Originally Published: 2007-03-25

Is there still anyone who's never heard of The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Is there anyone who still doesn't know about the cult movie with its devoted bands of repeat viewers? The ones who bring umbrellas and slices of toast to be deployed at just the right moment, and who know precisely when to insert phrases like "With a whip!" into the dialogue?
North America's most enduring cult film started, of course, as a stage show. Toronto had a somewhat successful production at the Bathurst Street Theatre a few years back, and now CanStage is trying their luck with a new version at the St. Lawrence Centre, designed, like last year's Hair, to tempt a younger crowd into the theatre.
They've taken the wise step of inviting Ted Dykstra to direct. Dykstra, co-creator and costar of the internationally successful Two Pianos, Four Hands, has done a very good job directing several music theatre productions over the past few seasons, and this twisty little script seems right up his alley. The first question of course, must be whether to conform to movie fans' preconception of the story or to attempt to come up with something entirely new.
"I'd like to think we've very consciously done both," he says. "We don't want to piss off the Rockyheads, but at the same time we want to remind them that this was a stage show before it was a movie."
In fact, Dykstra declares he's "not very fond of going to the movie. The reason people started yelling at the movie was because it's so bad; then it became funny. But before anyone had seen it ten times, the comedy was actually funny in and of itself."
By trying to direct an interesting production of the original material, Dykstra says he hoped to come up with a show that didn't need radical audience participation to make it work. And in fact, in the pre-Toronto run in Winnipeg, the strategy seemed to work. "Even the Rockyheads forget about yelling, because they're actually intrigued by the story," Dykstra says. "When you're seeing it live, it's quite a different experience; it rocks very hard in certain places."

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