One might have expected the release of The Rocky Horror Picture Show to have dampened demand for the stage show. It was not to happen. In London, the King’s Road Theatre continued to groan beneath the demand for tickets, and elsewhere around the world, too, Rocky still stirred.
El Show de Terror de Rocky opened in Mexico City early in 1976, the work of the singularly named Julissa—an indefatigable one-woman force of nature who dominated the Mexican theater scene of the age. Not only did she direct and produce El Show de Terror de Rocky, she also translated it into Spanish, and played the role of Chelo, as her text renamed Janet (Brad was now known as Carlos, and Dr. Scott became Dr. Carillo).
The erstwhile Julia Isabel de Llano Macedo was undertaking her first-ever directorial role, although she was scarcely a theatrical novice. The Mexican translations and productions of Jesus Christ Superstar (Jesucristo Superestrella), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Grease (Vaselina) were her work, while she had experience on the other side of the spotlight too, as teenage vocalist for the late 1950s rock band the Spitfires and a solo performer throughout the early 1960s.
Her acting credits ran to some forty movies between 1962 and 1973, and she could even point to her own crop of Rocky-esque B-movies, with roles in Fear Chamber and House of Evil (both 1968), Mexican productions directed by Jack Hill and costarring Boris Karloff. She also appeared as Mary in the original Mexican cast of Jesus Christ Superstar.
Her vision of The Rocky Horror Show was not without controversy, primarily for its sexual content, but also for the suggestions of blasphemy that even the removal of the phrase “dammit” had not completely assuaged.
There were international grumblings, too. Although Julissa blithely co-opted the original play’s costumes and set designs, and even borrowed the notion of Doctor Frank-N-Furter making his entrance from behind the crowd, El Show de Terror de Rocky was again an unauthorized production. But this time, despite having overlooked such intrusions in the past, Richard O’Brien did move against it, issuing legal threats that would ultimately lead to the production’s closure.
Lowly in the Lowlands
As one curtain was lowered, another was raised. For some time, producer Michael White had been talking with Dutch producer René Solleveld about staging a presentation of The Rocky Horror Show in the Netherlands, and on March 18, 1976, it opened at the Theater Royal in Nieuwendijk.
Directed by Derek Goldby, and working from a new translation by Hugo Heinen and Rene Solleveld, the play featured a very strong cast.
Cast as Doctor Frank-N-Furter, Hugo Metsers was the star of the erotic hit Blue Movie (1971) and the son of painter Hugo Metsers (1902–1978). Portraying Riff-Raff, Hans Beijer arrived via the now all-but-traditional route of Hair and Godspell.
Trudy de Jong (Janet) was plucked from the acclaimed Toneelgroep Baal (Baal Theater Group), pioneers of socially and politically active theater in their homeland, and one of the country’s leading experimental jazz acts, too. (As well as an actress, de Jong was the troupe’s lead vocalist.)
Derek de Lint (Brad) was fresh from shooting the French thriller Barocco, alongside Gérard Depardieu; and Moniek Toebosch (Magenta) was the star of a string of movies by French filmmaker Claudia Zwartjes and a renowned experimental musician, a former member of the New Electric Chamber Music Ensemble.
Through the late 1960s, the Ensemble’s work, made by largely untrained musicians who relied on chaos and surprise for their effectiveness, held the Dutch art world entranced. Ahead of her time in Rocky terms, but oddly apt regardless, Toebosch’s time with the Ensemble ensured that she was already no stranger to audience participation.
The band behind the production was Water, one of the country’s most respected progressive rock acts.
And the whole thing bombed. While the box office did fine business on weekends, weeknights played to near-empty houses, and the show barely struggled for a month before closing.
Coming on top of the movie’s failure, it was beginning to look as though the production really was cursed, that David Belasco was reaching out to crush the life from the show that wrecked his dreamchild. It was an impression, however, that would be seriously dented by its next Stateside incarnation.
The Rebirth by the Bay
In early February 1976, director A. Michael Amarino’s vision of The Rocky Horror Show was unveiled at the Montgomery Playhouse, at 622 Broadway in San Francisco. It was destined to run for 103 performances until the end of May, a tidy life span for a small production, and one that apparently reveled in its surroundings, the city’s edgy North Beach neighborhood. Or so the Stanford Daily’s reviewer, Mary Anderson, regarded it.
“The Rocky Horror Show . . . found an unfortunate home [here],” she wrote. “The Montgomery lowers itself to the demeanor of the entire North Beach district. It displays mutilated manikins and even employs a barker to coax people inside. Passersby might understandably expect The Rocky Horror Show to be a very seedy, S-M kind of trip. . . .”
