Ride the Cyclone
Jacob Richmond & Brooke Maxwell (Book, Music & Lyrics)
City Lights Theater Company
Dale Tanner & Javier de Guzman
Wild, weird, wacky, and most of all, wonderful are just some of the descriptors for City Lights Theatre Company’s summer-time offering, sure to be a sell-out hit for the next several weeks. Ride the Cyclone is Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell’s 2009 bizarre musical — now a cult and TicToc sensation — that begins with the tragic death of high school choir members on a faulty roller coaster called The Cyclone. Landing in an afterworld amusement park, a mechanical fortune teller offers just one of them a chance to return to life.
As each sings the reasons why they should be that lucky one, hilarity reigns supreme as fabulously voiced cast members sing the eclectic, genre-smashing songs that range from Broadway to folk, ballad, rap, R&B, synth-pop, and more. Combined with pull-out-all-the-stops direction by Kimberly Ridgeway, City Lights’ Ride the Cyclone is an outlandishly witty, thoroughly engaging, and in the end, heart-warming musical comedy about death and the hereafter.
Please continue to Talkin’Broadway for the rest of my review.
Rating: 5 E
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
Ride the Cyclone continues through August 23, 2026, in a ninety-minute (no intermission) production by City Lights Theater Company, , 529 S. 2nd Street, San Jose. Tickets are available online at www.cltc.org .
Photo Credit: Christian Pizzirani
Leave a Reply