The Rocky Horror Show, while still fabulously sick, seems almost quaint now—practically a Noel Coward play. When the original Broadway version opened in the '70s, the blue-haired matinee ladies thought it was way too much, even though they looked a bit like Frank 'n' Furter themselves. But now that Charles Busch is on broadway (with the very same freakazoid-liberates-repressed-couple plot) and drag queens are flouncing all over the tube, the time is right for this Rentvia Dame Edna by way of Cabaret extrava-gorgonzola. It's a gay Grease!—which I guess would make it Crisco!—and so layered that now the audience's interactive comments get comments back from the cast. (For the family crowd, narrator Dick Cavetteven keeps telling us how shocking it all is.) I was enthralled, though I must disclose that the Voice porn-ad pages are used as an audience prop.
photo: Pak Fung Wong
"I'm not boxed here at all": The Rocky Horror Show’s feisty Lea DeLaria.
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The cast is a Hollywood Squares of wondrous oddities, but naturally I'm most drawn to that human dynamo of comic invention and scat singing Lea DeLaria, who effortlessly plays two male roles—Eddie and Dr. Scott. Lea's last Broadway outing, On the Town, fell off the map quickly last year, but over a preshow snack at Ruby Foo's, she told me that Rocky feels like a hit—"and I've never been in a hit before. Usually you put me in and it's instant close!" The Rocky high is extra sweet for Lea because she worshiped at the throne of the cult movie version, which she said "really helped me be gay. To see something like that in the Midwest was a big eye-opener. We had no role models. Dr. Smith in Lost in Spacewas the closest thing to a gay character on TV. He was so faggy! You could tell he was gay because every time Will Robinson bent over, the robot would say, 'Danger, Will Robinson!' "
Lea herself pushed things forward in the '80s by being an out comic whose mantra was "I'm a big dyke!" Does she ever regret that saucy stance? No, she said, "it gets me laid and it hasn't hurt my career. You get put in a box, but everybodydoes. And I'm not boxed here at all." In fact, in the last few years, she's played three men, several lesbians, and even a straight woman.
Lea's girlfriend's been taken out of the box, as it happens. As the comic explained it, "She was so Gen X that she would just suck the energy out of a room. Even though the sex was great and she was eye candy and all of those horrible sexist things I like to say, I need to be with someone not so negative. She was like bornover it."
Meanwhile, the robustly cheerful diva is reborn with a new girlfriend and plenty of other possibilities, too. She hopes Susan Sarandon—who starred in the movie version—comes to see Rocky, "because I just want to finger her a little in the corner, if she'd let me. Please, Susan, please! She's so sexy!" The tourists around us looked a tiny bit horrified, but we carried on, discussing the hotness of Lea's costar Daphne Rubin-Vega. "Oh my god," she blurted, "would I like to be in her! How sexy is that woman! And Daphne's such a horrible flirt. Plus Alice Ripley [who plays Janet] is a totalcock tease. She's always like, 'I wore my best G-string for you, Lea.' I'm like, 'You bitch, I'll kick your ass.' "
What about Rocky's other apparent female, rocker Joan Jett, whom Lea kisses in the show? Just how butch is she? "I would not call her butch," Lea clarified. "I'd call her androgynous. You don't know what the hell she is—is she a man or a woman? I love that about her!" I guess she's just a sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania.
Butchness is also in short supply in Showtime's version of Queer as Folk—a/k/a Sex and the Sissy—which premiered to an audience of anally lubed magazine editors last week. Just as The Full Montywas relocated from the U.K. to Buffalo, this show is now set in Pittsburgh, though it could be anylarge city where Special K is not a cereal. It's all watchable and truthful enough, but not nearly as trenchant as it thinks it is. In any case, it will surely immortalize the line "Now you know what rimming is."
You'll know what screaming is when you see the high-pitched Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which had its own special screening—a benefit for Sloan-Kettering's Stem Cell Transplant Research Fund. The cancer-survivor organizer was funnier than the movie, telling the crowd, "I worried about having a bad hair day today, but then I realized I'm happy whenever I havehair." We wore our merkins to the after-party at the Wollman Rink, where a spunky little girl told me, "When you want to stop skating, you have to 'make a pizza' with your feet. I learned that a long time ago." Oh yeah, four, maybe five minutes ago. Alas, her advice was quickly forgotten when I got to eata pizza with my mouth.
