Stars happily stuck doing the Rocky Horror time warp

It was 1986 and Hollywood superstardom still a long way away when Russell Crowe donned eye-liner and head-to-toe leather to play Eddie in the cult musical.

Former soapie star Craig McLachlan, pictured here in a 1992 production, returns to the Sydney stage this week.

The time warp never ends for Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O’Brien, still travelling the world to oversee productions of the cult musical he wrote while unemployed over an English winter.

Former television soap star Craig McLachlan is also going over old territory when he revisits his 1992 role as Dr Frank-N-Furter when the latest Sydney production begins previews this Friday, 42 years after O’Brien’s salute to B-grade horror films, rock’n’roll and gender stereotypes premiered in a 63-seat London experimental theatre.

O’Brien has since observed productions across the globe, from London to Sydney, Tokyo and Dublin, where its Irish premier came in 1991 at St Francis Xavier Hall, owned by the Catholic Jesuit order.

O’Brien, whose later musicals included T. Zee (1976), The Stripper (1982) and Top People (1984) and is now into his third marriage, considers himself 70 per cent male and 30 per cent female.

Describing himself as transgender or possibly a third sex, being neither man nor woman, he has taken the female hormone oestrogen. He recalls saying to his older brother, at about age six, “that I wanted to be the fairy princess when I grew up. The look of disdain on his face made me pull down the shutters. I knew that I should never ever say that out loud again”.

He explained that oestrogen took the edge “off the masculine, testosterone-driven side of me and I like that very much. I think I’ve become a nicer person in some ways, slightly softer”.

Rocky Horror was love at first sight for Australian audiences, introduced to Dr Furter by Reg ­Livermore at Glebe’s New Arts Cinema (later the Valhalla) on April 19, 1974. The show moved to Melbourne in October 1975 and played Adelaide in 1977, finally closing after a three-year run.

Russell Crowe, pictured here in a 1987 New Zealand production, is one of many stars to have graced the Rocky Horror stage.

O’Brien had approached Australian producer-director Jim Sharman in London early in 1973 with a part-finished musical script titled They Came From Denton High. A year earlier, Sharman had cast O’Brien in the London production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Sharman came of age around Australian showgrounds in the 1950s, when his father and grandfather ran Jimmy Sharman’s Boxing Troupe, meeting circus and vaudeville performers. Pursuing an interest in theatre, he graduated from the production course at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney in 1966, then directed experimental theatre productions.

In 1969 Sharman directed the rock musical Hair in Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo and Boston, followed by Jesus Christ Superstar in 1972, taking the production to London’s Palace Theatre.

After looking over O’Brien’s script, written over about six months, Sharman suggested he find another title, and together they created the original Rocky Horror Show production.

Star Tim Curry came on board after bumping into O’Brien outside a gym, where the writer was scouring for a “muscleman who could sing”. O’Brien told Curry about his musical and suggested he speak to Sharman, who gave him the script,

“I thought, ‘Boy, if this works, it’s going to be a smash,” Curry recalled.

Sharman also recruited fellow Australians, actress Nell Campbell and designer Brian Thomson, for the production, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre (Upstairs) on June 19, 1973, and ran for almost 3000 shows across Britain by September 1980.

Former soapie star Craig McLachlan, pictured here in a 1992 production, returns to the Sydney stage this week.

Rocky Horror debuted in Los Angeles in 1974, playing a successful nine-month run, although New York proved a tougher audience, with a 1975 Broadway debut at the Belasco Theatre running only three previews and 45 shows. That year Sharman and O’Brien co-wrote a movie version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with Curry again cast as Frank-N-Furter, for Twentieth Century Fox. The movie was a flop at first, but won a cult following after audiences donned fishnet stockings and lashings of eyeliner for midnight screenings.

Aussie producer Wilton Morley revived the show in Sydney in 1981, with baby-faced English actor Daniel Abineri in the lead and dapper entertainer Stuart Wagstaff, then 57, as the narrator. Wagstaff first dismissed the role as “ridiculous” but signed up for six weeks “as a giggle”. Despite complaining the music was “a bit loud — it’s not Glen Miller” and sometimes yearning for “someone nearer his own age” in a cast where the eldest performer was 31, he completed the season, with the exception of one short break when Ian “Molly” Meldrum took the role.

Abineri was directing a New Zealand stage production in 1986 when an aspiring actor auditioned in Auckland. Dressed head to toe in black leather and using the stage name Russ Le Roq, a young Russell Crowe was cast in the dual roles of Eddie and Dr Scott. “During the tour, I told him his character had been based on Doctor Strangelove,” Abineri explained. “So we then discover Russell has painted his face white and turned his hair grey for the role.”

Originally published as Stars happily stuck doing the Rocky Horror time warp