The dark theater buzzes with the hushed voices of stage and lighting crew members as a girl wearing a flouncy skirt and glittery heels runs on stage pushing a man in a wheelchair, shrieking her lines at the top of her lungs. A woman with a headset stops the action, saying “Keep doing what you’re doing, we’re trying to get the light to follow you.”
With only a few days left until opening night, the cast and crew of the iconic “Rocky Horror Show,” produced by the UNM Department of Theater and Dance, is in the frantic process of bringing more than six months of planning and rehearsal into fruition.
Director Gil Lazier said the play is a complex story of a naïve young couple, Brad and Janet, who stumble upon a castle of sex-crazed aliens. The main conflict is between the young couple and the leader of the group, a transsexual alien who tries to awaken their sexual desires.
“It’s very realistic, as you can tell,” he said.
Lazier said the musical was originally written in 1972 by Richard O’Brien, who was a transsexual musical comedy performer struggling to land major roles in the theater. Lazier said O’Brien’s solution was to write something for himself to perform. He said the play originates from the wildly sexual ‘70s counter-culture, but it also incorporates other cultures, particularly through the music.
“The show has not only stuff that sounds like the whole glam-rock transsexual scene in the 70s,” he said, “but it’s got American rock-and-roll, and it’s got rockamillion, and it’s got stuff that sounds like Chuck Berry, so there’s a whole pastiche of American popular music.”
The movie was produced soon after the play and was an immediate flop, but Lazier said someone re-released it and started showing it at midnight, which is when its popularity skyrocketed and a cult following began.
The movie has exactly the same dialogue and music as the original play and differs only technically, in matters such as set and location. He said this production will incorporate some visual elements from the movie.
“Of course you can’t do a movie on the stage, so every time a stage production is done of it it’s brand new,” he said. “We’re trying to put into our production some similarities so the audiences who know the movie will recognize it in our production: visual references.”
Gilbert Sanchez, who plays the transsexual alien leader Dr. Frank-N-Furter, said the play is unique in its intricate technical details and artistic decisions.
“Our set is amazing,” he said, “People say, ‘How’s Rocky?’ and I’m like, ‘The set itself is worth the ticket price.’ They went full-out. We have a whole staircase and a working slide on stage. Also, our costume design decided to go with a more Japanese-style costume, so the creative staff has worked a lot on making it very different but very intricate.”
Lazier said there are many technical complexities in the musical, so more than 100 people have been involved in the overall production since its conception.
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“The show is spectacular,” he said. “We’ve got strobe effects, and we’ve got fog effects … and all kinds of stuff.”
He said there are 40 – 50 people backstage just to manage all of the effects.
Even for a musical, Sanchez said “The Rocky Horror Show” is one-of-a-kind and presents unique challenges for him as an actor. He said he loves how O’Brien played Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the film, but he still had to find his own inspiration for the character.
“For me it was hard not to just copy everything he did, because it was so good in the movie,” he said. “I had to take from him but also completely create my own character using my acting techniques and research and stuff like that.”
Sanchez said the play presents physicals challenges, too.
“Learning to walk in huge high heels … my ankles and calves are sore from the last couple days of rehearsal,” he said.
Although Dr. Frank-N-Furter seems outlandish, he’s not all alien.
Sanchez said he has human qualities that are important for the audience to understand.
“I think he comments on the obsession of having everyone’s eyes on him, being the center of attention,” he said. “I think, if anything, that’s probably his most relatable quality. It’s kind of an extreme of what humans want: How they want all this attention, but they don’t get it.”
Lazier said that the audience should be able to relate to the characters they see, and the live connection between actors and viewers is the reason theater still has a dominant presence within the arts.
“That’s kept the theater alive for thousands of years,” he said. “It’s not dying. There’s media going, and there’s great movies and tremendously popular stuff on the Internet and video games and so forth, but it doesn’t take the place. It’s not the same as live theater. It’s a certain kind of communion.”
“The Rocky Horror Show”
Opens Friday
Runs until Nov. 20
Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays: 7:30 p.m.
Sundays: 2 p.m.
Rodey Theatre, UNM Center for the Arts
$20 General Admission, $15 Faculty & Seniors, $10 Staff and Students
