IF YOU MISS the Neptune’s old theatrically enhanced midnight performances of Rocky Horror, you’ll have to drive over to West Seattle’s Admiral Theatre for its now monthly showings. Even as the cult favorite enjoys an outdoor revival this Saturday (sans costumed performers), the times are changing.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
August 25 at Gasworks Park
The Sound of Music
August 26 at Gasworks Park
“Rocky did really well for a long time,” explains Terry White of Landmark Theatres, which recently discontinued the film’s 23-year run. “There were surges at Halloween, on the show’s anniversary. It was profitable up until about two years ago.” However, attendance still lagged after cutting down the showings to once a month. “It was hard to pull the plug,” says White. “The over-20 age group may have burned out on it.”
Veronica Lavenz, a longtime member of the Seattle cast, hopes that the Admiral will be a better home for Rocky, with a more liberal policy when it comes to the show’s rather large props and a costume-wearing audience with a penchant for throwing food. “We’re hoping to attract more regulars,” she says, needing to supplement dwindling crowds with fresh faces to spray water and throw rice and toast. Most of today’s audience was born after the show’s 1975 release, she notes, affectionately calling these new viewers “virgins.” Also not uncommon is the sight of parents taking their teenage kids.
Yet for those same baby boomer families, Rocky has lost its cutting-edge kitsch appeal to an unlikely upstart: The sing-along Sound of Music. The subtitled 1965 Sound is hitting a handful of US cities this fall after drawing raves in the UK. In terms of camp, this is about as far from Rocky as you can get: Where Rocky boils over with fill-in-the-blank sexual references, Sound allows audiences to have it both ways. The great Rodgers and Hammerstein score is damnably, infectiously singable, while the bland, innocent surface is ripe for dissing. At Gasworks Park on Sunday, viewers can hoot, holler, talk back at the screen, and even dress in character to inject some much-needed irony to one of the squarest—and most successful—films of the ’60s.
Karaoke Sound promoter Charlotte Buchanan says the film “promotes awareness of a sweeter, simpler time”—which prompts both nostalgia and ridicule in aging boomers. Whether they’ll continue to enjoy Rocky‘s easier, intentional irony is harder to judge. It may be a phase they’ve grown out of. But Lavenz is sure that Rocky has some life it yet, even as the venerable tradition of the sing-along is time-warped back into the present.
