On Stage: Performing Arts at our Oneonta Campuses by Rachel Frick Cardelle
A Musical That’s Gone Viral and the Messages It Carries
“Ride the Cyclone,” a darkly comedic, one-act musical written by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell and directed by Marc Shaw, comes to Hartwick’s Slade Theatre November 7–13. Written in 2008, the musical premiered in Canada at the Atomic Vaudeville Theatre Company in Victoria, British Columbia. Then, in 2022, it went viral on TikTok when song clips from the off-Broadway production began circulating. (If, like me, you don’t have a TikTok account, it’s a phone app that allows you to watch, create and post short-form videos. If you don’t have a TikTok account, it’s also pretty likely that, like me, you aren’t a Gen Z’er, since 60-80 percent of that generation in the U.S. use TikTok, which becomes important later in this article so hang tight!)
The show takes place in a dilapidated warehouse of an old amusement park, which, it turns out, is a place of limbo between life and death for six teens who have had a fatal accident on The Cyclone, a roller coaster at the park. At the start of the play the emcee of the whole show introduces itself: The Amazing Karnak, a mechanical fortune teller whose specialty is being able to predict the precise moment of a person’s death. The musical revolves around each of the six teens having an opportunity to explain to The Amazing Karnak why he or she should be the one person allowed to return to life.
When I sat down with some of the cast and crew, I began by asking Marc why he was drawn to this show. He was quick to attribute that to the Hartwick students themselves, as he said the first time he heard it (I’m guessing here that Marc does not have a TikTok account) was when he popped into a club meeting and students were listening to the soundtrack of the show. Sam Scott, one of the students in the show (who is also the scenic designer, graphic designer and technical assistant), remembered the night this happened, roughly two years ago.
