No goldfish for you, bad theatre patron!

Kathryn and I had a huge throwdown fight in the Quad-C Theatre parking lot last night with a couple of Rocky Horror Puppet Show bouncer chicks. Doc and Brett stood on the sidelines and cheered for us. I was a little nervous because they looked tough, what with the fishnets and the dark eye makeup and the bored attitude, but apart from my black eye and a bruise on Kathryn’s cheek, we totally kicked their asses. And then we did the Time Warp on their unconscious bodies. And all because they wouldn’t let us into the theatre after intermission with our little vending machine goldfish cracker snacks. NOBODY tells me to leave my goldfish at the front desk!! I loves the fishes, ’cause they’re so delicious.

So, yeah, apart from THAT, we had a great evening! The Rocky Horror Puppet Show was fantastic. The only real downer was that they didn’t allow you to throw anything at the stage. (Thus the goldfish debacle described above)

Amazing costumes. Fantastic singers. Incredible scenery. And puppets. Oh yeah.

Sitting in boxes on the sidelines were life-size-ish puppets of Cher, Jesus, Hitler, Gene Simmons, Michael Jackson, Bart Simpson, Mr. T, the Beatles, Tina Turner, President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Batman, Spiderman, Abe Lincoln, Wonder Woman, Harry Potter, Stevie Wonder, and more that I can’t remember. They slowly filed in to their seats as we got closer to showtime, and would occasionally interact with each other (i.e. Wonder Woman going down on Harry Potter)…

The part of the Narrator (where’s your fuckin’ neck?!) was played by a guy doing a GW Bush impression (where’s your fuckin’ brain?!). Rocky was a ten-foot-tall puppet painted gold, worked by a guy on stilts and four other actors who worked his arms and legs. I love how they made no pretense of hiding the actors working the puppet.

Most of the cast was… to put it bluntly, mostly-naked-eye-candy college kids. Frank had an absolutely textbook-perfect male body, although his textbook-perfect six-pack did not become visible until late in the show when he removed his corset. His costuming was fantastic, especially his thigh high red vinyl boots. The actress who played Columbia had the squealing down to a T. Most of the actors — well, the main Transylvanians, anyway — had small puppets of themselves attached to their costumes in various ways. The guy who played Eddie was great, although not in the play for very long, and they got around the problem of the motorcycle by having him wear a motorcyle-themed codpiece, complete with handlebars. Brad (holy shit, it’s Superman!) and Janet (dammit) were quite good as well.

Two of the sideline-puppets, who were probably supposed to be the film critics from the Muppet Show, were miked — well, the actors controlling them were miked — and they would shout out a lot of the audience participation parts. Audience members did too, although Doc, who knows the whole thing backwards and forwards, didn’t end up doing a lot of the shouting because the lines he learned in Wichita are somewhat different than the lines that we learned here. And he was outnumbered! But he did sing along to every song, which made me very happy. Aaah, what a voice. 🙂

The cast also did some minor interacting with the audience… they could time their lines so as to give enough time to people shouting things at them. When we shouted, for the fourth time, “Castles don’t have phones, asshole!” at Brad, he turned to the audience and said “It’s in the script!”

I loved it and highly recommend seeing it… except this afternoon’s performance was the last one. Oh well — maybe they’ll do it again or tour it or something (do college theatres tour???). I don’t know how it works, but hopefully someone has written down all the stage directions and taken extensive photography of the sets and costumes, so that another group could perform it sometime, at the very least.

Oh, and I went to high school with the director, Dane Hoffman. My most vivid memory of Dane is of him coming to school in a Superman leotard, complete with red jockey shorts worn on the outside. He was brave.