Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals

The Rocky Horror Show

The Rocky Horror Show, that unlikely cult phenomenon with music and lyrics by Richard O’Brien, and a script by O’Brien and (uncredited) director Jim Sharman and the original cast, hit the London stage in 1973, and it was certainly an animal like no other. At its core it tells a tale we’ve heard many times before, back even before Shakespeare, of braving a wilderness , of surviving lost innocence, of sexual awakening, about accepting differences, about birth and death, forgiveness and redemption, about the fall from grace of a transgressive god. And yet there is something different here, born as it was in the midst of the alternative theatre movement and at the dawn of the punk rock era. Of its first production in London, Jack Tinker wrote in the Daily Mail, ‘‘Richard O’Brien’s spangled piece of erotic fantasy is so funny, so fast, so sexy, and so unexpectedly well realised that one is in danger of merely applauding it without assessing it. That would be a pity. Because I believe Mr. O’Brien has something quite nifty to say.’’ Rocky Horror explores American sexual hang-ups, the cultural chaos of the sexual revolution, and the sometimes cruel myth of the American Dream. It uses as its vocabulary a heady mix of cultural icons like Charles Atlas and muscle magazines, Frederick’s of Hollywood, old science fiction B-movies with scantily clad women, horror movies with barely sublimated sexual fantasies, and punk and glam rock with their blurring of gender lines, collectively representing a long history of Americans hiding sex behind other things, of pretending to be sexless. And far from being an irrelevant museum piece today, Rocky Horror holds lessons for us even now about how Americans arguably overreact to nearly everything that comes along, and about how much happier we’d all be if we’d just stop doing that. Because the show was created entirely by British artists, it has the advantage of an outsider’s objectivity in its exploration and satire of these mostly American phenomena. But its parentage also allows us to see its cross-dressing not as a subversive transgression, but instead as just one more example in a long tradition of cross-dressing, from boys playing girls in Shakespeare’s original productions, to men playing women in British pantomime, to the later androgyny of British glam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rocky Horror Show The Rocky Horror Show [ 113 rockers like David Bowie, Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Bryan Ferry, Boy George, and others. For the British, the cross-dressing in Rocky Horror was perhaps the least subversive element when it opened in London. The Rocky Horror score is often dismissed as simplistic bubble-gum pop, but a closer examination shows sophisticated storytelling through the music, delineating character and showing us the relative intensities of sexual awareness and openness among the characters. In this score, sexuality is expressed through the beat of rock and roll. Notice that Brad and Janet sing the softest pop (‘‘Dammit Janet,’’ ‘‘Once in a While’’), the servants sing rock with a harder beat (‘‘The Time Warp,’’ ‘‘The Sword of Damocles’’), and Frank gets the hardest beat, complete with electric guitar distortion (‘‘Sweet Transvestite,’’ ‘‘The Charles Atlas Song’’). Eddie sings late 1950s rock and roll (‘‘Whatever Happened to Saturday Night?’’), a form already in the past, showing us that he and his innocent view of sexuality are no longer part of this world. When Brad and Janet become sexually awakened, they are able to sing the harder rock of ‘‘Rose Tint My World’’ and ‘‘Wild and Untamed Thing.’’ We can watch Brad’s transformation , from the innocence of ‘‘Dammit Janet’’ to the self-awareness of ‘‘OnceinaWhile’’tothefrighteningsexualawakeningofthefloorshowto the despairing but perceptive poetry of ‘‘Super Heroes.’’ You can trace the musical journeys of Janet and Frank the same way. Whether O’Brien did all this consciously or not, it’s all there and it tells us musically who these people are and how they change, just like all the greatest works of musical theatre do. Though many people might laugh at the notion, Rocky Horror is in many ways a serious musical and a serious social document. Interestingly, many of the artists involved with the original productions of Rocky Horror have said in interviews that they believe the subsequent American productions in Los Angeles and New York and the film version lost much of what’s important about the show—its grit, its rawness , its confrontational directness, its relationship with...