New Haven Does The Time Warp (Again)

The first time Paul Dwyer did the time warp, it was 1979 and New Haven’s Westville Theater was packed to the gills. He shimmied. He shook. He learned the requisite choreography—just a step to the left, and a jump to the riiiight—attended a few screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in which the song features, and played around with the movie’s themes of drag and rock n’ roll.

Then he grew up, got a job as a journalist, and assumed he’d never see the cult classic again. 

Not so, it turns out. Sunday night, Dwyer was one of over 700 who flooded College Street Music hall with confetti poppers, slices of mock ​“toast,” pink latex gloves, toilet paper rolls and other props for a 40th anniversary (even though the film is technically 41 years old) screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, performed alongside a shadow cast and followed by a raucous Q & A with original cast member Barry Bostwick.

After seeing the event advertised online, Dwyer — who now lives in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. but grew up in New Haven — said he felt compelled to return, as if the movie were still exercising its strange magic over him.

First released in 1975 from director Jim Sharman and based on a 1973 musical of a similar title, The Rocky Horror Picture Show follows winsome, newly engaged couple Brad and Janet as their car breaks down on a country road in the middle of a rainy night. Their grim, wet search for shelter lands them at the castle of crazy transvestite alien scientist Frank N. Furter and his handful of creepy-ass servants and devotees: vampire-like Riff Raff, his sister Magenta, Furter’s former lover Columbia, and a handful of fans gathered for the Transylvanian convention of whatever weird year it is for them. It’s the night that Furter is going to unveil his newest creation, Rocky, and some wild, campy and sexually irreverent musical numbers ensue. 

Forty-one years years later at College Street Music Hall, the shadow cast and audience members alike delighted in a dated-ness that spilled over into a sort of Elm City pleasure dome. The movie’s sticking power, it seemed from the crowd, had to do with its marriage of things: B‑level antics and terrible acting that Fox failed to appreciate in its recent remake; quick, sometimes jostled camera work, Polaroid-like color and Warhol-esque drag; a nostalgia for when rock and roll was synonymous with genuinely challenging social norms.

For its devotees — many of whom it seems have found their way to New Haven — the church of Rocky Horror is always open, and it’s so bad-and-good that they keep coming back. Like Dwyer, who wanted Sunday to relive the magic with which he’d first seen it, and had come decked out as one of Transylvania’s finest.

“It’s great to come back to New Haven,” he said, remembering his school days at Richard C. Lee High School and the dearly-departed theaters at which he saw the movie in 1979, 1980, and 1981 ​“It was the first time I wore drag. We knew the moves to the time warp … and now we’re going to do it again.” 

“I’m honestly amazed to be doing it,” said his friend James Akin, who now lives in New Britain and recalled watching it at Friday midnight screenings at a Norwalk theater that has since closed.

But the event also brought in lots of younger fans who have identified something that makes the movie one wants to watch over and over again. Decked out as Magenta, 29-year-old Stacey Fierro said she’d fallen hard for the Rocky Horror experience three years ago, when it came on at home one night. When she saw that it was coming to New Haven, she’d begged friend and Rocky Horror novice Alejandra Leiva to come along. 

“I get it, why everybody’s hyped up,” she said. ​“It definitely has that staying power.”

They weren’t the only ones who thought so. 41 years after playing the lead character Brad (or ​“asshole,” as he is fondly, loudly, and frequently called by audiences across the U.S.), Bostwick had one piece of advice for the crowd, several members of which had dressed as characters from the cult classic. ​“It’s just a party,” he said. ​“It’s been a very strange journey, and I still feel like an evangelist from the church of Rocky Horror.”

He looked around the room, still full after the screening. ​“Can I get an ​“Amen?”

Dwyer shot up from his chair, waving his arms like windshield wipers. ​“Amen!,” he cried.