the voyage from which there is no return
by Douglas Messerli
Jacob Richman and Brooke Maxwell (libretto,
music, and lyrics), Rachel Rockwell (director) Ride the Cyclone / 2021
[filmed version of stage production]
This most strange theater musical of 2009 began
as a small cabaret-like production in Victoria, British Columbia at Metro
Studio Theatre. Directed by Britt Small with design by Hank Pine and James
Insell, it first consisted a cast of with slightly different characters than
the version staged later in the US. As the Wikipedia entry summarizes it, “cut
characters from earlier versions of the show include Trishna (played by Almeera
Jiwa), a shy nerdy girl next door who was into entomology and had a crush on
her neighbor Hank. Her character was changed to Astrid, Ocean's Nordic cousin
(played by Celine Stubel), in October 2009. Hank (played by Tim Johnson) was
repurposed into Astrid's boyfriend, and a character named Corey Ross (played by
Carey Wass) would have a rap battle against himself in the show. Astrid and
Corey's characters would later be cut to create Mischa Bachinski.”
Over
several productions in Toronto, on a tour of Canada, and later in Chicago, New
York Off-Broadway, Seattle, Atlanta, and later in Princeton, New Jersey, Arena
Stage in Washington, D.C., in Sydney, Buenos Aires, and in London’s Off-West
End, various characters, songs, and scenes were added and cut, sometimes in
quite drastic ways.
Yet the essential story about the members of
the St. Cassian High School chamber choir of Uranium City, Saskatchewan, who
have died on a faulty roller coaster ride called The Cyclone remained the same.
In the digitally filmed version right after the Atlanta production, the six
dead students tell their stories to a mechanical fortune teller who himself is
killed off by a wire-eating rat who plays the bass throughout. Before he
himself dies, Karnak the fortune teller promises to bring one of them back to
life which precipitates the cabaret-like songs and the procession of student
memories, differences, and friendships with one another and the dreary
community in which they lived.
The
original creators, Jacob Richman and Brooke Maxwell, working on a small stipend
from a Canadian Arts grant, had little experience with the genre that might be
described as Broadway musical theater, but created, instead, a work that
grabbed up elements of German cabaret, jazz, rock, jukebox music, hip-hop,
electro guitar, and traditional ballads and laments thrown together to create a
truly bizarre theater experience that scared off all but the most adventuresome
of directors, producers, and audiences, about which I will relate more specific
details in my discussion of the documentary about this film.
Nonetheless, from a small town Canadian company production this work went
on to play across Canada and the US and through the digital recording developed
a cult following not so very different, if not as large, as the film The
Rocky Horror Show Picture Show. Indeed, several critics have described it
as a kind of strange mix of Rocky Horror and Glee, with perhaps a
little of Our Town tossed in—all salted, I would argue, with a tribute
to Cats, a jigger of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, with
just a supçon of the art of Reginald Marsh (particular in such works as “Lucky
Daredevils. The Thrill of Death”). The work is also cousin to the numerous
versions of various local companies’ satiric spoofs of popular Broadway
musicals with, at least originally before it found producers and began to
chiseled-down into a saleable product, with a strong sense of improvisation at
its roots.
For
all that, one almost say because of that it is a true failure at its
pretense of being or even becoming a coherent musical work the way the genre
began to be defined after Richard Rodger’s and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!
Here the jerry-built story is most definitely secondary to the various songs,
all of them presented in different styles. Although it saves itself from any
true coherency by using the metaphor of a roller coaster out of control to
define its narrative thrust. And if nothing else we can praise this work has
not having been composed in the style of so many post-1970s Broadway hits in
which, as I’ve long argued, score their songs around a five-note modulation
that alters little except in its pitches of loud and soft. There is little
musical repetition here, as audiences need to prepare for a plethora of music
styles. And if the narrative is weak, its very invocation of dead children who
through their musical stories bring themselves back to life is so audacious
that it almost makes us believe there is a real spine to this cyclonic force of
utter chaos.
The individual in the process of blocked
maturation is at the heart of this show, youths that are filled with strange
ideas of how to behave and desires no child should admit to and probably
wouldn’t admit to if allowed to grow up.
We
begin with the Wizard of Oz of this adventure, the Amazing Karnak (Jacob
Richmond, who had previously been behind the puppet version of the same
character), an incredible automaton he is able to tell the future of everyone
he meets, and can predict the exact moment of a person’s death and the details
of their demise. But it quickly became clear to his carney operators that such
subjects do not combine well with children and popcorn, and his setting was
altered to the “Family Fun Novelty Mode.” He still has the power to alter the
future except that soon he will also die since a rat, who he had named Virgil
in memory of Dante’s guide through the underworld, is chewing through his power
cable will very soon bite down on 200 volts of electricity, instantly killing
the both. Since “more base than death,” Virgil plays the bass guitar through
this extravaganza.
