Ride The Cyclone - Glee meets Frankenstein meets A Chorus Line

Coming soon to a theatre near you - a new Canadian musical about six teenagers killed in a roller coaster tragedy in small-town Saskatchewan! Atomic Vaudeville brings a revamped version of Ride The Cyclone to the Arts Club Granville Island Stage under the auspices of the PuSh Festival. It's the second stop on a major Western Canadian tour from Calgary to Vancouver to Edmonton to Winnipeg to Saskatoon to Nanaimo. Not too shabby for a recent group of mostly UVIC grads led by Jacob Richmond (writer/director/music/lyrics), Britt Small (director), Brooke Maxwell (music/lyrics/music director) and Treena Stubel (choreography/staging).

In point of fact, the show is impressive. Shiny, even. The concept is intriguing, the set is all creepy and edgy, the rat band rocks out, the costumes are bang-on and the performances are uniformly strong (though Sarah Jane Pelzer's Jane Doe does boast the best pipes). On opening night, the audience clapped, laughed and even stood at the end of the show.

So why did it leave me so damn cold?

Ride The Cyclone sets up a high-stakes game led by fortune-teller Karnak who has the gift of predicting the hour of one's death. A primitive midway robot whose own time has come (death by nearby rat gnawing through electric cable), Karnak resurrects six dead teenagers of the Saint Cassian Catholic school choir who died too soon in the small teeny-tiny rural town of Uranium, Saskatchewan. He invites all six to tell their stories in song and once told, the dead teenagers must unanimously choose which one of the unfortunate sextet may come back to glorious life.

Sounds like a thrilling premise, right?

And it should be. But the relationships between the teenagers are superficial. And there is an unresolved sub-plot around a character called Jane Doe (who lost her head in the accident)... she can't remember who she is and neither can any of the others. If the crux of Karnak's game is who gets to go back to the real world, none of the characters really seem keen to play. They aren't fighting hard for their second chance at life. They can barely even bother to vote for someone who is eligible to win the game (one votes for Spiderman). More or less, they seem happy dead together - why are we supposed to care WHO gets resurrected?

Karnak notes at the top of the show that he is commenting on a lost generation. Well, what about it? The characters don't seem to be particularly relevant to the early 21st century - rather, it seems to be a timeless story of random youth. There's the popular, driven girl. And the fat best friend girl. And the gay male teenager. And the pitiable disabled kid. And the new kid in town (who happens to be a foreigner from the Ukraine adopted by a Saskatchewan family). And the girl with no past who carries a doll with no head. None of these characters seem to have much to live for.

And even weirder... if these kids were really from small-town Saskatchewan, they would know each other inside, out and backwards. Most would have gone to kindergarten together! They would have friendships and relationships with each other. They might backstab the kid everyone didn't like. Gang up on each other. Instead, it's like a group of kids from an urban high school of 1,000 students died in a plane accident and met up in the afterlife. Weird.

In the final analysis, Ride The Cyclone did not make me root for any of these characters. I didn't care who came back to life - I was more sorry that Karnak was facing death by rat. But don't take my word for it, because I'm clearly in the minority here. Go see it and make up your own mind.