Audience Participation in The Rocky Horror Show Changed My Life
by Jessa Blackthorne, Guest Editorial
Jessa Blackthorne is a New Jersey-based actress with a BFA in Musical Theatre from Rockford University. She has been a shadowcaster for 14 years and currently directs The Cosmic Light Cabaret, a Rocky Horror Picture Show shadowcast based in Chatham, NJ.
Editor’s Note - This piece is a response to our column yesterday about audience callbacks at the new Rocky Horror revival on Broadway. We welcome anyone, anytime, who would like to write a response to our content.
The first time I fell in love with Rocky Horror, it wasn’t at a midnight movie screening, but on a Broadway stage.
I’d seen the movie at home several times, but it was just another movie to me. I liked it, but I didn’t really connect with it the same way my mother seemed to, fondly telling me stories of attending screenings in the Village back in the 80’s. But then my mom took me to Circle in the Square to see the 2000 Broadway Revival, and my life was forever changed.
At 7-years-old, I’d already made my love of musical theatre quite clear, but this show was different than anything I’d ever seen.
Audience members wore costumes replicating the characters’ outfits. Bags of props to be worn and thrown, like a marabou feather boa you could wear to instantly feel like the cool kids in costume, were sold for a few dollars in the lobby.
During the performance, the audience would yell things, but they weren’t hushed– instead, the actors would engage directly with them in often-hilarious back-and-forth dialogues that elevated the experience and instantly turned this from just another musical into something truly unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
Even before the show began, cast members clambered around the seats engaging with the audience (as an aside, one terrified me so much the first time I attended that he apologized to us at the stage door after the show and we struck up a sort of friendship with him, saying hi and chatting for a while at subsequent visits to the production, culminating in him recognizing us sitting in the front row of Dance of the Vampires a few years later. Wherever you are, Jonathan Sharp, I’ll always remember your kindness.)
Seeing it for the first time was the first true before-and-after moment of my life. I was like Dorothy Gale, stepping out of the sepia-toned farmhouse of my world before into a technicolor spectacle of madness and beauty and something I’d never even imagined was remotely possible.
As an autistic kid who often struggled to find community, I knew that this was home.
I’m center bottom, with some audience members at Circle In the Square in 2001
While the production’s more traditional elements, such as the creative design, acting performances, and musical direction, were all brilliant (seriously, if you haven’t heard the cast recording, go listen to it because every single arrangement is a banger) the most compelling parts of the show were the elements that incorporated audience participation.
For the first time, theatre was more than just a sit-back-and-watch experience where everyone politely and silently lets the material play out. It was a communal experience where, for a few hours, everyone in the room went on a (strange) journey together, experiencing the joy, laughter, and heartbreak, and sharing it with one another as a community.
We’ve seen plenty of shows this season do exactly that, including Cats: The Jellicle Ball and Every Brilliant Thing (and now, The Rocky Horror Show), and it’s clear that this type of human connection in a world where we are all struggling to connect is exactly what we as theatregoers need.
So when I read that audience participation doesn’t belong in a Broadway production of Rocky Horror, it gives me pause. Because I have seen a Broadway production already prove the opposite. And it leaves me not angry, but confused.
I want to be clear here that I’m not arguing for unsanctioned chaos: you’ll not see me encouraging audiences to ignore the theater’s rules or use movie-centric callbacks when the stage show isn’t the movie.
Despite many, many, many people complaining online that they’re unhappy with this production because it’s not the movie, I don’t really want the stage show to be the movie. That’s not fun or interesting. If I wanted to experience the movie, I’d go see my local shadowcast.
But the stage show has its own callbacks. The UK Tour has been encouraging them for years, and with audience participation so deeply tied to the cultural identity of Rocky Horror, if a production wants to allow for it then I see no reason why we should be fighting that.
This production is very clearly excited to have at least some elements of audience participation: Sam Pinkleton even invited the NYC Shadowcast to attend a recent run-through, and several people I know through that cast have confirmed they were very open and excited about the audience participation.
And honestly, that tells us everything we need to know: Not every production of The Rocky Horror Show is required to welcome or encourage audience participation, but this one is, and we ought to respect that and trust that they know the soul of their production better than we do. If that’s not for you, it’s not for you, and that’s okay.
But for some young person in the audience experiencing it for the first time, it might just change their life.
I know, because I was that kid.
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Jessa Blackthorne is also raising funds for her production company, Cheese Platter Productions, to bring 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood to the Edinburgh Fringe– donations are welcome.