Venue: Eternity Playhouse (Darlinghurst NSW), May 14 – 30, 2026
Book, Music & Lyrics: Jacob Richmond & Brooke Maxwell
Director: Kris Sergi
Cast: Brock Cramond, Riley Druce, Liam Faulkner-Dimond, Michael Haratzis, Kayla Ingle-Olson, Kavisha Karunarathna, Natalie Patterson
Images by Izzy Sergi
Theatre review
In a liminal purgatory, six teenagers compete in a macabre talent show for the singular prize of resurrection. *Ride the Cyclone*, the 2008 musical by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell, purports to meditate on existential meaning, yet its philosophical inquiry remains largely superficial. The score offers moderate pleasures, and the characters possess intermittent charm, but the work never achieves the emotional gravity its premise demands. Though consistently amusing, the humour too often settles for the facile rather than the genuinely witty.
Kris Sergi’s direction and choreography inject the production with undeniable verve and exuberance, yet even this kinetic energy cannot fully animate the material’s hollow center. The production’s most compelling achievement lies in Kathryn Smith and Peter Mussared’s scenic design, which masterfully constructs the spatial paradox of a threshold existence—granting this purgatorial realm genuine dimensionality and visual majesty that momentarily transcends the script’s limitations. Sergi and Lexi Willis’s costumes display welcome visual variety, though they would benefit from greater refinement. Tim Hope’s lighting, too, is marked by inconsistency: it lacks the sustained atmospheric density to conjure a convincingly supernatural realm and falls short of the chromatic complexity required for nuanced tonal metamorphoses, yet it nonetheless achieves an arresting memorability at the drama’s most pivotal junctures.
The seven-member cast commits wholeheartedly, their palpable effort to infuse the piece with soulfulness evident even when the material resists such depth. Beyond some genuinely formidable vocal work, individual performances fluctuate between competent and genuinely accomplished. Natalie Patterson emerges as the production’s undeniable anchor; her Jane Doe combines technical precision with an emotional acuity so penetrating it becomes the evening’s most authentic glimpse into genuine pathos.
There are fleeting instants when the production invites a more profound consideration—that perhaps the hereafter offers possibilities more tantalizing than earthly existence itself. As these characters claw desperately toward their former lives, one might paradoxically conclude that while our time on the current plane remains unequivocally precious, what lies beyond may hold its own strange allure. Terrifying though the unknowable remains, it may not, in the end, be something to fear.
Suzy Goes See 