Instead, they would witness “a transsexual science fiction rock musical,” with a sparkling cast topped by David James as Doctor Frank-N-Furter, Roslyn Roseman as Magenta and the Usherette, Buddy King as Riff-Raff, and Needa Greene and Robert Reynolds as Janet and Brad—unknowns all, but all set to delight the audience.
Not only did Anderson declare the Montgomery production to be “classier” than the theater, she judged it an improvement on the movie as well (“excepting Tim Curry’s performance as Frank”), and there was an element of truth to that.
The transition from stage to screen is never an easy one, after all; it is not, perhaps, as violent as the shift from the printed page to the moving picture, but still it is capable of fiercely dividing viewers.
In terms of media response, The Rocky Horror Picture Show did suffer by comparison with the best of the theatrical performances. Anderson’s review makes it clear that even in the hands of what might be termed a “lesser” cast, the strength of the stage show was more than sufficient to outweigh any inexperience or uncertainty. Even her description of David James as effectively “copying” Tim Curry was one that few future Doctor Frank-N-Furters would find themselves immune to. Or, perhaps, even want to.
And there was an awful lot of them poised to come mincing down the catwalk.
Rocky at the Strand Theatre in San Francisco in 1979. From left, Linda Woods (Riff Raff), Marni Scofidio (Frank N. Furter), Jim Curry (Dr. Scott) and Denise Erickson (Magenta).
© Amadscientist/Wikimedia Commons
Leader of the Gang
In 1977, plans were laid for The Rocky Horror Show to make its theatrical debut in Norway, a six-month engagement at the Oslo Nye Centralteatret, from October 1977 through March 1978, and featuring a translation by Johan Fillinger and Ole Paus.
Toralv Maurstadelva, the theater’s artistic director, admitted in the playbill that he had been yearning to “make a show of it here” ever since he first caught the stage show at the King’s Road Theatre in 1974.
Of course it would be an official production, with Brian Thomson credited as assistant to director David Toguri (choreographer on The Rocky Horror Picture Show); while the all-local cast featured Knut Husebø as Doctor Frank-N-Furter, Jahn Teigen as Riff-Raff, Gro Anita Schønn as Magenta, Kari Ann Grønsund as Janee (Janet), Ivar Nørve as Jan (Brad), Julie Ege as Columbia, Per Elvis Granberg as Eddie and the marvelously named Zakhir Helge Linaae as Rocky.
Norway did not know what hit it.
This was not the country’s first exposure to the play, in fact, although past encounters had been somewhat low-key. Various local theater and amateur groups had mounted productions in the past, while the movie had at least got as far as the local film club circuit.
But still Norway was a relatively sheltered, not to mention conservative society, and the entire nation appeared to be shocked by the play. The newspapers and television certainly, if naturally, inflamed the outrage in the guise of encouraging debate, but as is so often the case, the more people were told that they shouldn’t go to see the play, for fear of the untold depravity that they would witness, the more lined up to attend.
No less than 129 performances were all but sold out as the show ran on, with the liner notes to the accompanying cast album doing a fine job of explaining the show’s importance.
“Whatever one may think about [The] Rocky Horror Show, it is clearly a piece of art that has managed to provoke, engage and stimulate people both worldwide and here in Norway. [Yet] the performance is no less relevant today than it was when it arrived.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, the original Australian run of The Rocky Horror Show was about to finally wind up, with a somewhat desultory last couple of months in Adelaide in spring 1977.
Across the sea in New Zealand, however, Rayner Bourton was scheming a fresh revival, approved by the show’s Australian producer, Harry M. Miller, but largely sidestepping those other legal niceties and requirements that would qualify it as an official production.
There were a couple of familiar faces on board; Sal Sharar from the original Australian production was back as Riff-Raff; Paul Johnstone, an original understudy before graduating to the front line, took on the twinned roles of Eddie and Doctor Scott. Bourton was back as Rocky.
But the somewhat amateurish feel of the event was never far from the surface. Even the cover of the original cast LP cut corners, selecting a photograph of Max Phipps, Doctor Frank-N-Furter in the Melbourne and early Adelaide productions, and replacing his head with that of his latest counterpart, English glam-rock star Gary Glitter.
Glitter had not seen the production before. In his autobiography, The Leader, he admitted that he’d somehow managed to miss both the play in London and the movie in the cinemas, before the offer came his way. He was in Paris in 1976, still mulling over the offer to take on the role, when he decided to have a look at what it was all about.
“I found a crowd of punks and freaks waiting to go in—I’d never seen anything like this . . . and began to get interested. It was what went on inside that decided me, though, as I watched the audience shouting out the words of the different characters they were identifying with. I thought this whole participation thing was so rock ’n’ roll that I had to do it.”
Because if there was one thing Glitter understood, it was rock ’n’ roll.