Karnak
was unable to warn these teenagers of their deaths, has now summoned their
spirits to take part in a kind of game show in which they demonstrate their
personalities, competing for a chance to return to life. “The one who wants to
win it the most shall redeem the loser in order to complete the whole,” quotes
Karnack in yet another of his prophetic oracles.
The students must vote for the winner, a
problem since they all have grown up with one another, except for the
mysterious sixth victim which Karnack introduces, named by the coroner was Jane
Doe (performed by Emily Rohm). Her body in a Cassian choir uniform was found
without a head and no family member has come to claim her. Even Karnak, who
never read her fortune, does know who she is. In this version of the
production, she is dressed with head of a doll which she carries around with
her, her black eyes staring out emptily and her head jumping at spurts like
that of a wind-up doll.
Ocean could be calling up the ghost of Tracy Flick in her song “What the
World Needs,” in which she argues that, particularly given the failures of the
other Uranium City teens, the physically challenged Ricky Potts, the gay boy Noel
Gruber, the macho rap singer Ukrainian Mischa
Bachinski, and even her lower class Hispanic black friend Constance
Blackwood—to say nothing of the headless demon Jane Doe—that everyone falls
short compared with her since she has the highest chance of succeeding in the
world.
When
Karnak remembers to tell her that the one who lives will be chosen by her or
his peers, she quickly attempts to change her tune to “I Love You Guys”—in
which she even draws upon Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to prove her
point—without convincing anyone of her love, except perhaps for Charlotte, the
nicest girl in her class.
The only gay boy in his small town, Noel Guber
(Kholby Wardell, the only cast member from the original Canadian company) has
grown up feeling separate and apart, while forced to work at Taco Bell. In his
mind, however, he is a romantic, as he declares in “That Fucked Up Girl (Noel’s
Lament)” in which he imagines himself as a character named Monique Gibeau, a
figure inspired from his witnessing Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel,
who has sex with every man, is betrayed, becomes an alcoholic, and dies of typhoid
fever.
Stripping off his Cassian choir clothes under which he is wearing black
lingerie, he quickly puts on a Louise Brooks-like wig, while slipping on high
heels over his ragged fishnet stockings, upon which he sings:
“A hooker with a heart of black charcoal
I write poems to burn by firelight
Drink champagne and guzzle gin
Good girls call me “the Town Bicycle”
Don’t knock it ‘til you’re tried my life of
sin.
“Oh, Claude, my pimp, knows never mess with me
Last prick did that faded quick to black
I have no idea where to find him, officers
But if you do, please mention that I’d
Like to have returned the pretty knife
That I stuck ten times in his back!
(taking a couple puffs of a cigar, he
continues)
“For I sing songs until the break of dawn
I embrace a new man every night
My life’s one never-ending carnival
(with the chorus) A whirl of boozy-floozy
flashing light
(alone) I want to be that fucked up girl.”
At one point Noel and Misha dance a sort of
tango that ends in a long male-on-male kiss, shocking Ocean, who perceives it
as obscene. When Ocean demands to know what is the lesson of his song (not
really a lament but a ballad), he proclaims that there is no lesson; the song
has no moral. Over Karnak’s attempts to quite her, Ocean sings yet another
song, “Every Story’s Got a Lesson,” engaging Constance to perform an anti-drug
improv PSA test, although by this time Constance has basically turned to humor
in her attempts to keep in the good graces of “her dear friend.”
Up
next is Mischa Bachinski (Chaz Duffy), a child adopted from Ukraine after his
mother died from radiation poisoning while involved with the “clean up” of the
Chernobyl Nuclear Reaction meltdown. In order find an immediate home for him,
Mischa’s mother lied, presenting him as a potty-trained two-year old; his new
Canadian parents, upon perceiving him as a violent, heavy drinking teenager,
refused to communicate with him, locking him away in the basement.
If Noel is an imaginary romanticist, a kind
of decadent embodiment of love, Mischa is very much a macho romantic, bound in
a coat of anger which he dispels through his “self-aggrandizing, quite
commercial version of hip-hop which he posts to YouTube. But after he explodes
is a brief gangsta rap act, we comprehend his real passion in an online ballad
of his imaginary Ukrainian fiancée, Talia, who he’s met on his site. By the
time he’s done, he’s in tears, comforted in kind by Noel, who has performed as
he lover in his spiel.
Although Mischa is not my favorite of these
figures, I do have to say that his song to Thalia is one of the most tuneful
works in the musical, and Duffy has one of the best voices of the cast.
