Just in time for Halloween, Forbidden Fruit, Eugene’s only live Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast, is presenting its annual late-night performances.
For $10, students can nourish their taste for obscurity and relive the cult classic Friday and Saturday at the Bijou Art Cinemas at 11 p.m.
The show’s 22-person cast, all but two of whom are University students, assumes personas for every imaginable sexual orientation and shouts profane puns back at the screen throughout the show as they re-enact loose character dialogue and dance in-step to the film’s extravagant musical segues.
Black fishnets are ubiquitous, complementing a blur of candy-red and baby-blue corsets dawned by both men and women.
As if the original gender-bending 1975 cult film starring Tim Curry and Susan Sarandon is not chocked full of enough profanities, the off-stage cast members interject edgy callback lines in the film’s natural pauses in conversation. For example, in one of the initial scenes when the newly married couple Brad Majors and Janet Weiss find themselves stranded with a flat tire on a dark and rainy country backroad, Brad, preparing to open his door and examine the tire, turns to his blushing bride and says rather innocently, “there is no sense in both of us getting wet.”
The comeback is instantaneous.
“She already is!” the cast screams in unison.
Needless to say, the show is not for children or the innocent-minded. Although the cast watched parents and grandparents bring their toddlers to previous years’ showings.
Though a casual viewer may not initially notice the extent to which lines have been rehearsed in the boisterous combination of live and canned dialogue, one begins to notice how synchronized and well-recited the superimposed discourse really is. Different off-stage cast members seem to be responsible for certain callbacks, while other lines are uttered en masse with a sprinkling of giggles.
At Wednesday’s dress rehearsal for the troupe’s pantomimed rendition of the classic work, Andy Wise gave a stunningly flamboyant performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the film’s bisexual mad scientist and main antagonist, played by Curry three and a half decades ago. At one point when the doctor is stumbling to chase his studly, Frankenstein-esque creation, Rocky, around the laboratory to an up-beat, Queen-sounding score, the crazed and lustful look on Wise’s face matches Curry’s. The choreographed wobbles in Wise’s stride are spot-on, giving a clear impression that he has studied that scene alone ad nauseam.
Forbidden Fruit’s main director and coordinator Holly Landaker, a University senior and psychology major, played the curious criminologist narrator, who views the shadow cast performance as an outlet for all the bizarre behavior that compliments the arrival of Halloween.
“Halloween is the biggest season, and it is when we usually sell out,” Landaker said. “(At the shows), people from all different backgrounds can come together in a safe and fun environment where they can be who they want to be.”
Roz Panofsky, playing the crazed, white-faced maid named Magenta, is a stage director for the show and the director of props. In her second year with Forbidden Fruit, Panofsky majored in vocal performance 10 years ago at Humboldt State University and witnessed the Rocky sub-culture years ago when it was even more lascivious.
“These shows used to be really, really crazy,” the actress said. “It’s much, much tamer now, which is a step in the right direction.”
University junior and French major Tiffany Thomas has only been with the troupe for a few months, and commands a supporting role as a “Tranny,” referring to the posse of inhabitants from Transexual, Transylvania, who lap up the spotlight during musical numbers.
“I’m excited to be in front of people, but I am nervous about flashing someone or falling,” Thomas said. “Besides that, I get to wear lingerie every night.”
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