Ride The Cyclone - Musical

Ride The Cyclone opens after the accident. Six members of a school chamber choir are dead, and a mechanical fortune-telling machine has gathered them together to explain the terms: one of them can be returned to life, they will decide between themselves which, and each of them gets a song to make the case.

The cases are wildly uneven. One wants power. One wants, for once, to be looked at properly. One has no memory and no name and therefore no claim to make at all. The self-appointed leader of the group has a plan, a spreadsheet temperament and no idea how insufferable he is. What begins as a competition turns into a run of confessions, because the only way to argue for a life is to describe one.

It was written by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell, grew out of a small production far from any major theatre district, and built its following largely through its cast recording rather than through a long commercial run. It has been revived steadily since, often by companies looking for something for young performers that refuses to talk down to them.

The score changes shape with every character - ballad, electro-pop, cabaret, a folk number in another language - so the piece works as a set of very different numbers held together by one premise. It is funny in a bleak, entirely unembarrassed way, and then it stops being funny with no warning whatsoever.

It has picked up an unusually devoted audience among teenagers and among people who were teenagers when they found it. Live, the fortune-teller and the tonal switches work far better in a room, where an audience can feel the thing turn underneath them.