The Rocky Horror Show

The cult classic musical The Rocky Horror Show, written in 1973, brings together song, camp, fluid sexuality, and blurring gender identities in a time when any sexual difference was taboo. Rooted in B movie horror and science fiction tropes, this humorous countercultural musical sees an apparently innocent heteronormative couple “transduced” into gender non-normativity, queerness, and sexual liberation while encountering quirky characters, catchy rock and roll music, an alien scientist and his Frankenstein-like creation, and audience participation! One of the first experiences many mainstream audiences would have had to experience such thinking, The Rocky Horror Show is still as relevant today, linking 21st century thinking and experiences to question, complicate, and celebrate expansive yet controversial ideas from the 1970’s. In the current moment with its political push to erase certain experiences of gender, The Rocky Horror Show allows us to celebrate differences–so let’s do the Timewarp…again!