Johanna McKenzie Miller, a longtime and highly successful Chicago actress turned artistic director, has big plans for the Metropolis Performing Arts Centre in Arlington Heights. Her theater’s new production of “Ride the Cyclone,” a musical that enjoys something of a cult following, especially among high school students, is a very lively start.
Metropolis dates back to the beginning of this century. I first rolled out there in the spring of 2000 in order to write about what was then a new, $22 million theater created by the developer Mark R. Anderson and designed with a modified thrust stage by the late, great theater architect John Morris. With roughly 375 seats, depending on configuration, the chic, neo-urbanist theater surrounded by retail, restaurants and condos, with Metra trains stopping virtually at the door, felt like a big deal. Plans were being made to transfer shows from the now-defunct Apple Tree Theatre, known for musicals at the time, to develop a relationship with Second City and also to create a Broadway cabaret series.
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Things did not go smoothly over the next 25 years as partners came and went, administrators came and went, artistic philosophies came and went, and budgets came and went. The Metropolis settled more into a life as a community-style operation than the original idea of competing for suburban audiences with theaters in downtown Chicago.
McKenzie-Miller says she wants to build Metropolis back into a producing venue, using Equity actors, and joining the same suburban circuit as the Paramount Theatre in Aurora, the Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace and the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. Its capacity is smaller than those, but also large enough to support Equity productions, especially when it comes to presenting somewhat smaller musicals like, well, Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell’s “Ride the Cyclone.”
At the show I saw last weekend, the place was filled with local high school students, all visibly relishing the sardonically macabre goings-on within this show about a small-town Canadian choir from a Catholic school whose members are killed in the collapse of a roller coaster known as the Cyclone at a local fair. The show, narrated by one of those Zoltar-like coin-operated fortune-tellers, first dryly explains what happened and then sets up a contest wherein the deceased teens compete to be the one who is permitted to go back to Earth and live forever.
Yes, just like “Cats,” only they are not cats.
The new Metropolis “Ride the Cyclone” is directed by Lillian Castillo, who was part of the original U.S. cast at Chicago Shakespeare Theater in 2015. Castillo knows her way around the droll material, which has been given an immersive, multi-layered set by Angela Weber Miller and projections designer Anthony Churchill. Carolyn Brady is the musical director. The young company of the dead — made up of Amelia Tam, Alex Merkel, Eric Amundson, Peyton Owen, Eldon Warner-Soriano and Diana Marilyn Alvarez — are all decent singers and the quirky characters they build are all fun to watch, with the most excellent Dave Honigman laying down the rules of engagement in aptly cynical fashion from his creepy booth.
The one significant weakness of the production is that it misses much of the emotional force of what happens once we know which student is the winner and then get a vista into a life that almost never was. A film has to do a lot of the heavy lifting there and this one is just not very good, at least not when it comes to tapping into the sadness of loss, which is the serious aspect of a very clever show that is about rather more than it first appears to be. That’s a shame because the rest of the piece feels very much in sync with the material, and, of course, an audience that truly was having the best time this past weekend, not far from their own backyards.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “Ride the Cyclone” (3 stars)
When: Through Oct. 25
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Where: Metropolis Performing Arts Centre, 111 W. Campbell St., Arlington Heights
Running time: 1 hour, 30 mins.
Tickets: $25-$49 at 847-577-2121 and metropolisarts.com