The Rocky Horror Picture Show recently came to Millville (NJ), hosted at the historic Levoy Theatre. The cult classic enthralled a packed house of fanatical followers (some have seen it 50 times or more), along with wanna-be participants attending for the first time (termed “virgins” in the Rocky Horror realm), and the simply curious.
The production included the infamous Rocky Horror Picture Show film, released in 1975 and since viewed by hundreds of thousands as one of the most intense underground cult films of all time.
At the special Millville performance, the Rocky film was accompanied and celebrated by a costumed “Shadow Cast,” which lit up the theater with costumes and a stage performance that matched movement-by-movement the film playing behind it on the big screen; smaller venues are relegated to showing just the film.
The crowd was a cacophony of appreciation from the first note of an unfortunate couple stranded by car trouble near a looming dark castle/spaceship to the finale—a troupe of of drag queen characters and their guests marching and singing across the celluloid and the footlights.
Audience participation remains the sacred (or blasphemous) essence of a Rocky Horror event. About 700 people attended, many were in either a flamboyant costume of a character in the film or an outlandish get-up of their own making.
In a one-of-a-kind theater experience, the patrons, from all over the Delaware Valley, shouted dialogue lines; hurled pre-scribed, memorized insults at the characters; and often stood to yell, sing, and dance in a mayhem of love, exhibitionism, and near-psychosis.
But even that wasn’t the most fun. At prescriptive points in the film, the rowdy behavior embraced Rocky Horror ritual activities, such as blowing noisemakers and putting on party hats during a grand dinner, donning rubber gloves as lead character Dr. Frank-N-Furter begins an operation, and… throwing rolls of toilet paper all over the theater—up, down, floor, ceiling, hanging from the balcony, as rival Doctor…. Scott comes onstage.
Audience props were provided by the theater for donations, which the cast donates to charity. The film, if you haven’t figured it out, was a footnote to the evening’s frenzied experience. As a movie, it can’t be categorized. It’s at once a low-budget musical comedy; a parody of the 50s B-movie horror genre; a norm-assaulting portrayal of conflated gay, drag queen, and transvestite characters; a humorous melodrama of jealousy, intrigue, and sort-of murder; and an eviscerating finger-in-the-eye of mainstream American society at the time.
The recently-deceased Tim Curry stars as Frank-N-Furter, whose signature turn is creating a living human being—Rocky—in his laboratory. Susan Sarandon, playing Janet Weiss, is the innocent woman in the broken down car who is ultimately absorbed into the rampant gender-bending maelstrom in the castle.
Now, you’ll just have to Goggle it. It would take five more pages to tell you the whole story.
The star-of-the-show shadow cast act is performed by Transylvanian Nipple Productions.
If your curiosity ever overwhelms your good sense and you want to go, arrive early. The stage lunacy starts pre-show with skits and audience participation warm up. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
