Synopsis  
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Ride the Cyclone, a musical written by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell, tells the story of the members of the St.Cassian High School Choir of Uranium City, Saskatchewan. After a tragic accident on a roller coaster called “The Cyclone," the students die and wake up in limbo. There, they are greeted by the Amazing Karnak, a fortune teller automaton who reveals that the choir are in a game of life or death where in his last remaining moments of life, he can give one of them a second chance to live, and that they will each be competing to return to the land of the living.
The Choir Members 
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The choir consists of six students: Ocean O’Connell Rosenburg, an over-achiever who thrives off of academic success and competition; Noel Grueber, the only gay man in Uranium City who loves French New Wave cinema; Mishca Bachinski, a Ukrainian adoptee who loves hip hop and his internet fiance; Ricky Potts, a boy with a degenerative disease and a large imagination; Constance Blackwood, a sweet girl who has conflicting feelings towards her hometown; And finally, an unidentified decapitated body of the accident who in the play is simply called “Jane Doe.” 

​Overview
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The show then follows a wild, yet mildly entertaining celebration of hope and life as they perform one final concert. Each of them expresses 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. This occurs all while competing against the others for the chance to live again. While the plot may seem a bit derivative—reminiscent of a number of peppy musical comedies like “Glee”—the incredibly talented cast brings an uplifting breath of life not only through a dozen witty, energetic songs in a variety of styles and magnificent vocals, but in forging strongly etched characters out of these familiar teenage archetypes. It somehow manages to be extremely fun with dark comedy and just enough tragedy that is rendered cosmic and jaw-dropping by the spooky carnival atmosphere and a sassy philosophizing robot fortune teller. While the overall soundtrack is incredible (some of my all time favorites being “It’s Not a Game/ It’s Just a Ride”, “Space Age Bachelor Man”, “Talia”, and “What the World Needs”), I’lll be breaking down two in particular which represent the play’s main theme: At the end of the day, life is not a game to be won--but a ride to be enjoyed through all its ups and downs.
Noel's Lament
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Noel’s section of the musical was just so wonderful to watch. You can really tell that he’s the most artistic and passionate of the choir. Noel has always been very creatively expressive, acting out scenes from tragic French movies and dreaming of writing his own novel inspired by the genre. Yet he’s also a bit of a nihilist, as shown by the movie he references in his monologue before his lament, “The Blue Angel.” This is a film about the tragic transformation of a respectable professor to a circus clown and his descent into madness as the main character dies clutching the desk at which he once taught (honestly, I completely respect this man’s taste in storytelling). Noel expresses how his mother told him to blend in, which caused a lot of insecurity.​
 
​He says he was born in the wrong place and era. All he wanted was to live a life of his own filled with spontaneousness, passion and heartbreak. In his lament, he sings of how his life as a Taco Bell worker in Uranium City Mall was unsatisfactory to him and how he dreamed of being a femme female harlot in post war France by the name of Monique Gibeau. This name is actually an ironic one for Noel’s character. In Greek origins, Monique means “alone,” which could represent how in his fantasy, he dies alone but with a life he was content with; one with no regrets. Gibeau is more of a funny yet grim irony, as it seems to be based off of a fast food restaurant and roadside attraction in Montreal, Canada, The Gibeau Orange Julep. The fact that Noel worked at Taco Bell was a major reason as to why he was unsatisfied with his life and developed his inescapable feeling of entrapment. So his stage name having a food place in it, especially a Canadian food place, is pretty bleak.

