May be London theater needs more quirky, sarcastic Canadians musicals about dead teenagers. A cult hit in North America, this small but darkly joyful 2009 work by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell depicts six Saskatchewan school choir children caught in limbo after being killed in a roller coaster crash while the Amazing Karnak fortune telling machine decides which of them can be brought back to life.
There's nothing special about it other than a series of sharp, witty songs in an impressive variety of genres that each character composes to justify their continued existence and is performed with norm-subverting gothic glee. The Final Destination film series is an obvious inspiration, as it features memorable fairground horrors pulled from countless other stories. Director and choreographer Lizzie G's production stutters during interludes but is otherwise executed with panache. This often causes laughter out loud.
It begins with a headless girl pushing a stroller and singing the wistful song “Dream of Life” as she slowly turns around on a stage marked with the signs of the Zodiac. It is framed by a curtained arch on a rusty carnival sign with starbursts, around which the name of the big bear, CYCLONE, is highlighted in broken letters shaped like light bulbs.
Above Karnak (Edward Wu), his angular bone structure, enhanced by robotic makeup, comes to life. He was originally programmed to predict death, but was switched to a nightmarish “family fun mode”. The rat that chewed through his main power cable would soon be the cause of his and his death. His final act will be to restore the life of one of the children; but not before seriously messing with their heads and revealing their true nature.
(Danny Caan)
Dressed in scruffy brown school uniforms, they are each represented by their zodiac sign, favorite fair ride, catchphrase (“Democracy rules!” comes first) and an unflattering childhood photo. Everyone presents one or more ironic pizza shows. Ocean Bailey Carson, the daughter of hippie Catholic-Jewish parents turned right-wing boss kid, gets things started by dissing her classmates in a hilarious school musical number. “I never learned to read, I’ll never reproduce, guaranteed straight to prison,” she brightly notes them one after another.
Noel (Damon Gould), the only gay man in their hometown of Uranium City, gets an accordion-led chanson in which he transforms into a consumptive interwar French prostitute inspired by Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. “The Ballad of Jane Doe” is a delightfully whimsical mix of operatic vocals and noisy piano, sung in part by Grace Galloway with a severed head floating above the body.
There's gangsta rap and Eastern European folk combined with impressive Cossack breakdancing moves from prominent Ukrainian adoptee Misha (Bartek Kraszewski). There's a disco-funk sex number where Jack Maverick's supposedly mute Ricky (the chorus is inclusive) reveals his fantasy life as an intergalactic cat-loving alien, with choreography centered on a scratching post topped with a glitter ball. Constance Wallflower (Robin Gilbertson) reveals that she lost her virginity to a carnival worker in a portable toilet a few hours before the accident, and then sings a sugary number called Sugarcloud, full of sweetness and light.
The characters are sassy and cartoonish, the choreography is delightfully messy, and the singing voices are strong across the board. And despite the script's deliberate crudeness and snarky put-downs—not to mention Karnak's chiding of Grace that not every story has a lesson—the show has a surprisingly gentle message: We should be ourselves and enjoy life, which, after all, is “just a ride.”
Recent visits to Southwark Playhouse Elephant have convinced me that it is a graveyard of new or new musicals, but Ride the Cyclone has changed my mind. It is the second work in Richmond and Maxwell's planned trilogy and is set in Uranium City, a real-life location that flourished in 1950s Saskatchewan after the discovery of radioactive athabascaite there, then collapsed after the mines closed in the 1980s. Now I really want to see the other two.
Southwark Playhouse Elephant – until January 10; southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
