Cafe Nine | Music | Arts & Culture | Ninth Square | Film & Video
Zoe Jensen Photo.
Of the over 100 cinched, heeled, and studded audience members that crammed into Cafe Nine last Saturday, roughly a third of them bore a red V on their forehead. In front of them, I stood onstage, glaring out into the cabaret-esque crowd in a spoof of the self-serious Criminologist projected behind me. The whole time, I could catch glimpses of the red Vs across the audience, the way one spots a cross on Ash Wednesday.
“I would like, if I may-,” I began, and my intimidation quickly gave way to delight. Beyond the stage, a savvy audience member retorted, “You may not!”
The V stood for virgin, signifying the cinematic virgins in the audience as Cafe Nine and the band Goin' Unsteady presented a live score and performance of the 1975 goth-camp classic Rocky Horror Picture Show. Throughout the night, members of the audience got a feel for how unique this particular rendition was, a credit to the impassioned, multi-disciplined artists that spearheaded it.
That felt particularly significant this year, on the 50th anniversary of the film.
“This iteration is obviously different because I have never seen a live band perform with a movie plus a live shadowcast,” director Zoe Jensen (of Conneticunt fame) had said giddily five weeks earlier, when the cast (including yours truly) kicked off rehearsals. “Usually this would be in an auditorium or larger venue, but I have never seen it performed in a dive bar like we are.”
The depth of Jensen’s Rocky Horror knowledge cannot be overemphasized here. When Jensen was just 11, her dad, Jon Jensen, started taking her and her sister to Rocky Horror screenings, from as far away as Indiana to as close by as Stamford. “I remember first watching it and feeling scared, interested, and like ‘What’s going on?’” she said. “It was such an intense awakening and a really important part of my family.”
Years later, that family tradition made it to New Haven. Months ago, Jon Jensen proposed the idea of his band, Goin’ Unsteady, performing live alongside a cast his daughter would assemble. Zoe was excited to make it a reality.
The Jensens are not the only ones with family ties to Rocky Horror: the 12 actors in the shadowcast included those who had first dates at the movie, parents meeting for the first time at screenings, and one mom who was in attendance opening night in 1975. Decades of daring ad-libs, midnight showings, and the deviant spontaneity of queer pockets of society had clearly all led to us forming an interest around this show.
The goal was to create a fun, utterly authentic, New Haven-style Rocky Horror that someone else would reference back as their experience with the show.
As summarized by characters Eddie (Karynn Hardy) and RiffRaff (Zella Collier), respectively during the first cast party: “No matter what choice you make, it’s the right one,” and “Let’s make a new memory for someone.”
My castmates’ casual wisdom and sprezzatura were really only matched by their dogged determination to execute the vision we inherited. In the lead-up to Saturday’s performance, we spent weeks ransacking attics and pillaging Goodwill bins, hours bleaching hair and re-applying eyeliner in an effort to replicate the iconic looks from the movie.
We exerted equal concentration during the rehearsal when, with Zoe leading the charge, we wrestled with synchronizing the lucid chaos of the band’s tempo against the physical movements required of each scene and the movie itself.
Perhaps the only exception to the rule of controlled mayhem was my role as the Criminologist/Narrator. It is the only role within the show with virtually no musical features—just me, the audience, and four daunting paragraphs of solo dialogue with occasional mid-scene appearances.
But, invigorated by my passion for queer media, some previous experience with Shakespeare, and Jensen’s suggestion to “make it cunty,” I endeavored by showtime to make the part engaging or, at the very least, say I had been a part of a Rocky Horror cast on its 50th anniversary.
While I remained in the wings ready to deliver the narrator’s intermittent monologues, my position afforded me the immense privilege of catching details no other seat in the house could. When, within the musical, the straight-laced sweethearts Brad (Justin Bendigo) and Janet (Kimberly Wipffler) first requested assistance from the sullen-faced butler of a mysterious castle, I could see the intentional shakiness of Janet’s movements and the permanent look of dismay on Brad’s face even when he wasn’t facing the audience.
Later, upon the arrival of the titular Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Bri Wilson), I watched as our antagonist delivered full-bodied expressions seemingly using every facial muscle possible, resulting in a manic allure reminiscent of Tim Curry’s famous original incarnation. Even the songs were more discernible from where I stood, the skillful pitches and growls of Goin’ Unsteady’s GingerVal bringing a classic rock edge to the usual glam rock of Rocky Horror that I didn’t have to parse through the clamor of a crowd.
As moving to our places went from a brisk walk to an earnest jog and the crowd grew more enticed with every gender-swap-fueled sex scene, the show rapidly became a blur. Yet, for every forgotten prop and missed line (of which I confess to two), we were awarded the beauty marks of a true Rocky Horror production.
“It’s meant to be messy regardless,” Jensen had said. “I think it [the Rocky Horror Picture Show] is a place to be scandalized and have ridiculous things happen.”
Creating a brief shared reality in which being brash, loud, and weird serves as the norm remains as much of a politically transgressive and transcendent experience as it was during Rocky Horror’s creation and in the five decades that followed.
“It felt like I was in a totally separate universe from the rest of the world,” GingerVal recalled of her first time experiencing Rocky Horror. “I’m really excited for what it stands for, especially today. I think it's relevant today to celebrate uniqueness, sexual freedom, and the many other themes in this movie.”
Which is to say, this production was not the first of its kind, and if our work has anything to say about it, it won’t be the last.