The actors do a great job of portraying the differing characters, supported by the different styles of music.
It almost feels like listening to a podcast musical and getting the full experience instead of simply a cast recording.
“And that, my friends, is a mater class in how to upcharge.”īecause of the use of Karnak’s narration, the show can be followed in a very clever way.Īdditionally, the recording uses sound effects that would not typically be used in a live theatrical performance to expertly create an ambience. “This second movement of this section won’t make a lick of sense until you see it live,” he said at one point before a particularly weird sequence of songs. The Amazing Karnak, voiced in the album by Richmond himself, breaks the fourth wall between tracks to give humorously in-character insight on the action.
In fact, it changes some aspects to make it fit even better to the format. The cast recording does an excellent job of capturing the show. This occurs all while competing against the others for the chance to live again. Through the concert, they aim to express in their own unique ways who they were, who they hoped they could be, and how they saw their life stuck in the same small town. The Amazing Karnak, gifted with the ability to predict the life and death of everyone he encountered is filled with guilt for not warning the children ahead of time, and shares that he has the power to bring one and only one of them back to life.Īfter Karnak’s offer, the show follows the choir’s strange celebration of hope and life as they perform one final concert. The six find themselves in an abandoned warehouse, greeted by a mechanical fortune teller. Tragically, the axle of their cart breaks at the peak of the loop-de-loop, sending the choir flying through the air. The show centers around the six members of a high school choir who make the fatal mistake of taking a ride on The Cyclone, a rickety rollarcoaster. The album completed exceeded every expectation I may have had for it, showcasing a completely unique and memorable show.
While I was expecting the humor, darkness, and tounge-in-cheek feel, I was shocked to find that there were some parts of real sympathy for the characters and true emotion. “The show is after all a feel-good musical about untimely random death and loss,” he said in an interview with “I’ve had a great glut of untimely random deaths in my family, so my initial impulse for starting this show was to brighten myself up by writing a musical comedy about the subject.”
In a time where I am happy to recieve any new theater content, this news made me estatic, and I eagerly counted down the days until it dropped.Ĭo-creator Jacob Richmond thought the pandemic was the perfect time to release an album of his show, which is now avalible on Apple Music, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon Music, and other online streaming services. In mid-April, it was announced that, almost out of nowhere, Ride the Cyclone, a unique, lesser-known Canadian-born musical would be releasing a cast recording.