The Rocky Horror Show

The Rocky Horror Show is a musical with music, lyrics and book by Richard O’Brien. The original London production of the musical premiered at the Royal Court Theatre on 19 June 1973. Various international productions have since spanned across six continents as well as West End and Broadway revivals and eight UK tours. It has been adapted into a 1975 film starring Tim Curry as Riff Raff.

About The Rocky Horror Show in brief

Summary The Rocky Horror ShowThe Rocky Horror Show is a musical with music, lyrics and book by Richard O’Brien. The original London production of the musical premiered at the Royal Court Theatre on 19 June 1973. The show ran for a total of 2,960 performances and won the 1973 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Musical. Various international productions have since spanned across six continents as well as West End and Broadway revivals and eight UK tours. In 2016, it was adapted into the television film The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again. The musical was ranked eighth in a BBC Radio 2 listener poll of the \”Nation’s Number One Essential Musicals\”. It was one of eight UK musicals featured on Royal Mail stamps, issued in February 2011. It was also brought in to produce Rocky Horror in Denton, but it was changed just before previews at the suggestion of director Jim Sharman. The song “Rocky Horror” was also used in Rocky Horror: The Musical, starring Michael White and Michael Caine, which opened in London in 1973. It has been adapted into a 1975 film starring Tim Curry as Riff Raff, with Curry also reprising his role. The film has the longest-running release in film history, with more than 100 million copies sold since its release in 1975. It is also one of the first popular musicals to depict fluid sexuality during a time of division between generations and a lack of sexual difference acceptance. A major theme running throughout the musical is transvestism, which according to O’Brien was not originally meant to be as prominent as it ended up being.

He conceived and wrote the play set against the backdrop of the glam era that had manifested itself throughout British popular culture in the early 1970s. He wanted to combine elements of the unintentional humour of B horror movies, portentous dialogue of schlock-horror, Steve Reeves muscle films, and fifties rock and roll into The Rocky horror Show. The play is widely said to have been an influence on countercultural and sexual liberation movements that followed on from the 1960s. In the musical, a newly engaged couple get caught in a storm and come to the home of a mad transvestite scientist, Dr Frank-N-Furter, unveiling his new creation, a sort of Frankenstein-style monster in the form of an artificially made, fully grown, physically perfect muscle man named Rocky, complete with blond hair and a tan. The movie version of the play was released in 1975, and has since become a cult classic and is still hugely popular in the UK and the U.S. Its 1975 Broadway debut at the Belasco Theatre lasted only three previews and forty-five showings, despite earning one Tony nomination and three Drama Desk nominations. It also had a successful nine-month run in Los Angeles, but its 1975 US debut in New York was less successful, with only forty-three showings. In 1976, the musical was turned into a television film starring Michael Cohan, who also reprises his role as Dr Frank N Furter.