Rocky Horror audience participation

Cafe Society
1

  1. How did Rocky Horror Picture Show audience interaction start? Just some guy in the crowd shotuing back at the screen? Was it thought out by the writer?

  2. Did the original production of The Rocky Horror Show (in London I believe) have any audience interaction?

  3. For anyone who’s seen the new production of The Rocky Horror Show in New York, is there audience participation with this one?

2

Rocky Horror was originally a stage play, not a movie. The audience interaction started with the play. When the movie came out - using mostly the same folks as were in the original play - the fans from the play went to see the movie and continued the audience interaction bit. This spread to folks in the audience who had never seen the live play, just the movie.

Personally, I think the movie absolutely sucks with the audience, but for years I was an enthusiastic Magenta-clone (my boyfriend went as Riff Raff - we had lots of elbow sex).

3

Sucks without the audience. You know what I mean.

4

It is pretty bad. I tried watching it at home just once without yelling at it but it just cannot be done.

5

I rented the video and threww toast at the TV.
It wasn’t the same.
(sigh)

6

Once I made the mistake of attending the University of Toronto Film Society’s screening of it. No interaction what so ever was allowed. Sheesh!

7

  1. According to Hoberman and Rosenbaum’s book “Midnight Movies,” the first audience response line was shouted by Louis Farese, Jr over Labor Day weekend 1976. In the scene where Janet is shielding herself from the rain with a newspaper, he yelled out “Buy an umbrella, you cheap bitch!”

  2. The stage show had audience “interaction” in that it was staged with characters coming through the audience to the stage, but there was no audience “participation.” No one at the original London or Broadway runs of the play shouted lines.

  3. I haven’t seen the new production, but I have seen a number of news stories and interviews with cast members, most/all of whom mention the audience participation and the importance of having strong ad-libbing skills to deal with it. I find the idea of yelling at the play rather rude, and I’m speaking as someone who’s seen the movie in the theatre close to 200 times and benn a member of four different casts.

8

VH1 had a thing about it a few days or weeks back. They implied that this all grew out of small local New York theaters.

I believe there are probably several different sets of ‘participation scripts.’ I saw one that was called ‘The London … script’ and it was absolutely perverted. Extreme bathroom humor to say the least. Oh for the simpler times.

9

For the most part, theatres running live performances of “The Rocky Horror Show” will not allow audience participation.

[li] Throwing objects can seriously injure an actor. Remember, these are professional people who make their living on the stage.[/li]
You can walk into your job Monday morning with your ‘badges of honor’ - “This? oh I was Magenta at Saturday’s screening at the Cinema 2 when I got hit in the eye with a roll of toilet paper. The swelling’s gone down, but it’s a great shade of purple. The cast? I slipped during the watergun scene, but the I didn’t go to the emergency room til after the show. Cool, huh? Gotta be a trooper, you know.” And you still have your 9-5 job at McDonalds, JC Penney’s, IBM, wherever you work.

Now imagine you with those same injuries, but you are a professional actor in a live performance (local, touring company, whatever). You are now out of work (possibly permanently, depending on the extent of the injury/ies), and have a very unhappy manager as well as a very happy understudy.

[li] A national touring company of TRHS was in Syracuse at what is now the Landmark Theatre. This was just after the preservation society had A) saved the theatre from becoming the site for a parking garage, B) was trying to overcome the lack of professional quality theatre in the area, and C) had put in MAJOR renovations to the theatre and lobby back to its glory days of the 1920s (new seats, new gold leaf on the ornamentations, new carpeting, repaired the wall tapestries, updated the bathrooms, etc). Do you realy think that a theatre charging $35+ per ticket (as opposed to a movie house at $7-ish) is going to let soggy bread be crushed into the woodwork?[/li]
[li] And (veering slightly into IMHO territory), it’s just plain rude to shout out anything during a live performance, unless it is called for by the actor (improvisation shows, for example). It’s disrupting both to the actors and the audience. The actors have their scripts memorized and usually don’t need the help, thank you. And having heard the backstage talk, I’ve heard the actors and stage crew call into question the intelligence, maturity, parentage and species of the person trying to be funny (often the most hilarious diatribes I’ve ever heard). You (the heckler) may think you are clever and a riot, but everyone else thinks you’re a imbecile whose mother was an overwhelped sea-cow.[/li]
Don’t get me wrong. I myself have enjoyed both the RHPS participation fests and TRHS live shows. It’s a matter of ‘a time and place for everything’.

10

The Waverly is the best-known, which is where Farese attanded.

There’s no official audience participation script. Anything that’s been published would have to be an unofficial creation. There is an audience participation album, though. Recorded, I believe, at the Waverly (or maybe the 8th St Playhouse). A lot of casts and audiences around the country build off that. Every cast I was ever in had different lines, and we added and deleted lines or did temporary changes based on local or current events.