5/25/2023 0 Comments The ballad of jane doeBut the cast makes the most of them – demonstrating terrific skills not just in singing and dancing, but in forging strongly etched characters out of teenage archetypes. The premise winds up being little more than the frame for a series of entertaining musical numbers. What are the rules of the contest? Karnak changes them arbitrarily from scene to scene (the fickleness of fate?) (As he explains: “Being told the place and time of your death in front of your family, with a mouthful of corndog at a fairground, is the very opposite of fun.”) Feeling guilty that he didn’t warn the teenagers of their impending death, he has decided to hold a contest that will allow one of the teens to return to the living. In place of the Franciscan monk, the creative team of “Ride the Cyclone” conjures up the Amazing Karnak, a mechanical fortune-telling machine common to old carnivals and last seen in the movie “Big.” Karnak (a convincingly spooky and robotic Karl Hamilton) knows when everybody will die, but he never tells those seeking their fortune at the carnival. In the novel, a Franciscan monk spends years studying the lives of these dead to try to answer the question – why were they the ones who died? But even more than “Our Town,” I thought of an earlier Wilder work, for which he won his first Pulitzer, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” a novel that begins with the death of five people crossing a bridge in Peru, and then backtracks to focus on each of the characters. Beneath all its jokiness and spirited (teen-scented) score, “Ride the Cyclone” seems to be trying to capture the mix of the unabashedly cornball and the cosmic that Wilder achieves in “Our Town,” with its theme of the importance of appreciating everyday life.
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