Ocean gets her word in after this performance as well, declaring it a
medley, and continuing to dominate the little time they have to come to their
decision. Noel declares finally that he would never vote for Ocean, while
Mischa casts his vote for Noel, and Noel for Mischa, which further infuriates
the forever logical Ocean who attempts to explain to them that they simply
cancel one another out. But in railing behavior, Karnak suddenly fines her
minus 10 points on account of being a “spielverderber,” the German word for
“party spoiler.” Yet Karnak, also recognizing that a party spoiler in the
context of German history might be a good thing, just as suddenly rewards her
plus ten points, evening out her bad behavior with the possible good, which
further angers Ocean who argues that everything has become random and
accidental.
But Ricky Potts, explaining an aspect of chaos theory argues that there
is no such thing as accidents, proceeding to explain his complex thinking while
presenting his version of himself.
Ricky
is a character close to author Brooke Maxwell’s heart, based vaguely on his
friend who when he began work on the musical was diagnosed with Lou Gerig’s
Disease, clinically known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Later,
beginning with the show’s run at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton and in the
Washington, D.C. Arena Stage production of 2023 the role which is played by a
wheel-chair bound actor, Pott’s role becomes far more complex and in the end,
in part because of the reaction of cult followers will cause a radical change
in the production. Again, I’ll save that discussion for my essay on the
documentary.
At
the point of the Atlanta production, Ricky has been transformed from an almost
mute character who performed mostly on a keyboard instrument throughout the
production in the early Canada days, by this point threw away his crutches
early on in the musical, realizing that he did not need them in death.
Performed by Scott Redmond at this point, the character had been transformed
from a figure with a degenerative illness into a child who, because of the
trauma of witnessing his Pentecostal preacher father killed by their pet viper,
Jo-Jo, had become nearly mute.
Inwardly this brilliant young man creates a
complex fantasy world for himself, imagining that he has been sent on an
intergalactic voyage to help save a race of sentient, anthropomorphic cat women
from a distant planet about which he sings in the song “Space Age Bachelor Man,”
in which he first indicates his sense of being unable to live up to the
requirements of saving an universe, but which ends with a statement about love
in general, demanding we take care of each other, “all colors, creeds, sexual
needs,” inciting us to “live and let live, love and love.” In some earlier
versions, Ricky, perhaps because of the remnants of his former degenerative
condition, cedes his chance of being resurrected. Supposedly by the Off-Broadway,
Seattle, and Atlanta performances that concession had been erased, but in the
musical version I saw he finally, very quietly, after having brought peace
through love to the universe, also concedes. As he puts it, “There is only one
commandment in the Bachelor Man Bible: don’t be a dick.” Karnak assures him,
however, that his vote still counts.
Misha recognizes his as being “so awesome in the afterlife,” but Ricky
argues that he’s the same person he always was, except that no one would ever
listen to him in the everyday world in which they lived. What we are beginning
to perceive is that this is true for almost all the figures, except perhaps for
Ocean, whose views were always loud, up front, and crystal clear.
But
in the midst of the group’s discovery of Ricky Jane Doe once more calls out in
Emily Rohm’s operatic voice. Jane, who seems to have had not secret dreams or
fantasies sings in “The Ballad of Jane Doe” (which for me calls up the Douglas
Moore / John Latouche opera The Ballad of Baby Doe). Only just as Noel’s
“lament” was really a ballad, so is Jane’s “ballad,” actually a lament.
No
one seems to remember Jane, and despite the fact that her body was dressed in
the St. Cassian choir uniform, some claim she was never even a member of the
group. The only one who might have know about here was the choir director who
died of the stress over his singer’s accident later that same day. In her
glorious soprano voice, Jane sings:
“Some might say we're released
Pushing daisies, deceased
But we all know the worms must be fed
There's just one lingering fear
Oh my soul, is it here?
Or is it rotting somewhere with my head?
Oh, no soul, and no name
And no story, what a shame
Cruel existence was only a sham
Oh, Saint Peter, let me in
You must know where I've been
Won't you tell me at last who I am?
And from the ground beneath my feet
I hear the anguish of the street
(Choir) A choir never complete
And like an old forgotten tune
A song that no one knows
Forgot how it goes
Just John and me
Forever eternally, Jane Doe
Jane’s ballad, sung almost to the rhythm of a carnival calliope, is the
most complex song, in many respects, of the entire work, and her “dance” via a
gurney attached to a harness in which she is embedded sends her spinning
throughout space, at moments forcing the actor to sing while hanging head-down
in space. What begin with a simple scene of umbrellas became a truly surreal
voyage through space, Jane representing the true force of the cyclone which
hurled her and the others into death, with only her losing part of her body
along with her identity.
Upon hearing of her plight, the choir
members attempt to gather to sing happy birthday to her, but quickly realize
that without a real name the celebrations seems empty, so together they create
through improvisation “The New Birthday Song.”
Ricky, it is clear, bonds with Jane, just as Misha has with Noel, in
Ricky’s case because both he had Jane has not recognized in the lives. He
awards her one of the special names, Savannah, that he has been saving aside in
his life.
