The Nearly Naked Truth

There’s a lyric from one of the Richard O’Brien tunes in his intergalactically famous The Rocky Horror Show that goes, “It was great when it all began/I was a regular Frankie fan.” It’s a lyric that has proven more true than the then-starving young playwright could have known when he scribbled it 35 years ago. Rocky was an out-of-the-box hit musical almost from the moment it opened at England’s Kings Row Theater in 1973, and it has, as they say, “had legs” (in this case, long, hairy ones encased in torn fishnet stockings).

Save a handful of grannies, there’s no one who does not know the premise of O’Brien’s trendsetting tuner, which begat a film version that revolutionized the idea of cult fandom and introduced the term “midnight movie” into the pop-culture lexicon. In celebration of these and many other things, Nearly Naked Theatre has remounted its 2006 hit version of O’Brien’s musical tribute to faraway Transsexual Transylvania as a kickoff to its 10th season.