The Skyline Theater Club presented a one-night-only performance of the sexy and campy The Rocky Horror Picture Show Experience. The show began at the stroke of midnight on Friday, Oct. 21.
The movie, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” premiered in the U.S. in 1975. It was not until 1976, when it started to achieve cult status with raucous and hilarious crowd participation, that it attained the entertainment value that allows it to thrive today. This is when The Rocky Horror Picture Show started showing at midnight at the Waverly Theatre on 6th Avenue in New York City. The promoters would play the movie’s soundtrack before the show began and once the movie commenced the revved-up crowd started shouting insults at the villains on the screen and cheering the heroes. This is how The Rocky Horror Picture Show, its choreographed crowd involvement, and its traditional midnight starting time began to take shape.
The fun began at the Skyline Theater the second you entered the lobby, as many costumed cast members greeted theatergoers and urged them to purchase a prop bag so the crowds could also partake in the frivolity. The bag included bubbles, glow sticks, a newspaper, latex gloves, noisemakers, toilet paper, and playing cards. Attached to the bag was
a handy list that instructed newcomers, or “virgins” in Rocky Horror parlance, on when to deploy the items in their bags.
A “virgin,” according to the official fan site of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is “anybody who has never seen the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show.'” There were over 20 of these virgins on this night. These newcomers are marked with a scarlet letter “V” on their foreheads and have to step on stage before the show and compete for prizes in various humiliating contests that are dripping with sexual innuendo. Some of contests included speed banana eating, pronouncing various sex related words while one’s mouth was stuffed with marshmallows, and the most tawdry of them all, a couples balloon popping, in which two contestants had to press their bodies together to pop the aforementioned balloon. The latter challenge was too sexual for one mother in the crowd as she promptly collected the young women in her charge off the stage and brought them back to their seats.
The show itself was amazing; especially when you consider that the cast had only a little over a week to rehearse and they were mainly working off memory from last year’s performance of the same production. The charismatic Abel Gomez effortlessly portrayed the gender bending and outright naughty character, Dr. Frank-N-Furter. He strutted around the stage in his high heels with the same grace and ferocity as actor Tim Curry achieved on the movie screen behind him.
The other performers joining Gomez on stage also did their best to assure that the newcomers in the audience would be back for future shows. Evan Fitch and Sterling Wolper played the innocent and naïve Brad and Janet to perfection when they are quickly lured into Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s sex-laced insanity.
One of the most amazing things about this night of cinema/theater is something that normally goes unmentioned—the set changes. These changes have to be accomplished at the pace of the movie playing on the screen and not that of a normal theater production.
“I think that is the main problem with it,” said Skyline student and set designer/deck charge Ben Rampley. “You can’t just stall or blackout like you would in a normal play or musical. You actually have to keep up with the movie, and if not, it just ruins the whole flow…the whole production.”
Considering the midnight starting time of the show, the turnout was impressive. But, because of the large number of novices in the crowd, the lines shouted out by audience members were confined to about three small groups of Rocky Horror devotees, but their presence and the dedication of the cast were enough to make the night a memorable one.