While it might seem that friends Constance and Ocean might also team up,
Ocean finally hurts the other girl deeply by her self-obsession, finally
leading her to punch the seemingly perfect person in the breast.
It
is finally time for “the nicest girl in the class” to reveal her naughty side, admitting
that just hours before the dreadful accident she had given up her virginity to
a 32-year-old carney worker in a port-o-potty, giving “it” up, she declares,
“just to get it out of the way.”
But
gradually she begins to reveal deeper reasons, including her long-standing
aversion to the notion that she is the nicest girl in town.
She
is a true native of Uranium City, her own family and been there since they
opened the mines, and they carry with a pride for their role of running a diner
in the city. Yet her high school experience has led her to question that pride,
and just before the cyclone derailment, she resented her parents and her life
destined to be lived out in the middle of nowhere.
As
they flew through the air, however, all the anger and frustrations fled, and
she suddenly came to a new appreciation of the small moments of joy and love in
her small town life, calling up the recognition that Emily Webb makes in her
one-day return to life in Our Town. In “Jawbreaker / Sugar Cloud” she
laments that it took such a horrific event such as the death by cyclone (also
calling up Dorothy’s voyage in The Wizard of Oz) to make her realize how
wonderful her life had really been.
Moved
by her friend’s song, Ocean apologizes to Constance, "as if seeing her
friend for the first time,” despite the fact that she is shocked by her sexual
behavior.
It is noteworthy that what we have just
seen, in part, was a battle royal between a realist view of the world and a
romantic one, imbued with fantasy and imagination. The males in this work all
seem to seek something beyond their own daily distressed lives, while the
females, both Ocean and Constance delight in the down-to-earth realities within
the boundaries of verifiable existence. True Ocean’s reality if very much one
in which she alone exists, but it is still a vision of everyday experience,
just as is Constance's late show wonderment of the workaday world inhabited by
her family. The males, moreover, have all suffered abuse and abandonment, have
been shunned and ignored by the society in which they exist. Their solution has
been to turn inward, to the alternate reality hidden in their heads. Only Jane
Doe, without a head or any seemingly human experience is connected to both
worlds, a desire to discover the “reality” of who and what she is while at the
same time able to experience the euphoria of an existence in which she floats
through the air, able to sing while floating upside down in space.
As if
the writers were suddenly now required to bring all their loose narrative
threads together, they let Karnak change the rules again. I’ll quote the final
paragraph of the rather coherently-written Wikipedia essay to summarize the
sudden onslaught of new information that the audience is asked to embrace to
the bring the work to its end:
“At last, it is time for the final vote.
Karnak suddenly changes the rules, telling Ocean that she alone will get the
deciding vote because she has the highest Grade Point Average. Having a crisis
of conscience, she refuses to vote for herself. Recalling Karnak's prophecy,
she realizes that Jane is the only one who doesn't have memories to take to the
afterlife with her. Ocean says that while the teenagers died young, they at
least had a life, admitting that she would ‘gladly take [her] seventeen years
over nothing.’ The choir support Ocean in her decision and send Jane to ‘The
Other Side.’ Karnak reveals her name to be Penny Lamb (a character in
Richmond's play Legoland). Whether she returns to life as Penny or
starts a new life is left ambiguous. A compilation of home movies of her new
life from youth to old age is played (‘It's Not a Game’). Virgil finally tears
through the rubber, killing himself and Karnak before the latter can give his
final piece of insight. As Karnak dies, he says the same fairground advertising
he told the teens before they rode The Cyclone: ‘Your lucky number is seven.
You will soar to great heights. Be sure to ride The Cyclone.’
Somewhere
outside of limbo, the remaining teens unite and sing an uplifting song (‘It's
Just a Ride’). The voice of Jane Doe echoes her opening song: ‘I know this
dream of life is never-ending / It goes around and 'round and 'round again...’
as the teens travel towards whatever comes next.”
So
ends one of the wackiest, yet emotionally moving, popular musical productions
ever brought to the stage. Given the vast number of rewritings, reprisals,
reincarnations, praise, and cultural attacks that this little hour and a half
theater work has evoked you might think it was a grand classic of major
critical substance. It isn’t. But somewhat like the Sondheim musical flop Merrily,
We Roll Along, this work has continued to intrigue theater goers, actors,
producers, and directors just enough to keep it alive. And like the Sondheim
musical, which begat the documentary film Best Worst Thing That Could Ever
Happen, so has Ride the Cyclone spawned ancillary film, Brandon
Henderson’s 2024 The Ballad of Ride the Cyclone or: The Making of a Cult
Musical You Know Nothing About Nothing About, which I discuss below.
Los Angeles, December 4-5, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(December 2025).
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