NEW YORK _ Few musicals have been inspired by accidents that killed teenagers. Even fewer use a coin-operated fortune teller as their sardonic narrator, a mechanical voice that recounts the fate of a girl, decapitated and thus eternally anonymous, found by the side of the track.
But "Ride the Cyclone," the dark but perversely lovable little tuner that takes off from the night a roller coaster spilled its perky but ill-fated Saskatchewan riders, arrived off-Broadway recently as a charming oddity from the Chicago with a conceit that, depending on whether or not you can stomach the premise, either compels or repels.
Penned by the Canadian team of Brooke Maxwell and Jacob Richmond, "Ride the Cyclone" is a work at once macabre and sweet, melancholy and affirmative, merciless and deeply compassionate.
Its appeal, at least in part, is not disconnected from that which causes a gaper's block. But its structure _ wherein the dead teens all make their case to live again _ reveals a show trading on our desire for immortality. The emotional heft comes near the end of a 90-minute show that spent a great deal of time parodying teen archetypes, exploding youthful cruelty and poking fun at an achievement culture that tends not to help you when you dead.
Most of the original Chicago Shakespeare Theater production team is intact, including the director, Rachel Rockwell, the youthful star Tiffany Tatreau (who finally and deservedly got the role she played in Chicago only at the last minute), Emily Rohm (who plays the Jane Doe teen) Karl Hamilton (hidden inside the Amazing Karnak), Lillian Castillo and Kholby Wardell, a provincial gay teen with Parisian dreams. The new performers _ Alex Wyse as Ricky, Gus Halper as the Ukrainian emigre rapper Misha _ are both excellent.
Many careers are likely to prosper _ the terrific Tatreau, who plays Ocean O'Connell Rosenberg, class overachiever, is relentlessly focused and consumed by this character. She'll get some notice. So, I suspect, will Rohm, whose formidable performance is a great creepy pleasure, anchored by stellar vocals.
"Ride the Cyclone" felt a tad tenser, slower and less certain of itself at the MCC Theater than had been the case in Chicago _ the performances on opening night did not entirely capture the requisite blend of the strange and the deeply intimate. The score revealed itself to be in need of couple more songs. But this is not uncommon when productions move into the glare of New York; this is a show that will need young audiences in order to thrive. And it must project total comfort its own charred skin.
Whether or not it can find a crowd who willingly goes to horror at the Multiplex _ and respond to the richer emotional experience offered here _ will be the determinant of how many repeat rides are granted. But there's no other show in town even remotely like this one.
