Are we reminiscing now?
I first saw RHPS in 1979 during a college break in Miami, when a high-school buddy of mine dragged me to see it at The Coconut Grove Playhouse. I felt like I was the only person there who hadn’t seen the film multiple times!
A few months later it started playing midnights in Gainesville, where I was attending the University of Florida. At first my friends and I went to every show armed with a plethora of props. Not only rice and newspaper and lighters and water pistols, but toast, toilet paper and even a manaquin’s right arm (you know, Columbia’s “I’d give my right arm for that man” speech…), plus a few others I’d guess most people have not seen outside that theater.
Soon we aquired more props, like the appropriate pink rubber gloves to raise up and snap at the appropriate time, and then my girlfriend and I started wearing lab coats. The theater played the soundtrack as the audience waited for the movie to start, and we started acting out Dammit Janet (in our lab coats) before the film. The applause was always a positive reinforcement.
Then someone gave me a blue bathrobe, and I started wearing that (since I wear glasses anyways, instant Brad). One of my friends (who had surprised us one week by coming in a full scale Transylvanian Partyer outfit one week) then wanted to top our Brad and Janet costumes, and did a fully accurate Riff Raff, down to a professional type bald wig with glued on blonde hair.
It was not too long after that that we tried to get a cast together. We called ourselves The Original Gainesville Cast and not only played every week at our local theater (the assistant manager was nice enough to screen the film for us a few times during the daytime for rehearsal purposes - we didn’t have VCR’s back in the day) but soon started accepting invitations to perform at various events in other cities. We “played” Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami and even Atlanta for their year anniversary or something.
We even got to meet Richard O’Brien (it’s a long story, but he was on vacation in Florida). Through us bringing him down to the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami the owners there got to talk to him (while our cast was performing) and got him to come down for The Grove’s 2nd Anniversary celebration held at a skating rink. Little Nell was there, too, and maybe Pat Quinn… I don’t really remember. I do remember that the theater owners said that since the screen they had set up to show the film after all the festivities was right on the ground, that we couldn’t perform in front of the screen as it would block the view. Of course, we agreed, and then did it anyways, to everyone in the audience’s delight. I also remember that during the obligatory “costume contest” Richard O’Brien actually ignored the official entries and found me on the floor to give the Best Brad prize to. Some of got to spend a little time with Richard O’Brien that week, and went as far as to try to drive him around to show him Miami, but alas, the second “gas crisis” was at that time and we couldn’t get any gas for the car at that time of night. Oh well.
That was our last show as a cast together. Our Riff-Raff moved out to California, and we just sort of all went our own ways. Our Riff-Raff joined some casts in California (the Roxy theater, I think, and then Manhattan Beach) but he’s the only one of us who kept it up after that.
A coincidental note: many years later, I find out that my wife saw RHPS maybe 20 or 30 times… which doesn’t seem like a whole lot to those of us whose screenings easily number in the hundreds, but this was during it’s original run, when it opened in LA in 1975. No audience participation at all (in fact, she actually does not like any of that audience participation stuff, as she thinks it drowns out the real movie)! Who’da thunk it?
