Wednesday, October 7, 2009

it's a month of rocky horror

During my first semester of college, I accidentally joined a theatre company on campus that does shadowcasts of the Rocky Horror Picture Show despite never having seen the movie before. (A shadowcast, for those who don't know, is a performance in which people act out a film on stage while it is being screened behind them.) It's funny how freshman-year shyness can make you do crazy things.

While I may have ended up doing some regrettable things during the semester I was a part of this group, I don't regret my brief foray into the comically depraved world fans have created around this 1976 cult film. The story of a newly engaged couple who get stranded at the mansion of transvestite scientist Frank N. Furter, Rocky Horror Picture Show is a job actress Susan Sarandon refuses to acknowledge ever having done.

This month, local theatre companies are not putting on one but two performances of the Rocky Horror Show, which is the stage version of the horror-rock-opera-parody-etc. movie, sans screen. From October 7 to 11, it'll be at Montgomery College's Parilla Performing Arts Center on their Rockville campus. And throughout the last weeks of October and first two weeks of November (including a midnight performance on Halloween) it'll be performed by the Kensington Arts Theatre in the Kensington Town Hall, no less. For more info, check out Montgomery College's and Kensington Arts Theatre's websites.

2 comments:

Terry in Silver Spring said...

During my freshman year at UMd in fall of 1980, I ended up at a midnight showing of Rocky Horror at a long gone theater just down from campus on Rt 1. What a hoot, especially since I had no idea what this was all about. I can't tell you how many times I've seen that movie, but it's a lot. Rocky Horror taught me a good life lesson, too. If you are going to take a whole bunch of rolls of toilet paper from the bathrooms in your dorm, take it from floor in the building other than your own. That wisdom has served me well over the years.

Cyndy said...

If you see the show this week, be sure to wave at the bass player!