Is the Rocky Horror Show as big a deal in the States as it is in New Zealand? The writer (and Riffraff in the movie) was Richard O'Brien, a New Zealander. Any stage production always draws large audiences, often dressed up in drag or in whiteface and top and tails. The audience, en masse, usually gets up and does the Time Warp in the aisles.
"Time Warp" seems to be one song that everyone knows, young or old. At one stage production I went to, a frail-looking woman who was well into her late eighties or early nineties got up and wiggled during the song, hanging on to the back of the seat in front of her for dear life.
Some interesting arcana: In one of the national stage productions, the then-Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, was the narrator. There were lots of political references and to-ing and fro-ing between him and the audience for some strange reason. I just about suffocated from laughing. Plus the fact that the actor who played Frankenfurter was really as gay as they came, and camped it up much more than Tim Curry could ever have got away with in the movie. It was really outrageous and the audience lapped it up. Lots of rice thrown. No toast, though.
One of the best renditions of "Time Warp" I've seen was sung (and played, on two pianos) by two caged-in queens at a piano bar in Dallas. The waitresses in the bar all got up on the pianos and did the dance steps, and the patrons all fell about trying to emulate them. It may have been the amount of Sam Adams I'd consumed, but I thought it was absolutely priceless.
Ah, well!
