Confessions of a Transylvanian (32 page)

Once these movements and placements are agreed upon, it becomes the job of the actors playing those roles to remember exactly where the hell to be and arrive there
precisely
at their scheduled times. Otherwise, Tom up in the lighting area wo
n’
t know where to point his spotlight, and then where will you be?

Out of the goddamn spotlight. Tha
t’
s where yo
u’
ll be, dummy.

So, in addition to the character mimicry, there is also a great deal of very precise blocking to commit to memory and to follow religiously. That, you would think, should be enough to keep you occupied.

But tha
t’
s not nearly all. There is the also the movement of the rest of the cast to keep in mind so that you do
n’
t bulldoze over a Translyvanian or another principal while moving this way or that. That is no small task, given that half of your performance is delivered in the bright, blinding whiteness of the spotlight and the rest of the time you are plunged into utter, equally blinding darkness.

Next, there is the placement and use of the props and set pieces. These must be either pre-set by you or graciously delivered to you by a helpful assistant. So it is crucial to know where your props are. Because if you find yourself in need of a laser-beam-shooting pitchfork-gun and you forget where you put it, well...yo
u’
re shit out of luck, pal.

Then there are the costume changes, some of which are lickety-split and can be complicated as hell. Most of the changes you can probably perform without assistance but even these changes are illuminated only by the dim, reflected light of the theater screen.

And, finally, there is the audience. You forget about the audience
at your peril
. After all, the
y’
re the ones with all the rice, toast, cards and toilet paper to lob at you. Ignore or neglect them, they will remind you of their presence in a red-hot minute and when you least expect it.

Tha
t’
s the long way of saying: Performing the Rocky show successfully means staying on your toes at all times and never losing your cool.

I was off to a
fine
start, would
n’
t you say?

After the feather-duster incident, I entertained the notion that the rest of my evening as Riff Raff might devolve into an unintentionally hilarious series of Inspector Clouseau-like mishaps and I was determined, with all my heart and soul, that this should not be the case.

We continued through the Time Warp and my senses were sharper than
I’
d ever known them to be. I was riffling through my mental Rolodex for all of Kenn
y’
s moves and, step by step, did my best to mimic what he had done the previous week. This was done in conjunction with my attempts to keep the on-screen Riff Raff well within my peripheral vision.

The rest of the Time Warp moves, as I went through them, went a little something like this:

Getting ready to cross to Columbia? Great, do
n’
t forget: arms down, then up, then down, then up, repeat three times, face off with Magenta and take a beat and...thrust hands forward, back, forward, back once again for sixteen beats then
down
on the floor. Hold, hold, wait for the dance, wander over here, three steps, then stop. Then beat, beat, wait for the line then jump to the left. Then step to the right. Then hands on the hips. Now knees in tight. Now dance with Magenta while they pelvic thrust. Then move to Columbia nice and slow, hold by the juke, it’s tap dance time. Watch while Columbia jumps about. Falls on her face then…one more time: Jump to the left, step to the right, hands on the hips, knees in tight. Pelvic thrust (we’re almost done): Let’s do the Time Warp again (one arm and kick this time) let’s do the Time Warp agaaaaaain (once more then collapse on the floor).

Breathe.

Enjoy.

First Time Warp under your belt, I was thinking. But still a hell of a lot to get done.

And tha
t’
s the way the rest of the night progressed. It became a series of milestones reached, plateaus achieved and new heights to conquer.

Time Warp? Check.

Sweet Transvestite? Done. (The pose by the throne being my favorite moment.)

Next up: elevator scene, the trick to which is to time the gulp of champagne, the bottle drop and the door sequence just right.

Lab sequence. Mostly fun for the big dance number in Rock
y’
s song, sandwiched between Columbia and Magenta, kicking up your heels.

Eddie. The “wedding.” Then a break.

All this time,
I’
m following Andrea like a hawk, all pistons firing. After rattling her brains in the first scene, she was understandably a bit wary of me, but after a while she began to realize that I had actually prepared for the role and was
n’
t just making wild guesses as to what the blocking might be. When I got the kick routine down during “The Sword of Damocles” (no easy piece of choreography, let me tell you) Andrea might actually have looked (though I would
n’
t swear to it)
slightly impressed
.

The next scene, though, was the one I had been both dreaming about, and dreading, ever since I first set my cap to take on the role of Riff. It is the famous candelabra scene and it is noteworthy, not only because it involves a tricky series of blocking moves (waking up and torturing the post-coital Rocky and driving him from the castle), but it concludes with the most highly charged
actual
sexual moment in the entire show.

Once Riff has finally chased Rocky down the elevator shaft, he is approached by his sister Magenta. Finally alone, Riff performs an excruciatingly slow bit of elbow sex with her, after which he unexpectedly swoops in to bite her on the neck, vampire-style, as she rapturously throws back her head and moans with carnal pleasure.

Now my turn had come. I was suddenly facing a situation where, in just a few minutes, it would become my actual
job
to slowly move in, cozy up to Andrea and give her the granddaddy of all hickeys. I was at once intimidated beyond measure and excited beyond reason.