“When I was a kid, my major influence was Elvis,” Glitter once explained. “After that, I discovered people like Ray Charles; I liked his ‘What’d I Say’ very much. Then I got into things like Gary U.S. Bonds . . . Eddie Cochran . . . Gene Vincent’s ‘Be Bop a Lula.’ Those were my real influences.”
Those were the talismans he would carry through his formative years, and those, of course, were among the icons that Richard O’Brien too held dear. And as the burgeoning glam-rock movement continued its stylistic flirtation with the music of its youth, Glitter was the man who would create the ultimate fusion.
Of course, Gary did not always Glitter. He was born Paul Gadd in . . . 1944 was the official year, but estimates continue to vary. He received his first guitar at age thirteen, but he never really took to it; he wanted to be a singer, and remembered being “the typical boy posing in front of the bedroom mirror with my collar turned up, trying to sneer like Elvis.”
Through the 1960s, the Glitter-to-be strove for success, releasing a string of singles that went nowhere, fronting a succession of bands that did likewise. It took a meeting with producer and arranger Mike Leader in 1968 to convince him to stop following fashions and start trying to lead them; and over the next couple of years, the pair beavered away in the studio, seeking the blueprint that would make that dream a reality. They found it with “Rock and Roll.”
Gadd had already been through a succession of pseudonyms, each one as unsuccessful as the last: Paul Monday, Paul Raven, Rubber Bucket. The man of a thousand aliases needed to come up with the thousandth-and-first, and he found it in glam rock.
The sound was flowering everywhere; there had to be a clue in there someplace. Vicki Vomit . . . Terry Tinsel . . . Stanley Sparkle. . . . Late at night, night after night, the calm of his Upper Montagu Street neighborhood would be shattered by Gadd leaping from his chair and declaring, “I want to be Ivan Incandescence! I could become Horace Hydrogen!”
Working backwards through the alphabet, “Gary Glitter” was simply the next alliteratively daft name he came up with. But this time it stuck.
In a perfect world, Gary Glitter would never have existed. In a perfect world, he would not have been able to. Visually, he was disastrous. Slightly middle-aged, slightly overweight, slightly all-round daunting, he came over like a cross between the failed nightclub crooner he had once been and the space-age mutant he now wanted to be.
He was by no means ugly, but Glitter could never hope to be the next can of teen meat on the weenybopper’s shelf. So he exaggerated his faults, put on too much makeup, showed too much flesh and developed into the perfect caricature of a rock ’n’ roll superstar.
One of his best moves, and Doctor Frank-N-Furter certainly learned a little from this one, had him appear at the top of a staircase, a single gloved hand creeping around an all-concealing curtain.
As the beat grew louder, an arm emerged, followed by a shoulder, and so teasingly on, until Gary was revealed, his back to the audience, a voluminous cloak hanging to the ground.
Slowly, he would shrug the cloak to the ground, and only then would he turn, slowly still, to face the baying crowd. His eyes would be staring, his mouth open in a frozen “O,” as though he were astonished—or horrified—by what he saw. And then he would open his mouth to sing: “Come on, come on. . . .”
Like the most shamelessly obscene vaudeville stripper, Glitter used his body as a weapon, to shock, to titillate the audience. The New Musical Express called him “the ultimate test of a liberated mind. If you can’t live with the sight of Gary Glitter, the Michelin man of glam rock, quivering like [a] tripe factory, you’re just another bigoted straight.” He looked, the same organ reported, “like a Yogi Bear [water bed] disguised as David Bowie.”
It didn’t matter. As Mike Leader put it, “Suddenly it all came together. We were writing and making the sort of record that we had both loved to listen to when we were fourteen and fifteen years old, yet it wasn’t preconceived. We had not planned it that way. But when we played the tapes back, the sound we heard was a revelation.”
English Glam rocker Gary Glitter, New Zealand’s first Frank.
Photofest
“Rock and Roll” was to become one of the most unique records of its era, and even at the time, trying to chronicle Glitter’s career was like trying to stop a juggernaut lorry. Hit followed hit followed hit; Glitter was everywhere and everything, and between 1972 and 1975, he was effectively unstoppable.
Slowly, however, and inevitably, the sales started slowing, the hits seemed less than hypnotic, the formula started to creak. Glitter himself, behind the scenes, was suffering both financial woes and psychological pressures, and while he was seldom far from the public eye, his 1991 autobiography, The Leader, spoke openly of the problems that suddenly assailed him.
Hounded into bankruptcy by the Inland Revenue, bruised and battered by his commercial decline, drinking heavily, “the self destruct button was firmly pushed.”
