"This delightfully weird and just plain delightful show will provide the kind of thrills we look for in all musical comedies, however outlandish their subject matter: an engaging and varied score, knocked out of the park by a superlative cast, and a supremely witty book…All of the performers are terrific…Although the show is primarily a series of solo turns, the staging is dynamic...For a musical about dead teenagers, it’s high-spirited and just plain fun from start to finish."
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"A lengthy cooking time has only resulted in a derivative, if energetically plated stew...'Cyclone' earns points for its hectic mix of misanthropic satire and small-town melancholy, and the eclectic score keeps things lively—Brooke Maxwell and Jacob Richmond's tunes run the gamut from Ukrainian rap to French chanson and indie pop. But at 100 minutes, this gaudily hand-painted car trundles along after the thrill has faded."
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"It clearly wants to be both eerie and funny, as well as subversive, serious, touching, and great. As a result it’s a little bit of all of the above, except for the last...It’s only toward the end, as the stabs at snarky humor subside and the kids start considering the brevity of the lives they are leaving, that anything emotionally engaging happens. Until then, 'Cyclone' feels like a queasy hangover dream with the late Prince as the dramaturge and some serious short-term memory problems."
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"The impulse toward the easy, cheesy laugh means that unlike other teen-angst musicals, the emotional stakes remain flat. The young cast is talented and appealing enough, but their characters and their sketchy back-stories too seldom escape the cartoonish…As a musical score, it lacks cohesion, mostly sounding like inferior versions of numbers you've heard before in more thoughtfully crafted shows."
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"The dark but perversely lovable little tuner...A work at once macabre and sweet, melancholy and affirmative, merciless and compassionate...'Cyclone' felt a tad tenser, slower and less certain of itself at the MCC Theater than had been the case in Chicago — the performances 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 there's no other show in town even remotely like this one."
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"This quirky show pushes hard for its desired audience response, be it laughter or tears. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as funny as the writers seem to think and a last-minute U-turn toward schmaltz comes across as unearned…Everyone in the cast works up a sweat selling the material they have to work with...Under the steady and efficient direction of Rachel Rockwell, the whole thing feels like a Fringe Festival musical with really high production values."
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"Curiously lacking in any kind of emotion or tension. Director and choreographer Rachel Rockwell's production is a lively one, featuring a boisterously talented cast...But while the book contains a decent number of guffaws and the score exudes a pleasant assortment of contemporary sounds, the hints that something of significant profundity is contained within the text are left unfulfilled."
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"The emotional payoff is nil, because the songs neither illuminate the characters nor help explain why they should be allowed to live...'Ride the Cyclone' looks and sounds much better than it is, thanks to Rachel Rockwell's direction and choreography and a top-flight cast of fresh faces...Still, it's hard to get away from the idea that 'Ride the Cyclone' is little more than a batch of random songs strung together by way of a forced, silly narrative concept."
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