darquegk said: "A lot of people’s Rocky experience is frozen circa 1980s; you still hear callbacks about Gerald Ford and Jane Fonda at a lot of the big shadowcasts. I’m a “professional Rocky fan” in the Pittsburgh area, and I’ve done lead roles and audience participation constantly in the show for nineteen years now.
In my experience, there are three kinds of Rocky audience participators. There’s the ones who come and go all-out on the classic Rocky experience, just yelling the most basic callbacks and throwing things and having a good time as a sanctioned rule breaker. There’s the purists, who try to recreate the Sal Piro script and album note for note. And then there’s the ones who try to keep it fresh, stay topical and “get cancelled” with the newest, darkest and most shocking joke. Granted, Pittsburgh is famously one of those towns where Rocky never went out of style, so there are MANY productions every October and often several in the off season.
In my experience, the only bad Rocky I’ve ever seen has been the one or two productions that explicitly said “we aren’t doing a multimedia immersive participatory communal event with improv and such; we are doing the musical play written by Richard O’Brien, so view it as you’d view any other musical.” You can’t unring a bell, and Rocky doesn’t thrive in such an environment. It’s not why people love it. What Rocky is, is a dark religious experience. Like the Catholics pre-Reformation had the Feast of Fools to invert all social mores, get all your wildness out loud and proud but then return to “civility” with a new appreciation for the norm, Rocky should be an experience where actors and audience alike break all the rules, to better appreciate those rules when order returns."
Meh. The problem is the audience participation mostly isn't clever, while the show is. It's frustrating to hear people making fun of what they don't understand. Audience participation used to be a gas up though the mid-80's, when the barrior between film and audience literally seemed to collapse, but then it because this weird competitive thing ("_I'm_ going to say the line first before everyone else to show I know it better--never mind that then it doesn't match up with the line it cues in the film, thus rendering saying it meaningless" or dumb things like "rice wars" during the wedding scene, ruining the fun that stuff like that used to create of feeling you'd somehow entered the movie, were present at the wedding, caught in the rain with Brad and Janet). I mean, it used to be genuinely beautiful when the entire screening room was illuminated by hundreds of lighters, all going off on cue at the word "darkness" in the chorus. But all that was a long time ago.
It would be great if the audience could simply, you know, enjoy the show. But apparently they can't. And although it's understandable that this has happened to stage revivals in the US, it's also the case in countries (like England) where the midnight movie experience never had a big presence.
I do agree that you can't unring a bell, but I think it's unfortunate that audiences can't differentiate between a midnight screening of the movie and a performance with live actors moving along different beats. You can't really find a clever way to stage a line or a new bit of business for a laugh, because the audience will just be screaming the same dumb lines as if they are watching the scene in the movie, and the unique moment the show has tried to create will be lost. The only solution seems to make revivals cartoons of a cartoon, and it feels overblown and rather boringly safe.
