The phone rang, and a girl called Dee asked if she could audition.
I was co-directing The Rocky Horror Show at university with my friend Pili. Dee was a tap dancer, so we had her down for Columbia before she’d said a dozen words. Columbia tap dances through the Time Warp, and the woman who created her, Little Nell, was from Sydney. It seemed obvious.
She ended up in the chorus.
I genuinely can’t remember why. Dee remembers very clearly, and she has never entirely forgiven me. That was how we met: in a rehearsal room, then in a theatre, under the lights. Everything since, including 37 Frames, started there.
Tim Curry died on 25 August, the same day as Dolly Parton. Losing both of them in one day was more than I knew what to do with. So this Halloween, the first without him, this one is for Frank-N-Furter, and for the man who made him.
A thesis in fishnets
Pili and I were doing it for our master’s thesis. On paper, we were deconstructing the role of the feminine. In practice, we were trying to write an academic dissertation about something that was, mostly, just enormous fun.
There are a lot of layers to Rocky Horror. We found plenty of them. We also found that a production like that takes over your whole life, and your family’s. My brother Greg came dressed as some kind of zombie and handed out programs at the door. The family came back night after night. University friends still bring it up now.
It’s one of those pieces of work where you’re never sure if it’s really, really bad or really, really brilliant. We decided long ago it doesn’t matter. It made us fall a little in love with Susan Sarandon. It gave us the Time Warp, which is still a favourite in our house. It gave us Magenta and Riff Raff and Columbia and Rocky, and Meat Loaf, another hero of ours, crashing through on a motorbike.
And it gave us Tim Curry, who held the whole thing together in heels. I think, in some way, he brought the two of us together.
And it gave us Tim Curry, who held the whole thing together in heels.
The people who shout back
If you’ve never been to a Rocky Horror screening, the audience is half the show. People dress up, bring props and shout lines back at the screen, all of them in on the same decades-old joke. We’ve done it more times than we can count. The last time was in Kawasaki, at Halloween, which tells you how far that joke travels.
It’s a strange thing to love a film so much that you talk back to it. But that’s what a whole room of strangers does, every time, and for a couple of hours nobody in it is a stranger.
The story begins at a wedding
You couldn’t find two things further apart than The Rocky Horror Show and the weddings we plan now. Except that the story begins at one. Brad and Janet have just waved off their newly married friends when he proposes, and everything that happens after that is their fault.
We didn’t see it at the time, but that production taught us most of what we know about a room. When to bring the lights down. When to let people join in. How a crowd that came to watch becomes part of the show, if you give it the chance. A wedding is a very different night, but it asks the same question every time: what will these people feel, and when?
A wedding is a very different night, but it asks the same question every time: what will these people feel, and when?
So yes, our career started in fishnets. We’re comfortable with that.
This Halloween
Cinemas everywhere will be screening it this weekend, as they do every Halloween, and this year some of them are billing it as a tribute to him. The rooms will be full of people who are a little sadder than usual, shouting back at the screen anyway.
If there’s a screening near you, go. Dress up if you like. Shout the lines. Do the Time Warp in the aisle. It’s the only way he’d want it done.
Thank you, Tim, for Frank, and for that room under the lights.
For the record, Dee did get a much bigger part in the end.
Photographs: the marquee by Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 4.0; Tim Curry in 1978, an A&M Records publicity photo in the public domain; the Halloween show in Dublin by Sebastian Dooris, CC0. All via Wikimedia Commons.