The Rocky Horror Show offered him respite from his woes, allowed him to recharge the batteries that would enable him to launch at least a tentative comeback once he returned to the UK. It reminded him that performance was the thing that mattered most to him—more than stardom, more than fame, more than a congratulatory phone call from his accountants.
It did not even matter that the New Zealand tour was neither an overpublicized outing nor an especially well-received one. Its strongest reviews stemmed from a short stay in Wellington in August, and Rotarua leading into September, but interest dropped away after that; and by the time the production closed, later in the fall, it felt as though the curtain was finally being lowered on The Rocky Horror Show.
The Twelfth Replacement Janet
Even the London engagement was nearing closure. The Rocky Horror Show had hung on in its spiritual home of Chelsea for six years now. But in early 1979, it received the news that, once again, the wrecking ball was eyeing its home, tearing down that faithful pile to make way for something new and shiny.
At the beginning of April 1979, The Rocky Horror Show made the final move of its original life span, to the 820-seat Comedy Theatre (now the Harold Pinter Theatre) on Panton Street, in London’s Leicester Square—the heart, at last, of the capital’s West End theater district.
The theater itself was one of London’s loveliest, two years short of celebrating its centenary and with its original 1881 interior more or less intact. The horseshoe-shaped balconies were a whimsical joy that simply dared one not to admire them during the dull parts of a performance, while the Comedy had also played its part in paving the way for The Rocky Horror Show’s very existence, with the creation of the anticensorial New Watergate Club, back in the bleak mid-1950s.
Nell and Eddie of the Rocky Horror performance group Preshow at The Tiffany Theater on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood, 1981.
© Amadscientist/Wikimedia Commons
A new cast came together to mark the new home, a company that would include, over the remainder of the show’s lifetime, Peter Blake as Doctor Frank-N-Furter; Neil McCaul as Riff-Raff; and, still largely unknown but clearly going places, a young actress named Tracey Ullman as Janet Weiss.
The daughter of a Roma mother and a Polish father who settled in England during World War II, the erstwhile Trace Ullman discovered a talent for mimicry when she and her elder sister Patti staged nightly variety performances for their mother.
She took those nascent abilities to school, too, and when she was twelve, she won a scholarship to the Italia Conti Academy, a theater arts training school established by, and named for, the great Italian actress.
At thirteen, Ullman appeared on television’s The Tommy Steele Show; at sixteen, she was in West Berlin, dancing in a German ballet production of Gigi. Back home, she joined the Second Generation dance troupe, although any further aspirations she may have had were allegedly, if cruelly, curtailed the night she forgot to put on underwear before she took the stage.
Dismissed from dance, Ullman turned instead to musical theatre, and by the time she was cast in The Rocky Horror Show, she was already something of a West End veteran, with roles in Grease and Elvis the Musical behind her.
Later, following her departure from The Rocky Horror Show, Ullman would blossom even further, becoming a recording star for a few glorious mid-1980s moments and an internationally renowned television personality, one of the most accomplished comediennes of her generation.
And yes, her Janet does rank among Rocky’s most triumphant, not only for the comic timing that she introduced to the role, and the guileless joy of her singing voice, but also for that moment of pure bottled lightning when she transitioned from the “old” Janet to the “new” one.
The loss of innocence has rarely been so skillfully portrayed, even if Ullman’s own memories of her stint are most self-effacing. In 2015, she told the Express newspaper, “I remember it was a freezing cold theatre in London where we did it, and I was like the twelfth replacement Janet.”
August 1979 saw The Rocky Horror Show set out on its first-ever UK tour, with an all-new cast introducing twenty-one-year-old Daniel Abineri, a teenage Rocky fanatic back in the days of the Classic Cinema, as Doctor Frank-N-Furter, and reintroducing the ever-faithful Ziggy Byfield as Eddie and Dr. Scott.
Coproduced by Michael White and Cameron Mackintosh, and with Richard O’Brien overseeing the auditions, it was a purposefully garish production, louder and lewder than it had ever been in the capital. It was also one to which Abineri seemed to be born; so effective were his performances that as soon as the tour returned to London, he stepped in as the very last of the original London Franks.
It was with its arrival at the Comedy that The Rocky Horror Show finally stepped into the realm of traditional theater, at least in terms of a British production.
For the first time in its six-year life span, the action played out on a proscenium stage. For the first time, the entire production took place before the audience, as opposed to occasionally within it. For the first time, Doctor Frank-N-Furter made his entrance from the stage instead of creeping up on the audience from behind. For the first time, you could buy tickets for seats arranged on so many separate levels.
And for the first time, The Rocky Horror Show closed down for good.
It remained at the Comedy until September 13, 1980, and its 2,960th performance. And then the curtain came down and the laboratory fell silent.
The show was over.
But not really.