Acting Up Stage Company

Toronto critics are raving about Ride The Cyclone.

Take a look at what they are saying!

The Toronto Star (Richard Ouzounian)

**** (out of 4)

“Stop waiting for the next big thing, Toronto, because it’s finally here.

Ride the Cyclone, which opened at Theatre Passe Muraille Monday night is not only as good as all the advance hype would lead you to believe, but it’s the most awe-inspiring, truly entertaining, heart-tugging, toe-tapping musical I’ve seen in years.

It may not sound like the premise on which musical theatre dreams are built, but believe me, it is.”

Read the full review>>

The Globe and Mail (Kelly Nestruck)

**** (out of 4)

“My love for it is beginning to exceed the bounds of critical propriety. Like other early adopters, I’ve grown so attached to the quirky characters Richmond and Maxwell have created, it almost feels as if they’re my children too – and I just want them to go out and conquer the world.”

“This is a show where you don’t want to miss a word.”

Read the full review>>

The Toronto Sun (John Coulbourn)

“Take this ride over and over again.”

Read the full review>>

NOW Magazine (Glenn Sumi)

NNNN (out of 5)

“Ride The Cyclone lights up the Passe Muraille Mainspace, and the local theatre scene, like a crazy carnival.”

“This production by Atomic Vaudeville, TPM and Acting Up is an outrageously fun show performed by young artists you’ll be hearing lots about in years to come.”

Read the full review>>

The National Post (Robert Cushman)

“Puts bigger shows to shame.”

“It’s already a super hit and on its way to becoming a cult. Or maybe vice versa.”

Read the full review>>

The Torontoist (Carly Maga)

***** (out of 5)

“Not everyone is a “theatre person,” even fewer consider themselves a “musical theatre person,” but really you just have to be a “person” to enjoy this undeniably strange yet completely endearing concert from six deceased choir kids from Uranium, Saskatchewan.”

“If there is one show to say you “saw it when…,” it’s Ride the Cyclone. So skip the ring toss and the deep-fried butter, and get in line now for this roller coaster of a show.”

Read the full review>>

The Slotkin Review (Lynn Slotkin)

“Ride The Cylone is a blast. It’s a total blending of a hugely creative story, an interesting mix of musical genres, lyrics that dazzle with their wit and irony, and a strong cast that can do everything from sing, dance and act.”

“The result is a raucous, lively, tongue-in-cheek hilarious show. I want to see more of Atomic Vaudeville and I want to see it soon.”

Read the full review>>

Fab Magazine (Drew Rowsome)

“Ride the Cyclone is probably review-proof. Only a few minutes in, when the fortune-telling puppet Karnak’s deep mysterious tones flood the theatre with anticipation and hilarity, any pretense of doing anything other than surrendering to the ride becomes impossible. And what a ride it is.”

“If you can get a ticket, go. Surrendering to Ride the Cyclone is like taking a roller coaster ride, with all the twists, turns and sudden veers into unexpected places. And the end effect is just as exhilarating — a shot of adrenaline that sticks around long after the neon Cyclone sign blinks into blackness.”

Read the full review>>

Emerging Arts Productions

“Ride the Cyclone is one of the most memorable Canadian musical creations we’ve seen.”

Read the full review>>

Yet another rave for Ride The Cyclone from Lynn Slotkin:

Read the full review here>>

Review: RIDE THE CYCLONE

by Lynn on November 16, 2011

RIDE THE CYLCONE is a blast.

It’s a total blending of a hugely creative story, an interesting mix of musical genres, lyrics that dazzle with their wit and irony, and a strong cast that can do everything from sing, dance and act.

The show is produced by Atomic Vaudeville, an accomplished theatre company from Victoria, BC.—not a place one thinks of as the home of such a wildly creative group. We better pay attention from now on.

The story is about six young teenagers, all of whom sang in the high school choir and all of whom died one day when an amusement park ride named the Cyclone, malfunctioned.

The narrator of the story is the fortune telling machine at the amusement park. The machine’s claim to fame is that it can foretell when a person is going to die. In a monotone but droll delivery, the machine introduces each teen who then tells us about him/herself. The teen sings, dances, and tells us what’s going on in his/her word.

One teen had it particularly hard because she was decapitated in the accident and no one can actually say who she is. She’s called Jane Doe. There is the overachieving but unhappy Ocean Rosenberg; the oversexed Misha Bachinsky from Ukraine; Constance Blackwood, overweight, outwardly sweet and shy but inwardly raging and angry; Ricky Potts, slight build who dreams of being a rocket man of sorts; and Joel Gruber, gay and sophisticated.

The music is an eclectic mix of genres from hip hop to pop, rock, almost opera and funk, to name a few. Each song expresses the inner most thoughts of the teenager(s) singing them. And each song is hilarious in its own way.

The writing reveals a sharp wit; an inventive way of creating the story and an off balanced way of looking at the characters.

Jacob Richmond is a multi-talented creator. He co-created Atomic Vaudeville in 2004 with Britt Small; wrote the book of RIDE THE CYCLONE; co-wrote the music and lyrics; and co-directed the show with Britt Small.

