It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

So last week was the first experiment of the newly-formed Standing Room Only. We showed the film Curse of the Demon as a promotion and educational opportunity for students to gain some cultural knowledge into what exactly they're coming to see when they come to the Rocky Horror Show at Rhodes. Overall, we were pleased with the event.

Our first setback, however, came from the weather. There is always a danger of trying to host something outside, which we wished to do. We had reserved the Rhodes ampitheatre for the film, but right at 7:20, a giant deluge of rain soaked the campus. Luckily, we had decided literally minutes before this to move the event into our backup location, one of the lecture halls of the Biology building. I must praise the members of Standing Room Only for their amazing flexibility in this time. I've seen genuine freak-outs when events don't operate according to plan. This team, however, moved quickly, swiftly, and created a successful event out of probable chaos.

Thanks to Robert Shreve, the president of the Alpha Tao Omega Fraternity and various word-of-mouth advertising (and facebook invites and posters), we had an audience of around 40 people. About 15 of these individuals were somehow connected to the Rocky Horror Show, and the other 25 were outside guests. With the terrible weather and the fact that it was the Thursday after Fall Break, we were very pleased with this. In the future, however, it would be better when organizing these events to pick a different day. Two days after a student holiday makes it difficult to drum up an audience.

Chris Davis, the director of Rocky, gave a 10 to 15 minute presentation about the "mind candy" that is the Rocky Horror Show and how its inspiration came partly from the B-Movies of Hollywood, particularly those of the horror and science fiction varieties. You can watch a short part of his talk by clicking on the Youtube link.He made clear the reference to different elements of these films that can be seen in Curse of the Demon that Rocky tends to mock in various ways.

Overall the first event went well. My only concern was the result of an oversight on my part. When telling the cast about this movie night, I never expressly mentioned the overall purpose of these kind of events. The whole purpose of this experiment is to make the theatre at Rhodes more accessible to new potential audience members. And we succeeded in attracting these kinds of members. In order for an event like this be work correctly, though, those in attendance must feel comfortable, they must relax, they must be able to receive what the cast/artist/musician has prepared.

The "theatre kids" were certainly comfortable among their peers, but their rather boisterous laughter and the sharing of inside jokes or the reciting of lines from the show at various moments in the movie made the "non theatre kids" uncomfortable. And I fault myself for this. I never made it clear to those of the inner circle of theatre supporters that we must intentionally create a comfortable environment for these kinds of endeavors.

This being said, the evening was a huge success, and I am very pleased with how everything turned out. Now for the final promotions before opening night on Halloween!!