15 Jan

Hit Zombie Musical: Ride the Cyclone Comes to Vancouver, Jan 17-Feb 16 (Ticket Giveaway)

Photo courtesy of Arts Club

Ready for Glee with zombies?

Ride the Cyclone – a campy musical about a high school chamber choir killed in a roller coaster accident – premieres this Thursday, Jan. 17, as part of Vancouver’s PuSh international performing arts festival. And you’ve got a chance to win a pair of tickets (for more on that, read on).

Developed by Victoria’s Atomic Vaudeville company, Ride the Cyclone has been hailed as “the most awe-inspiring, truly entertaining, heart tugging, toe-tapping musical” in years by the Toronto Star. The set-up spells darkly comic masterpiece. Six high school choir students from the small town of Uranium, Saskatchewan, perish in a freak roller coaster accident. The Amazing Karnack, a mechanized fortune teller at the amusement park, feels responsible.

So, to make amends, he brings the deceased teens back to life to sing about their dreams and desires in one final concert. It’s absurd. It’s campy. And it’s one unforgettable musical.

The show centers around solos by the six teens, each of whom struggles with the usual adolescent identity crisis, even after death. There’s Noel, for instance, who sings a cabaret number and explains that being gay in Uranium is “kind of like having a laptop in the Stone Age. You know you have it, but there’s nowhere to plug it in.” And there’s geeky piano player Ricky, who was raised by his grandparents on a diet of tuna and milk and sings a space-age ballad about being a stud in a galaxy of cats. Not to mention the anonymous Jane Doe, who loses her head in the accident and goes on to sing an eerie music hall number about not having an identity.

Ride the Cyclone has proven such a success that the little production from Victoria is right now in the process of being fine-tuned for a potential run on Broadway. Before it hits the Great White Way, however, you can catch it in Vancouver, from Jan. 17-Feb. 16 on the Arts Club’s Granville Island Stage. Tickets are available on the Arts Club website.

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see Ride the Cyclone on Thursday, Jan. 24, at the Arts Club’s Granville Island Stage, post this message on Twitter: