Tag: Melanie Gruber

Rocky Horror New Mexico

cnmchronicleLeave a comment

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.

From Knife to Stage; CNM culinary arts student takes on a new role

cnmchronicleLeave a comment

By Guadalupe Santos-Sanchez, Staff Reporter

Melanie Gruber is a Culinary Arts major at CNM who regularly performs in the Albuquerque production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

A few years ago she went to her first Rocky Horror Show and won a costume contest dressed as Janet, Gruber said, then in November 2013 she found out through Facebook that they were holding auditions, so she auditioned and made it.

She had no acting experience before she auditioned for the show, she said.

“The audition was very nerve-wracking we had a scene that we had to read, and then we had to do the same scene while they were yelling the call backs at us, and we had to do a Q&A,” she said.

The cast does not discriminate if you do not have any skill, if you cannot sing they are not going to turn you away because it is a fun show, she said.

If you do not have any acting experience they will try to train you, if not you can be part of the crew or a Tranny, which is mostly singing and dancing, she said.

“They just work with everybody they don’t like to turn people down unless they have a bad personality, if you’re going to cause problems then they won’t let you on the cast,” Gruber said.

She initially auditioned for Janet Weiss, but everyone who makes it automatically becomes a Transylvanian, or a Tranny, before becoming main cast, she said.

“A Tranny is a Transylvanian, they’re like the party guest/ chorus, so if you’ve ever seen the film they’re the people in the tail coats and fun hats that were weird looking,” Gruber said.

She has been in every perfor­mance since she started and she has played a Tranny, Janet, and Rocky Horror, she said.

When she is not playing Janet she plays a Tranny, she said.

“I like playing Janet the most, because I like to be on the stage, I like to be the person that everybody likes to look at,” Gruber said.

Having to dance around in a corset, under­wear, fishnet, and high heels is very nerve-rack­ing, however, because she is shy, she said.

“The first time it was really bad because my mom’s boyfriend was in the audience and I was like oh gosh… before the show I did a lot of hyperventilating ‘cause I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to feel about it and when I got out there I just blocked everything out, I was like, I’m doing this by myself nobody else is here, nobody’s watching,” Gruber said.

Her first performance as Rocky was for their Gender Bender show, Gruber said.

“He makes weird noises, so it’s really hard to get comfortable with him, because you don’t say anything really, you just make grunting noises,” she said, “it was difficult at first because you have to grunt the right way, or else you just sound awful.”

“When I was doing the gender bender show and I was playing Rocky for one of the scenes Rocky has to be touching Janet seductively, and the guy who was playing Janet decided to motor­boat me into his fake boobs and put me under his slip,” she said.

Usually it is just touching or rubbing the chest area but he took it to a whole new level, she said.

To prepare for the show she watches the movie a lot and practices to ensure that she does not mess up, she said.

Before the show, she does vocal exercises because she has to do a lot of singing, she said.

For the show, the movie is projected onto a screen and the cast are on stage performing the exact same thing that the characters are doing in the film, at the same time, she said.

“We kind of block it out, we block out the movie and we block out the call backs- because the audi­ence is scream­ing obscenities as part of the show,” she said.

“I put a lot of acting into it, actually for a show I become that character not just somebody in a costume saying lines, I pretend that I actually am that character,” Gruber said.

Her performance is a lot better than when she started, she said, she knows her lines and dance moves more and she does not get as ner­vous as she used to.

This is just a side thing and she never thought she would do theatre until she saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show, she said.

She first watched the movie when she was 6 years old, her whole family used to sit and watch the movie together all the time, she said.

“I just fell in love with the movie, and I was like I have to do this I can’t not act in this movie, I have to do it… you have to be a pretty big fan to run around in your underwear,” she said.