As a die-hard Rockyphile for many, many years, this was without doubt the worst audience participation experience I've ever seen.
I've lived in Orlando for a while, and I'd really been looking forward to experiencing the city's well-regarded Rocky Horror Picture Show shadowcast. I had heard good things for years, but I'd somehow never managed to go. I finally did so during October and... wow... I'm at a loss.
From what I've been able to learn since my experience by talking to other attendees and former associates of the show, they weren't always like this. Apparently they used to be extremely organized, in sync, and put on a great performance. Not so much now, evidently.
The first moment I realized something was off was when they started the show by describing it as "a crappy movie." That's the theme of their AP script: this is a bad movie and no one likes it. In all my years of RHPS fandom, I've never encountered that attitude. The point of the show is to celebrate the movie, not insult it. They kept it up all night, deriding the music, the story, and even the cast - which is odd, considering it contains at least three Shakespearean actors and an Oscar-winner. The Rich Weirdos, though, seemed to feel their role was to act as a kind of budget MST3K.
That wasn't the biggest problem, though. It's a weird approach, but if that's your thing, sure, run with it. In fact, it appears they used the script from Atlanta's Lips Down on Dixie troupe as their starting point, so someone must enjoy it. No, the biggest problem was that the AP was a disorganized, incoherent mess.
There were clearly two people fighting for control of the show: an MC, and the fellow playing the Criminologist. The Criminologist, for his part, seemed to know what he was doing. He seemed to be using a completely different script, one with the traditional jokes, the classics that the audience is supposed to know going in, and he did it well. He was badly overshadowed by the MC, though, who spent the entire night shouting into his microphone with a bottomless supply of terrible material. And when I say overshadowed I don't mean the Criminologist was just less prominent, I mean they were literally talking over each other and the MC was much louder and coarser. It was like watching a tug-of-war where one of the participants keeps throwing handfuls of rocks at the other. It's hard to describe how awful it was. The audience members who had prior experience were completely lost... in fact, the only times there was any coherence in the jokes was when we made them. Otherwise, there was no chorus of voices, just a lot of discordant babble.
Apart from the Criminologist's efforts, the loose script they were using was, frankly, terrible. As I mentioned, they had taken the current Atlanta script and embellished it, but their embellishments were dreadful and endless. Instead of one joke leading to another and maybe one more, it was one not-especially-clever joke leading to six or seven in a row, and when the string of quips was over they had talked over a huge stretch of the movie. One of the fundamental tenets of these shows is supposed to be that you don't talk over any significant portion of the dialogue so that the audience, especially any Rocky virgins, can still follow the story. These guys had no respect for the film at all, and it showed in their complete obliteration of what was occurring onscreen. They seem to be so convinced of their own superior entertainment value that they assume that's all the audience needs to see.
What else can I say? Most of the cast was gender-swapped, that was annoying. I imagine they thought it was appropriate to the film, but it didn't work, and you could see how proud they were of it. A female Frank-N-Furter is just... silly. The prop bags were nice enough but they failed to caution the audience not to throw the rice directly at the faces of the people behind them, so the evening started off with a nice round of sharp eye pain.
The person playing Trixie was great. That's my one word of praise.
All in all, it was an incomprehensible, disrespectful disaster. I hope there's a better cast somewhere in the state, but if you've never done this before and decide to see this one, please don't judge the Rocky Horror Picture Show by what you're about to experience. It's pretty much the antithesis of what you should expect. read more
