Latest news with #TheatreUpstairs
Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Rocky Horror changed my life 50 years ago. I've been in a time warp ever since
In 1973, I was a 19-year-old hoofer either busking the streets of London in top hat, tails and tap shoes or being the soda jerk at a Knightsbridge cafe, dressing like Ruby Keeler, keeping boredom at bay by tap dancing on tables to 1930s music. Jim Sharman, another Aussie, arrived at the cafe with actor Richard O'Brien, whose unfinished rock musical based on Frankenstein, Jim had agreed to direct. Jim was explaining that the script needed two more servants as one was not enough for back-up vocals. On seeing me, he turned to Richard and said, 'There's your servant.' It was my first professional role on the London stage – in the tiny attic of The Royal Court Theatre, the Theatre Upstairs. A three-week rehearsal period to be followed by a three-week run for a play described by O'Brien as a 'fun knees-up'. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the result of a symbiotic, creative, relationship between O'Brien, Sharman, set designer Brian Thomson, musical director Richard Hartley, costume designer Sue Blane and, of course, actor Tim Curry. The following year, we all gathered in the freezing cold Bray Studios an hour outside London to begin filming The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Fox offered Jim a big budget and all-star cast but Jim wanted to use the original stage cast so Fox slashed the budget and gave him less than six weeks to shoot it. The one casting that they insisted on was that Brad and Janet be played by Americans. He flew to LA and cast Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick. The film opened to silence. Fox gave it a minimal distribution and it was shelved. But then a man in the publicity department at Fox's LA office decided to take it off the shelf and have a look. He thought it could work being shown at midnight screenings at the Waverly Theatre, New York City and sent it over. The same audience came week after week and began dressing up as the characters. Then they started calling out to the screen – the first one was when Janet puts a newspaper over her head to protect herself from the rain, that was the beginning of the callbacks. Soon after that, they began performing in costume in front of the screen and the 'shadowcast' was born. We had no idea about this until we were invited to New York for a one-year celebration of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and there were fishnets galore – lines of sequinned Columbias, Frank-N-Furters and the rest of the cast. It was fabulous. I think one of the reasons it has become a cult hit is because it is a joyous celebration of all things homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, heterosexual and cross-dressing. The script is witty, there's not a dud song in it, and it doesn't take itself seriously. The film has helped sexually liberate great swaths of conservative America. It took me some time to realise many of the fans were a combination of nerds who stayed in their rooms, unable to express themselves or people struggling with their sexuality. I find it so uplifting to be part of something that has and, 50 years later, continues to liberate so many. Many fans tell me that they had felt isolated or lonely, even cast out by their families, then discovered The Rocky Horror Picture Show community and found their people. I've met so many fans who have met their partners this way and now have a gaggle of mini fans. It brings me so much joy to be part of a film which has had such a positive and profound effect on so many people and continues to this day.
The Age
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Rocky Horror changed my life 50 years ago. I've been in a time warp ever since
In 1973, I was a 19-year-old hoofer either busking the streets of London in top hat, tails and tap shoes or being the soda jerk at a Knightsbridge cafe, dressing like Ruby Keeler, keeping boredom at bay by tap dancing on tables to 1930s music. Jim Sharman, another Aussie, arrived at the cafe with actor Richard O'Brien, whose unfinished rock musical based on Frankenstein, Jim had agreed to direct. Jim was explaining that the script needed two more servants as one was not enough for back-up vocals. On seeing me, he turned to Richard and said, 'There's your servant.' It was my first professional role on the London stage – in the tiny attic of The Royal Court Theatre, the Theatre Upstairs. A three-week rehearsal period to be followed by a three-week run for a play described by O'Brien as a 'fun knees-up'. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the result of a symbiotic, creative, relationship between O'Brien, Sharman, set designer Brian Thomson, musical director Richard Hartley, costume designer Sue Blane and, of course, actor Tim Curry. The following year, we all gathered in the freezing cold Bray Studios an hour outside London to begin filming The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Fox offered Jim a big budget and all-star cast but Jim wanted to use the original stage cast so Fox slashed the budget and gave him less than six weeks to shoot it. The one casting that they insisted on was that Brad and Janet be played by Americans. He flew to LA and cast Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick. The film opened to silence. Fox gave it a minimal distribution and it was shelved. But then a man in the publicity department at Fox's LA office decided to take it off the shelf and have a look. He thought it could work being shown at midnight screenings at the Waverly Theatre, New York City and sent it over. The same audience came week after week and began dressing up as the characters. Then they started calling out to the screen – the first one was when Janet puts a newspaper over her head to protect herself from the rain, that was the beginning of the callbacks. Soon after that, they began performing in costume in front of the screen and the 'shadowcast' was born. We had no idea about this until we were invited to New York for a one-year celebration of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and there were fishnets galore – lines of sequinned Columbias, Frank-N-Furters and the rest of the cast. It was fabulous. I think one of the reasons it has become a cult hit is because it is a joyous celebration of all things homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, heterosexual and cross-dressing. The script is witty, there's not a dud song in it, and it doesn't take itself seriously. The film has helped sexually liberate great swaths of conservative America. It took me some time to realise many of the fans were a combination of nerds who stayed in their rooms, unable to express themselves or people struggling with their sexuality. I find it so uplifting to be part of something that has and, 50 years later, continues to liberate so many. Many fans tell me that they had felt isolated or lonely, even cast out by their families, then discovered The Rocky Horror Picture Show community and found their people. I've met so many fans who have met their partners this way and now have a gaggle of mini fans. It brings me so much joy to be part of a film which has had such a positive and profound effect on so many people and continues to this day.