Speaking of which, a lament (according to Oxford Languages), is a “passionate expression of grief and sorrow.” While Noel’s song is technically a lament as it is an expression of his grief towards the life he couldn’t live, it is more of a ballad. Which, again according to Oxford Languages, is a “poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas.” This is because he is telling the story of the person he felt he was born to be. Uranium was a small town, where Noel had to hide who he was in order to fit in, including his sexuality. He even says that the closest thing the town had to a major cultural event was when the seven eleven gave out three free slurpees a year. He also says (this broke my heart) “I wanted to feel, god damn it.” 
Noel wanted to be tragic because Uranium, apart from the fact that it was unlikely those who were born there would leave, was never that. It was incredibly boring and, presumably, homophobic. Noel wanted something that wasn’t lifeless, and so he found happiness in French New Wave cinema, a movement which gave directors full creative control of their work, allowing them to diverge from the conventional “Old Hollywood” style of films in favor of improvisational, existential storytelling. Uranium never had much of a culture, and Noel found a love for French culture. Uranium was uneventful, and what is more eventful than trauma, tragedy and misfortune? What could ever make him feel stronger than the agony of being tortured everyday in order to make a living? It may not be the best way to cope, but Noel ultimately preferred that to a town he felt he could never quite fit into.
Jane Doe is without a doubt one of the most interesting and tragic characters of the bunch, given she is the only one who remembers nothing of her past life and who she used to be. While Noel laments on how his life was cut short and how he never got to finish his novel or live like the movies he loved so much, Jane doesn’t know what her dreams were, whether she had any, or what she even looked like. Similar to Noel's Lament, the title “The Ballad of  Jane​

​Doe” doesn’t quite fit. Since Jane has no recollection of her life, she technically has no story to tell. This is even mentioned in the lyrics, “Oh no soul, and no name, and no story, what a shame. Cruel existence was only a sham.” Thus, it would make more sense for this to be a lament. Afterall, listening to this song is like going through all the stages of grief in the span of five minutes. In that case, Jane's song could possibly represent her yearning for a story of her own she can tell. Her song is also one of the most impressive moments of the album. The backing up of the ensemble with Jane’s operatic vocals is truly an iconic, haunting listening spectacle. It also has a lot of death imagery and symbolism. 

​During her performance, she floats in the air crying out so she can know at last who she is. When having a near death experience, it’s very common to have out of body experiences, where you feel as if you’re going through a tunnel or weightlessly moving towards a light of some sorts. As Jane is depicted flying through a void of nothingness, this can be compared to an out of body experience since before she starts flying and singing operatics, her body flops down like a doll. Jane is likely still in a state of shock after her death, and hasn’t fully processed her tragedy as her high notes are heavily implied to be her screams. They are also intentionally cut short, like her life and how her head was abruptly chopped off.

While nearly all the lyrics were amazing, one of my favorites was, “Time eats all his children in the end.” Jane points directly at the audience while singing this; giving a sense of resentment and anger for the horrible way she died. This can also be interpreted as a reference to the Greek myth of the Titan Cronus in Roman mythology, eating his children due to a prophecy foretold by the deity of earth, Gaia. Gaia told Cronus that one of his  children would overthrow him, and so after their births, he ate each and every one. In another line, she sings, “Oh Saint Peter, let me in, you must know where I’ve been. Won’t you tell me at last who I am?” This could represent one might try to negotiate with a higher power in an attempt to cope with death--also known as the bargaining stage of grief. Additionally, the lines “And I’m asking ‘why lord? If this is how I die lord, why be left with no family and no friends?” and “When silence falls, does no one care?” capture her despair so well. By the end of the ballad, Jane comes to terms with her death and accepts the fact that she may stay a Jane Doe forever, singing, “Like John I’ll be eternally a forgotten name, some lost refrain. Just Jane Doe.”​
Closing Thoughts

Ride the Cyclone is a reminder of the ultimate truth of life: death is inevitable. In the words of American author Steven Pressfeild, “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us.” It’s so common to find yourself spending life with the dream of being able to really live one day. Yet the fear of failure holds us back. And suddenly, death knocks on the door and you realize you never got to live that life. So please live your life to the fullest. Afterall, life's too short to limit yourself by thinking about every consequence, and too fragile to carry the weight of regret.
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Stephanie Murillo