ON STAGE
What: Legoland
Where: Belfry Theatre
When: Saturday, two shows:
4 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Tickets: $20 at Belfry box office (250 385-6815)
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As Victoria playwright Jacob Richmond looks ahead to Broadway, he's also taking a trip back in time.
On Saturday, Atomic Vaudeville reprises Legoland at the Belfry Theatre for two performances. Richmond's satirical comedy about an oddball brother and sister -- a sort of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for teenagers -- features the original actors: Amitai Marmorstein as Ezra and Celine Stubel as Penny.
This week the show, which has not been performed for four years, was rehearsed at Atomic Vaudeville's Government Street loft. The pair of Victoria performances will polish the production before it travels to the Old Fire Hall in Whitehorse, where it plays Sept. 25 to 28.
It's a busy time for Richmond. He's also doing rewrites on Ride the Cyclone, the acclaimed musical he created with composer Brooke Maxwell. The story of a gaggle of teens who perish in a roller-coaster accident, it has emerged as one of the most successful Canadian musicals in recent years. Critics and theatregoers across the nation have embraced the award-winning show, which now appears poised to enter theatre's major leagues.
Toronto producer Morris Berchard previously indicated interest in taking Ride the Cyclone to New York City. Richmond now says Kevin McCollum, one of Broadway's leading producers, has joined the team that aims to take the musical to New York. The show has had workshops in Toronto, where many of the cast now live.
The addition of McCollum is a major step. In 2006, McCollum's company produced the Canadian-made musical The Drowsy Chaperone on Broadway. That show ended up winning five Tony awards and was produced in Toronto, Los Angeles, London and Japan. McCollum also helped produce such Tony-winning Broadway shows as Rent and Avenue Q.
"We're rewriting [Ride the Cyclone] now," said Richmond. "They had a bunch of stipulations. ... They made compelling arguments."
Specifically, the producers requested Ride the Cyclone's narrative be improved. And a live band will be added. Richmond admits when he and Maxwell created the show, they had no previous experience writing a musical.
"Our benchmark was Grease. And there's not much of a story in Grease," he said with a chuckle. "It's a bit of fumbling around in the dark until you find something that works."
The revised version of Ride the Cyclone will be unveiled in Victoria for two nights in December. After that, the show tours Western Canada -- a trial run to ascertain whether it's ready to go to New York. It plays Calgary's High Performance Rodeo before a month-long January/February run at Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre. Ride the Cyclone then travels to Edmonton's Citadel Theatre, Winnipeg's Manitoba Theatre Centre, and Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon before finishing up at Nanaimo's Theatre One in April.
Both Legoland and Ride the Cyclone are part of a series Richmond calls the Uranium Teen Scream Trilogy (the characters in these shows are from Uranium City, Sask.). He is in the process of writing the third instalment. The show will be about an "old hippy band" -- a sister act now working a cruise ship -- that had one hit in the 1960s.
The script is inspired partly by Richmond's experience of taking a two-week honeymoon at a Gulf of Mexico resort. His memories include a second-degree sunburn, banal conversations with resort staff and watching such shows as Broadway tributes and Michael Jackson impersonations. Most of the resort guests seemed to be from Calgary.
"It was a circle of Hell," Richmond said, laughing.