Scoop
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
It's Astounding! NZ Post Stamps To Celebrate Kiwi Richard O'Brien's Iconic Rocky Horror Show
This May NZ Post is recognising NZ Music month by shining a light over at the Frankenstein place. Four new stamps will celebrate over 50 years of iconic rock'n'roll musical The Rocky Horror Show. Debuting in London's Theatre Upstairs at Royal Court in June 1973, the first run of British-New Zealander Richard O'Brien's satirical tribute to B movies, science fiction and horror moved to several other locations in London before it closed in 1980. A 1975 film adaptation helped to launch it into cult status, and New Zealanders got to see the show for the first time in July 1978, with regular productions touring the country in the following decades. 'Obviously, we're shivering with anticipation! Rocky Horror has a special place in New Zealand's creative history, and we're thrilled to honour its legacy and status as a global cult hit in the official stamp programme' NZ Post's Head of Collectables Antony Harris says. Born in the United Kingdom, Richard O'Brien moved to New Zealand at the age of 10 and spent his formative years in Tauranga and Hamilton. In 2004, a statue of Rocky Horror character Riff Raff, who O'Brien debuted, was erected to honour Hamilton's influence on O'Brien's oeuvre. Harris said the stamps feature high-impact black-and-white artwork with some recognisable pops of red. 'The stamps are based on officially licensed Rocky Horror Show artwork, with a unique interpretation by Wellington designer and musician Chris Jones.' Jones says it's been an honour and a challenge to try and do justice to Richard O'Brien's iconic characters and songs inside four very small frames. 'What's not to love about Rocky Horror from a visual perspective? It's an absolute feast. I've loved getting lost in the world of Brad, Janet and Frank more than I probably should have, and being reminded of just what a genius tongue-in-cheek comment on society the show makes.' 'Rocky's such a brilliant, zany collection of ideas and visuals with a long and proud history, and I'm very happy to be contributing to that." The stamps can be purchased on the NZ Post Collectables website or at selected PostShops within New Zealand – with an issue date of 7 May 2025. Te Marama Puoro o Aotearoa NZ Music Month is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2025. Find out more about what's happening with New Zealand music at
The Guardian
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Keith Dewhurst obituary
The journalist turned playwright and screenwriter Keith Dewhurst, who has died aged 93, was part of an extraordinary informal ensemble of actors, designers and musicians who collaborated for more than a decade with the inspirational director Bill Bryden. Members of this group worked first with Bryden in the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs in 1970, and later at the National Theatre when Bryden was invited by Peter Hall to let rip on plays by Eugene O'Neill and David Mamet, as well as on two promenade performances in the NT's Cottesloe (now the Dorfman) theatre, scripted by Dewhurst and the poet Tony Harrison. Harrison's ebullient, idiomatic version of the Wakefield Mystery plays – The Mysteries (Brian Glover as God in a flat cap on a fork-lift truck) – started on Easter Saturday in 1977, and was followed by Dewhurst's glorious adaptation, in two plays (1978-79), of Flora Thompson's elegiac Lark Rise to Candleford, an account of an agrarian village community in Oxfordshire in the pre-industrial 1880s. Bryden's irregulars on Lark Rise included Glover, Dinah Stabb, Edna Doré and Jack Shepherd, the designer William Dudley – evoking vistas of wheatfields at harvest time, stars and bleakness in winter on an overhanging sky cloth – and the electric folk rock of the Albion Band with the singer Martin Carthy from Steeleye Span. Dewhurst's magical adaptation of Thompson's trilogy of novels threw shadows of enclosure and poverty around the quotidian joys and back-bending work of the community. The overall effect was one of deep and poetic poignancy, sometimes akin to Jean-François Millet's painting of The Gleaners. He and Bryden complemented this success with a more ecstatically political and vivid version of the historian Christopher Hill's account of ideological turmoil in the English civil war, The World Turned Upside Down (1978); and, on the NT's Olivier stage in 1982, Paul Scofield as Don Quixote, in which he made a glorious rendition of the epic grandeur