The direction is clean, focused, clear and uses the stage to great advantage. The cast is exemplary. They all seem to have trained singing voices, many are exceptional; they all dance with style; and they all know how to keep that level of seriousness so important in comedy.

The result is a raucous, lively, tongue-in-cheek hilarious show. I want to see more of Atomic Vaudeville and I want to see it soon.

RIDE THE CYCLONE plays at Theatre Passe Muraille until December 3.

The Toronto Star just gave our production of Ride The Cyclone an unqualified rave!

Read the full review here >>

**** (out of 4)

By Jacob Richmond & Brooke Maxwell. Directed by Richmond & Britt Small. Until Dec. 3 at Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave. 416-504-7529 or artsboxoffice.ca

Stop waiting for the next big thing, Toronto, because it’s finally here.

Ride the Cyclone, which opened at Theatre Passe Muraille Monday night is not only as good as all the advance hype would lead you to believe, but it’s the most awe-inspiring, truly entertaining, heart-tugging, toe-tapping musical I’ve seen in years.

It may not sound like the premise on which musical theatre dreams are built, but believe me, it is.

A high school chamber choir from Uranium City dies in a freak accident on roller coaster called The Cyclone. Only they get to come back from the dead to perform a final concert.

Yeah, it is the anti-Glee. Real emotions keep popping through synthetic songs and a dark cloud of mortality hanging over it all instead of a mirror ball (although one appears in the final scene, just to let you know that they can!).

No autotune for this killer cast — all their singing, like their acting, is straight from the heart.

Only an idiot could play favourites here because they’re all great. Kholby Wardell is the flashiest one, playing Noel Gruber, the only gay kid in town, who laments the fact he died “without seeing Paris or kissing another man,” but he makes up for it in a French cabaret send-up that’s devastating and sexy at the same time.

Rielle Braid is the born-bossy one, Ocean Rosenberg, with a Jewish father, a bitch Irish mother, and a passion for Karl Marx. All these conflicting influences wind up destroying her at a debate tournament in a song as hilarious as it is cynical.

Another showstopper is Ricky Potts, the geek who’s rubber limbs and self-mocking smile serve him well when he dresses up in silver spandex to play the new superhero, Bachelor Man.

Matthew Coulson has an amazing combination of agility and brute force as the Ukranian immigrant kid; Misha Bachinsky whose two loves are Gangsta Rap and Russian ballet; Sarah Pelzer’s empty-eyed agony will slay you as Jane Doe, the anonymous victim of the accident; and Kelly Hudson brings it all home as Constance Blackwood, the happy chubby girl who finds out too late how sweet her life really was in a tumultuous gospel number.

The cast are brilliant, but the real geniuses are Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell who wrote this astonishing piece.

Richmond’s book and lyrics know just how to cut deeply with the deftest stroke (“They came from Seoul to a city that had none”), while Maxwell’s music is incredibly artful, co-opting traditional forms without ever descending into pastiche and uniting them with a contemporary sound.

Ultimately this is a sad story, about a generation with no place to go — nowhere for their dreams to become reality; a group who are maybe better off dying in their prime, before they can get disillusioned.

Thanks to Andy McKim at Theatre Passe Muraille and Mitchell Marcus from Acting Up Stage Company for guiding this gem to us.

Ride the Cyclone. I promise you’ll never forget it.

What does Fab Magazine have to say about Ride The Cyclone?

“Sheer theatrical magic - it is astounding what can be conjured up with lights, enthusiasm and a cast that seems game for anything - but it would be a shame to spoil the surprise of any of them. If you can get a ticket, go. Surrendering to Ride The Cyclone is similar to a roller coaster ride with all the twists, turns and sudden veering into unexpected places. And the end effect is just as exhilarating - a shot of adrenaline that sticks around long after the neon Cyclone sign blinks into blackness.”

Read the full review >>

Next gay review: Ride the Cyclone
11.15.2011
Drew Rowsome

Ride the Cyclone is probably review-proof. Only a few minutes in, when the fortune-telling puppet Karnak’s deep mysterious tones flood the theatre with anticipation and hilarity, any pretense of doing anything other than surrendering to the ride becomes impossible. And what a ride it is.

The plot (the teenaged members of a chamber choir from Uranium City, Saskatchewan, die in a roller coaster accident, and Karnak gives them the opportunity to give the final performances they always dreamed of) is a gimmick of a thread, but the jewels strung along it add up to a simple but devastating conclusion. Each character gets a monologue followed by a showstopping number — and each number tops the last in its emotional resonance. The performers are uniformly talented and all are ear-catching singers, but not for a second did the audience have time to admire the finesse on display — the characters are too real and involving. And while everyone shines individually, it is the cohesiveness of the ensemble that gives Ride the Cyclone such impact.

