters, floating through a space where various witches, demanding it become something other than its oddball self to sell theater seats, knock of the door of its opportunities with the intention, so it seems, of sometimes crashing down through its fragile search of youth identity and love to leave it a cold expression of loss and anger.

     In the next couple of essays, in an essay-review of the filmed concept version of the musical and a documentary made in 2024 by Brendan Henderson, almost as amateur-based as the original work itself, I discuss what Ride the Cyclone is and consider what its chances are of every reaching the Oz of New York Broadway theater.

     The painting above by the American artist Reginald Marsh who throughout the 1920s and 1930s painted Coney Island beach scenes, popular vaudeville and burlesque venues, and the masses in general is titled “Lucky Daredevils. The Thrill of Death,” a work that might almost serve as a billboard advertisement for the Canadian musical, which also bears resemblance to the far more sophisticated experimental dramas of US playwright Len Jenkin’s plays of 1980s and 1990s with titles such as Limbo Tales (1980), Five of Us (1981), Dark Ride (1982), Pilgrims of the Night (1991), and Careless Love (1993). The relationship between these two other artists and Ride the Cyclone, in fact, is so intense I hope someone will take up the subject in a serious scholarly essay.

    In this instance, I have been drawn to work primarily by its inclusion, among the dead students, of the only gay boy in town, Noel Gruber and his growing relationship with the macho bad boy Mischa Bachinski in the limbo world of this drama.

 

Los Angeles, December 5, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).