in Cervantes' picaresque novel. The Don's trusty steed, Rocinante, was a knackered old penny-farthing tricycle, suitable for a nostalgist of knight errantry. Dewhurst's fifth and final show at the National was a fleet and funny adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's Black Snow in 1991, sharpening the fangs of the novel's backstage bitchery after the author, writing in the 30s, had fallen out of love with the Moscow Art theatre. The director was William Gaskill who, as artistic director at the Royal Court, had first ratified Dewhurst's and Bryden's connection. Dewhurst had preceded this illustrious career as a football reporter on the Manchester Evening Chronicle in the 1950s, detailed to follow the fortunes of Manchester United, then in the flowering of the Busby Babes era. He became a trusted insider at the club, and indeed chronicler, before and after the Munich air disaster in 1958, when United's plane had stopped for refuelling on the way back from a European cup-tie in Belgrade, then crashed on take-off. A close colleague on the Chronicle, Alf Clarke, was one of many journalists and players among the 23 who were killed. The team's manager, Matt Busby, and fledgling star Bobby Charlton were among the survivors, and Dewhurst was on hand to recount the trauma and extraordinary recovery the club made on a tide of nationwide grief and sentiment. Born in Oldham, Lancashire, Keith was the son of Joseph Dewhurst, who worked in the cotton industry, and Lily (nee Carter). He was educated at Rydal school in Colwyn Bay – where he had been evacuated during the war – and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he graduated with a degree in English in 1953. He worked for a while as a yarn tester for the Lancashire Cotton Corporation in Cheshire before joining the Chronicle in 1955, but he was determined to branch out. By the early 1960s he was writing plays for television and radio, which led to an important association with the radical new police series Z-Cars in 1968, and its sequel, Softly Softly: Task Force in 1971. And he wrote a dramatic biographical TV play for The Edwardians BBC series about David Lloyd George (1974), with Anthony Hopkins in the title role. He had married the actor Eve Pearce in 1958 and moved to London in 1967. From 1969 he worked for a year as an arts columnist on the Guardian. His first theatre play in the capital was Rafferty's Chant (1967) at the Mermaid, a farce involving a Mancunian conman selling the same car to a string of dupes, before he linked with Bryden on a single Sunday night epic production (without decor), Pirates, at the Royal Court in 1970. This was the seed of the Bryden/Dewhurst collaboration, followed by the 1809 face-off between French and English soldiers in Corunna!, both with Steeleye Span – Maddy Prior and Carthy to the fore – prominent. The battle of Corunna! was mind-blowing in the Theatre Upstairs, too big for its military boots, and the first expression of Bryden's radical, extravagant musical style. Dewhurst went with him in 1972 to the Edinburgh Lyceum to write feisty new adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and Molière's The Miser. His fine television writing continued with 27 episodes of Richmal Crompton's Just William (1977-78), with Bonnie Langford as Violet Elizabeth Bott and Diana Dors as her mother; and two television movies adapted from Alexandre Dumas – The Man in the Iron Mask (1985) and a voiced cartoon of The Three Musketeers (1986). His two notable movies were Chris Thomson's The Empty Beach (1985), a thriller adapted from a novel by the Australian author Peter Corris; and David Leland's The Land Girls (1998), adapted from a novel by Angela Huth about the women's land army in Dorset during the second world war, with three new shooting stars: Rachel Weisz, Anna Friel and Steven Mackintosh. He continued writing into his 90s, including several novellas as well as two books on football and a theatrical memoir with Shepherd. He also contributed regularly to the Manchester United fanzine, United We Stand. Dewhurst and Pearce had two daughters, Emma and Faith, and a son, Alan, who died in 2023. The marriage ended in divorce in 1980 and, in the same year, Dewhurst married the Australian literary agent Alexandra Cann, with whom he lived in Fulham, south-west London, and latterly on the Isle of Wight. She survives him, along with his daughters and three grandchildren, Henry, Alex and Millie. Keith Frederick Dewhurst, playwright, screenwriter and journalist, born 24 December 1931; died 11 January 2025
