Trivia / Ride the Cyclone

• Bonus Material: The 2021 World Premiere Cast Recording features four bonus tracks of alternate/cut songs:
  • "Be Safe, Be Good (for Rachel)"
  • "A World Inside"
  • "Karnak's Theme"
  • A slightly less explicit version of "Noel's Lament"
• Bowdlerise:
  • In 2023, a high school edition was created so that actual teens could perform the show. Changes include taking out the Waiting for Godot "erection" line from the nativity scene, replacing "fucked up girl" with une femme brisee (meaning "broken woman" in French), and making "Space Age Bachelor Man" about dancing instead of making love.
  • An official alternate version of the script has Ricky Potts developing traumatic mutism instead of a degenerative disease to explain his imaginative nature. This sparked a #saverickypotts campaign among fans worried about the erasure of disability representation, though the version with disabled Ricky is still available for licensing.
• Colbert Bump: A number of people have found the obscure musical through the 2021 cast recording release and from the TikTok platform since 2021-2022.
• Deleted Role: The show has gone through many reworkings with songs and characters being changed and cut; two of the most well-known examples are the characters of Hank and Astrid. Astrid was Ocean's cousin from Ukraine who liked deathmetal and would bite Ocean during the show because "she deserved it." Hank was Astrid's boyfriend who was unable to walk, like Ricky. Their song was essentially an earlier version of the song "Talia," as a dream ballet duet with puppets and whatnot. During it they get attacked by a bear and Astrid shoots it. However these two had a short run and were cut from it in under a year. Some regional productions will add them back in as a two-person ensemble, giving them a lot of the dancing and such, but they don't have any lines or any solo singing.
• Descended Creator: Co-creator Jacob Richmond plays Karnak on the cast recording.
• Distanced from Current Events: In the original script, Mischa's favorite "ride" at the fair is the shooting gallery. However, some productions change this to the beer garden, retaining the humor while avoiding any references to guns, whether due to the uptick of gun violence in America, or because of Russia invading Ukraine in 2022, leading to an active ground war in Ukraine.
• In Memoriam: The cast recording dedicates one of its bonus tracks to Rachel Rockwell, the director/choreographer for Ride the Cyclone's first three U.S. productions, who died of ovarian cancer at age 49 soon after the closing of the 2018 Seattle production.
  "Be safe," they said.
  "Be good."
  But things don't happen
  quite the way they should.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For years, fans of Ride the Cyclone survived on small tidbits of material, such as second-hand recordings and short promotional material from various runs, until an official cast recording released in 2021 and a pro-shot leaked online less than a year later.
• Role Reprise:
  • Kholby Wardell played Noel Gruber in every professional iteration of Ride the Cyclone from its first workshop in 2008 until 2019, beforee returning for the official cast recording in 2021.
  • Tiffany Tatreau, who played Ocean in the 2015 U.S. premiere, made a surprise return after Taylor Louderman stepped down from the role in the 2016 Off-Broadway production, and reprised the role another two times afterward.
  • All but one actor from the 2019 Alliance Theater production reprise their roles on the world premiere cast recording.
• Shared Universe: Word of God from co-creator Jacob Richmond says Ride the Cyclone is actually the second in a trilogy of plays called the "Uranium Teen Scream Trilogy", bookended by Richmond's 2009 play Legoland and a third installment as-of-yet unwritten. All three would center around an exaggerated version of Uranium City, Saskatchewan. Supported by the fact that Jane Doe is revealed to be Penny Lamb, one of the main characters of Legoland, when she's brought back to life.

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