Sydney Morning Herald
Friday June 21, 1996
By VALERIE LAWSON
With a bit of a mind flip, you're there. Back in the time warp of the New Arts Theatre, Glebe, with the leering gorilla ushers and up there on the stage, Reg Livermore's glorious pantomime face.
"I wanted Bette Davis eyes," said Livermore this week. "There had to be a menace, appearance wise." He doesn't mind reminiscing about The Rocky Horror Show but "I don't want to live in the 1970s". Livermore is one of the few exceptions. Dammit, Janet, on this 21st anniversary of the release of the cult Rocky movie, and 22 years after the sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania blasted onto the Sydney stage, we're not doing the time warp again, we never stopped doing it.
Next Monday, there's a special screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in Sydney and a party at Planet Hollywood to launch a new video of the film. But some of the creators of the original Rocky, such as designer Brian Thomson, find it all "a bit sad". They don't want to see Jason Donovan in his pretty boy makeup doing the show in Perth, nor did they enjoy a younger generation miming and singing along to the movie. Reg, and Kate Fitzpatrick and Arthur Dignam and Sal Sharah and John Paramor ... they were the definitive Frank 'N Furter and Magenta and Narrator and Riff Raff and Brad, and no-one can ever finesse them. Rocky was the '70s flip side of Jesus Christ Superstar, the devil incarnate in fishnet stockings.
It began with Richard O'Brien, singer and understudy for Herod in the original London staging of Jesus Christ Superstar, directed and designed by Jim Sharman and Brian Thomson. O'Brien never played Herod. Thomson said: "When the understudy's role was taken away from him, Richard left in a huff. He wanted to show them ... he would write a musical." O'Brien and pianist Richard Hartley made a tape of a few songs and "played it to the producer Michael White, and the lady in charge of the Upstairs Theatre at the Royal Court in London who agreed to pay them ?1,000 each".
Rocky opened for a five-week season at the Upstairs in 1973 with Tim Curry as Frank 'N Furter and O'Brien himself as the henchman, Riff Raff. For years, it has niggled Thomson and Sharman that O'Brien won the lion's share of the royalties for a creation which grossed at least $500 million. Profit on the film alone, says Thomson, is $150 million, but his share of film royalties "wouldn't have been enough to pay the rent".
Thomson said: "Everything came from Jim Sharman putting it together with his astonishing skills." Sharman also directed the 1974 stage musical in Sydney and the film.
Even before the Royal Court production, Harry M. Miller heard O'Brien's tapes in London played by Sharman, loved it, and put the show on at Eric Dare's New Arts Theatre in Glebe, then an art film house. Since then, Miller has staged two more productions, in Melbourne with Max Phipps as Frank 'N Furter, and one for Wilton Morley in 1984.
© 1996 Sydney Morning Herald
