Audience partici-:‘The Rocky Horror Show’ thru Surging Films and Theatricals

The Company. Photo by Pat Rigg.

Full disclosure: Ian Rigg—who, among other capacities, plays the Narrator—is a former contributor to this site.

The Rocky Horror Show ought to be easily explainable, seeing as we’ve had 50 years to come to terms with it. A spoof of cheapo sci-fi shlock. The lovechild of glam rock and Alfred Kinsey. A short-circuit of the very concept of Western horror, turning an oft-lingering sexual subtext of the genre into an out-and-proud text.

A text which spawned a supertextual dialogue that continues to this day at midnight screenings of its improbable and retrospectively kind of miraculous film adaptation. The callouts have bred callouts have bred callouts.

Having been to a handful of those screenings myself—in college and at the Hollywood Boulevard in Woodridge—I still can’t quite explain it. This is a good “inexplicable”, let’s be clear—surprising that something so overt can still keep something under the covers.

Now, having seen Surging Theatricals mounting of the actual stage show—a rare treat, all things considered—I still can’t quite explain what I saw.

Rest assured, it’s the same wet ‘n’ wild Walpurgis Night that Richard O’Brien laced up in thigh-high boots and unleashed all those years ago. It’s the same Brad and Janet (Will Knox and Abby Denault), squares so square that their first order of business after getting engaged is to tell their old science teacher. It’s the same array of clichés lined up and shot at like clay pigeons, from “I’m sorry, the phone is dead, you’ll have to spend the night” all the way on down. It’s that same songbook that anyone would give a vital organ to have written. It’s puerile. It’s thrilling. It’s got enough inflatable penises to float a bachelorette party (or bachelor party—we’re open-minded here).

It’s just borrowing pretty liberally from the film’s iconography—the bloody font, the Denton billboard, the virgins’ survival kits—and there’s my reservation. Perhaps because it’s Halloweentime, the worst time to ruffle the Rocky fanbase’s feather boa. Perhaps it’s simply not fixing what isn’t broken. Perhaps, in a frightfully uncertain world, it would be churlish to take away much-needed security that a high-concept / low-blow queer-ass rock musical can provide. Still, I think I would have liked some splattering outside the lines, something that really let loose. (The live videography, pulled from the Ivo van Hove playbook, is a neat concept that deserved more examination.)

That said, whereas the film’s shadow casts are mercilessly kept in time with what’s on screen, here, callouts are encouraged and those people on stage got time, baby. Billy Surges is the name in the director’s slot, and, as per Surging’s usual, 90 percent of the work was in casting the thing right. But he may as well share credit with the audiences that come, the livelier the better. And the cast knows to breathe: how to leave space for the scripture and even accommodate the one-time-only burbles.

At least unless it’s Seth Elisha Harman at center stage, playing a uniquely unaccommodating and no-damns-given Frank N. Furter. He plays this king of queens with the command of a Shakespearean thesp in a B-movie—he knows he’s slumming it, he knows you know it, you know he knows you know it, but he’s attacking that gristle like it’s juicy steak anyway. Tony Calkins enviously picks at the scraps as Riff Raff, the most delightfully demented laboratory assistant in Chicago this side of Mercury’s Young Frankenstein.

(An aside: Will Knox probably gets the most uninterrupted performance thanks to “Once in a Lifetime”, a song exclusive to the stage musical. As far as I know, there are no callouts, and for those that do know: that’s not a deep cut, but a gouge. Similarly, savor Alex Iacobucci’s speaking lines as the titular muscle man.)

So yes, Surging’s Rocky Horror is properly electric, and they’re putting it all out there—regular evening shows and late nights.

I just wouldn’t have minded seeing a little more neck.

You just might need to follow the light over to this Frankenstein place yourself.

-pation.

The Rocky Horror Show runs through November 5 at the Edge Theater, 5451 N. Broadway. For tickets or more information, please visit surgingfilms.com.

For more reviews on this or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.