Line between cast, fans blurs at cult film classic

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© St. Petersburg Times
published April 16, 2002

There are some things some of us have to do on a regular basis.

Not everyone has the same set of compulsions, but people who are wired the way I am occasionally feel a buildup of pressure that means we must go to Cedar Key, go to New Orleans and drink a White Russian at the Old Absinthe House, go to a beach bar, any beach bar, and listen to a Jimmy Buffet clone murder Margaritaville or, as is the most recent case, go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Yes, the 27-year-old rock cult classic is alive and well at several area theaters, and after almost disappearing from the scene for a while, seems to be enjoying a resurgence, often with cast members and devotees who weren't born until years after the original show -- starring Susan Sarandon, Tim Curry and Barry Bostwick -- hit the streets.

I say cast members because, traditionally, there is a group of kids who will get up in front of the stage and, with varying degrees and levels of planning, choreography and costuming, mime the action on screen.

And, in a tradition that has evolved over the years, the show is big on audience participation, with the audience shouting gag lines -- usually obscene -- back during the movie's unabashedly bad dialogue.

What is fun is how the show has evolved over the quarter-century plus that it has been in production. Those attending used to be searched to make sure that they weren't carrying rice, water pistols, toast and playing cards, all props that are thrown at the screen at specific points in the action (rice at the begining wedding scene, for instance). Most chains where the film was shown, traditionally at midnight, didn't want to clean up the mess.

But the cast that puts on the show at the normally staid Beach Theater on St. Pete Beach not only stays to clean up after the show but raises money by selling "prop bags," filled with the heretofore forbidden goodies, to the audience.

And this particular cast, a company called Interchangeable Parts, has been around theaters in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, in one incarnation or another, since 1991, and is one of the best. Carefully directed and planned moves put the right members on stage when the screen action dictates their presence, and they indulge in just enough ad-lib action and preshow horseplay to keep it interesting.

Co-director Ed Schneider, who also plays Riff Raff, the Igor-like butler played in the movie by the film's creator, Richard O'Brien, went out of his way to make my party and only a couple of other obvious relative newcomers at home and to explain things so that nobody got scared or offended.

Somebody could probably do an entire sociology thesis on the evolution of the audience participation lines shouted during the movie.

In the 1970s and '80s (yes, I was one of those lost souls haunting multiplexes at midnight, although I never wore a merry-widow bra or gold lame shorts, each particular to certain characters and frequently worn by audience members), I counted myself as a pretty good audience member, having memorized the litany of jokes and lines pretty well.

Now, 15 years later, I only heard one or two familiar lines and the rest, equally hilarious, were all new. I also noted about five years ago during a Halloween presentation of Rocky Horror at the Tampa Theater that the responses develop differently on a geographical basis and that when you gather audiences from the few remaining different locations where the show is still produced, they are frequently shouting different things at the same time, resulting in a completely unintelligible cacophony.

Two members of our group, a college professor and his economist wife, were actually rafted into the cast for a brief part of the performance, and my wife, a Republican and a "virgin," by Rocky standards (meaning it was her first show), took part good-naturedly in a preshow initiation she probably won't mention at the next political cocktail party she attends.

The bottom line is that it was one of those things that we did on a whim (the movie marquee caught our eye as we were entering Aqua Blue, a really great restaurant a few doors down) and, as with most whim-induced activity, turned out to be far more fun than we had expected, probably heightened by the fact that we had all taken naps earlier in the day -- something most cast members won't understand for another few years.

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