By Guadalupe Santos-Sanchez, Staff Reporter | Photos Courtesy of Facebook.com
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is about two newly engaged college age people, Janet Weiss and Brad Majors who go to a nearby castle to ask for help after their car breaks down, said Rocky Horror New Mexico Director, Tim Coggins.
“They get sucked into a bit of a whirlwind of sexual promiscuity, aliens, and it really tests the two main characters Brad and Janet’s resolve as normal people,” he said.
Janet is an innocent girl, who while staying at the castle experiences weird things, said Melanie Gruber.
“She ends up turning into a slut for many different reasons. She was a virgin when she got there and she ended up sleeping with two people in that castle in one night,” she said.
Rocky Horror is a creation by the transvestite and he is very illiterate, she said.
According to imdb.com, the transvestite is a mad scientist named Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who creates the perfect life form for himself to have as a sexual toy. Other characters in the castle are servants Riff Raff and Magenta, a groupie named Columbia, the ex-delivery boy Eddie, a rival scientist Dr. Everett V. Scott, and an expert and narrator The Criminologist.
The night of each production starts with a pre-show where the rules are introduced and they kind of play around with the audience, said Coggins.
Those who have never seen the show before are called virgins and they are all gathered up right before the show, he said.
“They are basically mocked or made to do some sort of uncomfortable task like eating a cup of cereal out of someone else’s pants or sometimes they are forced to eat bananas since they are sexual innuendo,” he said.
This is called the virgin sacrifice and it is just a way to loosen up the audience and be a little raunchy, he said.
They are a shadow cast, which means they act out the entire movie on a stage while the film plays on a screen behind them, Coggins said.
“We also have a group referred to as the Trannys and they are the party goers, they interact with the audience, they do the call backs that have become classic over the 40 years that Rocky Horror has been a film,” he said.
“We pride ourselves in being extremely screen accurate, we try and make our costumes as close to the film as possible, we do actually sing and recite all the lines, we do all the dancing, we perform a full floor show, and there is multiple costume changes,” he said.
Rocky Horror New Mexico was started in 2010 by Teresa Ewers and Rocky Horror New Mexico producer Dustin Martinez, to bring Rocky Horror back to New Mexico, Coggins said.
It had been ten years since the last performance of the show anywhere in the state, he said.
Their official name is Rocky Horror New Mexico, but they are more commonly known as The Hotdogs, he said.
“It’s a reference to the movie, there’s a line in the movie where the main character Dr. Frank-N-Furter is called a hotdog by supporting cast members as an offensive term and we thought it was kind of funny and fitting,” he said.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is presented once a month, every fourth Saturday of the month, Coggins said.
September’s show will be of Guest Performer theme, he said. It will be at the Aux Dog Theatre on Sept. 27 and will start at 10:00 pm.
Other themes have included Back to School Night and in the Gender Bender themed show that they do every June or July, men play female roles and women play male roles, he said.
“But in October we’ll have multiple shows, two up in Santa Fe and two in town at the Guild Cinema,” he said.
These will be on Oct. 24, 25, and 31 and will include a Nov. 1 show.
Tickets are only $10 except for the Halloween shows, those are $15, Coggins said, and they ask that the audience be of an appropriate age to watch an R rated film.
“We always sell prop bags which allow our audience to interact with the show by utilizing the props like cards, and rubber gloves, we have noise makers for you to use, we have all kinds of different props, those are for $3 – $5,” he said.
As a tradition, everyone at Rocky Horror New Mexico usually walks around Nob Hill on the Friday before the show to advertise, he said.
Their next audition will be the first Tuesday in December, and they usually have auditions to join the cast the Tuesday after the performance, he said, and they do not allow anyone bellow the age of 18 to join the cast.