The scene began with Magent
a’
s mopping the floor of the lab. (The audience, at this point, would begin singing, “
I’
m so glad we had this time together...” If you do
n’
t get the joke,
I’
m not going to explain it to you.) Riff, finishing up his own cleaning job, catches Magent
a’
s eye and they both look off into the bedchamber where Rocky is resting from his wedding night with Frank.

Magenta seems to be reading Rif
f’
s mind. She cocks her head in Rock
y’
s direction as if to say, “Go for it.” Riff discards his cleaning rag and moves off in Rock
y’
s direction. Entering the bedchamber, he stares down at Rocky, who is facing away from him and sleeping on his stomach. (The audience: “Servants enter from the rear!”)

Riff looks around for a weapon and spies the candelabra in the corner. He picks it up, moves slowly toward Rocky and then taps him with the base, rousing him. Rocky turns in horror (Fire bad!) and Riff cruelly thrusts the flames into his face. Rocky attempts to move out of the way but...oh no!...Frank has chained him to the bed with manacles around his ankles. Try as he might to move to safety around the bed, Riff appears at every turn, driving him into a frenzy.

Finally, in a superhuman lunge of desperation, Rocky breaks his chain and flees in terror down the elevator shaft. Riff is close behind and malevolently hurls a candle down the shaft after him.

All of this, on our stage, seemed to go beautifully. Billy, as Rocky, was suitably terror-stricken as I chased him about. I lunged and thrust and he dodged and weaved. Then he finally disappeared down the shaft, I threw an imaginary “candle” after him for good measure and then...

...I turned.

And there was Andrea, in all her Magenta glory, looking at me adoringly. (I know she is required to do that, but I let it go for the moment.) I gazed deeply into her eyes, brought my hands forward and moved slowly into our first (non-THWOCK-enfused) bout of Elbow Sex. Up, then down. Smooth, sensual and uneventful.

That having gone
very
well, she bared her neck to me and I moved in.

Swear to God, I can still smell her neck to this day. The sweet ambrosia of her hair is a memory I can conjure up at a momen
t’
s notice.

I did
n’
t actually bite her, of course (
I’
m not an idiot), but I did plant a kiss on her neck as big as the great outdoors. I heard her moan in ecstasy and silently prayed that this moment would never end.

This is a long moment in the film. I savored every bit of it.

Sadly, eventually, the spotlight turned off and we broke apart in the darkness. I do
n’
t know how long our embrace had lasted. It might have been three seconds, it might have been an hour. I have no idea.

Time meant nothing. Never would again.

After the show, in Denn
y’
s, I was getting thumped on the back a lot and showered with accolades. It was great to finally get some feedback from the rest of the cast, as no one had spoken a word to me during the show. I thought, at the time, that it was because I was sucking so terribly hard that they could
n’
t bear to look at me, but it turned out that their treatment of me was more related to baseball than anything else.

See, when a pitcher gets about five or six innings into a no-hitter, it is an unwritten rule that the rest of the players are not supposed to say anything about it to him lest, by doing so, they mess with his mojo. In fact, the players will pretty much treat the pitcher as a pariah during the course of the game in order to preserve his luck. This, apparently, was how the cast had perceived my performance. It was considered, from what I was hearing afterward, the Rocky Horror version of a no-hitter. They thought I was perfect.

I, of course, knew better. Right out of the box, I had given up what I considered to be a grand slam (if I can possibly keep this metaphor alive any longer), by actually clocking my scene partner in the cranium with a fuzzy stick. Sure, things had gone smoothly after that. Maybe even better than smoothly. Maybe really, really great. But a no-hitter? Hardly.

Something else was weighing on my mind, though, and the moment I could get him alone, I cornered Donny and asked him the question that had been nagging at me all night:

“Okay,
I’
m dying to know: Who the hell is Robby?”

Donny smiled and lit up a smoke. “You caught that, huh?”

“How could I miss it? Kenny dropped his name like a hissing snake. One minute Andrea and Sunday were howling at him to get on stage and the next minute they were speechless. So who is this guy?”

As he often did before launching into a story he knew was going to be good, Donny leaned back, took a long drag of his cigarette and stared momentarily up at the ceiling. Then he looked over and began:

“Robby was the Hollywood Twin Riff Raff, Jack. Kenny was his understudy. And I guess if you really want to know the whole story about how the shit hit the fan down there last year, you could
n’
t find a better example than Robby.

“Russ told you about the way Marshall ran his show, right? If you were playing a main character, you owned the role. Period. Forget about if you were wrong for it or if someone better came along or if you just sleepwalked through the show. So what if you did
n’
t give a shit about your performance? It did
n’
t matter. Marshall had your back and you were never in any danger of being replaced. I think Marshall saw it as being loyal, somehow. Even if did result in the show sucking flaming donkey dick.

“Anyway, Marshall eventually realized that he needed to have formal understudies for each of his main characters and by process of elimination he wound up choosing most of the members of this cast. Everyone here, all of us, we were the second string. The junior varsity. And, over the weeks and months we were there, each of us got to go on and play the roles. Me, Russ, Andrea, Iris, Sunday...all of us. And most of the time, not to exaggerate, we were head-and-shoulders better than the people who played the roles down there on a regular basis. But that did
n’
t matter. Marshall had his rules.