Kholby Wardell is up first as Noel Gruber, the only gay teenager in Uranium City. Gruber’s enactment of his sordid fantasies and dreams shatters every gay stereotype while revelling in gay fantasies and commenting on the hazards of our diva-worshipping culture. It is sheer brilliance and utterly hilarious. That may be Ride the Cyclone’s biggest strength: it is packed with grand ideas and twisting emotions yet is consistently laugh-out-loud funny. As Hank Pine — set designer, bass player and the thespian who portrays Virgil, the giant rat — says in fab’s preview article (http://fabmagazine.com/Story/frank-hank), “It’s actually funny, as opposed to ‘ho ho ho — that’s funny.’ In bigger productions people pull their punches, but not in Ride the Cyclone. It’s nasty, it’s hilarious and I think people like that. We expected people to be offended, but we play to even old people and they dig it.”

For once a giant rat is telling the truth: the jokes and one-liners in Ride the Cyclone pay off in a big way because they are honest, occasionally “nasty,” and impossible not to apply to one’s own life. During a gorgeous sequence in which the immigrant aspiring rapper/ballet dancer (don’t ask, just enjoy) expresses his heartache for his internet girlfriend, one poor woman in the front row could not contain her peals of laughter — Ride the Cyclone digs under the audience’s skin, but it’s impossible to predict who will be triggered where.

There are many more moments of sheer theatrical magic — it is astounding what can be conjured up with lights, enthusiasm and a cast that seems game for anything — but it would be a shame to spoil the surprise of any of them. If you can get a ticket, go. Surrendering to Ride the Cyclone is like taking a roller coaster ride, with all the twists, turns and sudden veers into unexpected places. And the end effect is just as exhilarating — a shot of adrenaline that sticks around long after the neon Cyclone sign blinks into blackness.

And as a side note: the curtain call reveals that the giant rat wasn’t lying about his ridiculously good looks, either.

Ride the Cyclone runs till Sat, Dec 3 at Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave. passemuraille.on.ca

Another great review for Ride The Cyclone from The Toronto Sun:

“Take this Ride over and over”

Read the full review here >>

Take this Ride over and over
By John Coulbourn ,QMI Agency

4.0 stars

TORONTO - If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a piece of musical theatre fluff like Forever Plaid collided head on with a darker version of Glee, book a ticket to Ride the Cyclone.

That’s the name of a new show produced from Atomic Vaudeville, a company that in periodic forays from its British Columbia home base charmed us with memorable and wildly inventive works like Legoland, which delighted in a brief run in the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace a few years ago.

Now, AV’s movin’ on up, strutting its stuff on TPM’s mainstage in their latest and already highly pedigreed romp, the aforementioned Ride the Cyclone, presented by TPM in collaboration with Acting Up Stage Company.

Set in a nether-world combining elements of a dusty midway warehouse with the smoking brimstone of the afterlife, it reunites the members of Uranium City’s teenage chamber choir — all killed when a roller coaster called The Cyclone went off the rails — for one final hometown performance.

On certain levels, it bears more than passing resemblance, plot-wise, at least, to Forever Plaid, which reunited the deceased members of a ’60s boy band — killed en route to their first gig — for a posthumous opportunity to give the concert they never gave.

But where Plaid represented one of the first charming trickles in what was destined to become a flood of jukebox musicals, all recycling old music, Cyclone boasts a whole bouquet of original tunes, which pretty much cover the waterfront when it comes to style and all the handiwork of composer Brooke Maxwell and playwright Jacob Richmond, who both share the credit for the lyrics.

Where Plaid offered its protagonists a collective vocal opportunity, Cyclone goes all psy-clone-logical, allowing each of the six dearly departed choir members an opportunity to explore his or her innermost longings before the plug is pulled on Karnak, the old carny soothsayer who brings them back to life.

So, young Noel Gruber (played by Kholby Wardell), who died knowing he was gay without ever having a chance be gay, is given a chance to get in touch with his feminine side, at the same time as Ricky Potts (Elliott Loran), a comic-book geek, gets to explore his hyper-masculinity as an otherworldly superhero.

And while the self-centred Ocean Rosenberg (Rielle Braid) gets to settle a few scores, outsiders Misha Bachinsky (Matthew Coulson) and Constance Blackwood (Kelly Hudson) finally have a chance to have their say too.

Even Jane Doe (Sarah Pelzer), found sans head in the post accident-carnage, gets a chance for a memorable solo turn.

With castmates providing dramatic back-up, they each enjoy their moment in the post-Cyclone sun, with the multi-talented Loran also doing double duty at the keyboard. He also proves a good eye behind a video camera, providing further excitement to a low-budget, hi-tech set design created by Hank Pine and James Insell, the latter charged with bringing Karnak to life.

All of this teenaged soul-searching puts one in mind of Glee, but while there are certainly Glee-ful elements at play here, it’s more like watching a negative instead of a film, as co-directors Richmond and Britt Small cultivate Glee’s preciousness while cleaving to a darker, even more cynically adult sensibility.

It’s the kind of theatre that aims to keep its audience in the theatre instead of carrying us away — truly impressive work for all that it never shakes its louche post-Brechtian theatricality long enough to really soar.