They’re coming for the “Time Warp” — but getting a scolding.
Audiences for the Broadway revival of “The Rocky Horror Show” are being confronted with buzz-killing warnings against shouting out the hilarious call-backs and tossing around the iconic props that are the main reasons for the rollicking musical’s enduring popularity.
No more throwing toast when the actors raise their glasses to propose one.
Tossing rice during the wedding scene is verboten.
Forget jumping to the left and stepping to the right.
Dancing the “Time Warp” in the aisles is in the rear view.
Better leave your Riff Raff and Magenta costumes at home.
No more fun.
Self-serious management at Studio 54, where the show is being staged, are bleeding the joy out of a theater experience that energized legions of misfits, freaks and suburban wannabes.
All of us flocked to midnight screenings of the movie spinoff, as well as to live theater productions from here to London, to indulge in a subversive taste of raunch and rock ‘n’ roll.
I, for one, grew up subwaying it from Queens to Greenwich Village or the Upper West Side armed with the trinkets and memorizing the shout-out lines that made “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” a touchstone of my generation and the ones to follow.
On a visit to London, I was pleased to see the tradition had spread from New York City back to a live-action theater across the pond, where it all began.
But now bossy signs, utterly antithetical to the rebellious “Rocky Horror” spirit, greet fans in place of audience-participation kits containing such items as toilet paper, playing cards and rubber gloves they can loudly snap.
The missives warn theatergoers to shut up rather than honor the tradition of spouting gleefully at the actors.
And a new section on the production’s website lectures attendees to “choose your call-outs carefully — as this is a Broadway musical, not a midnight showing of the film.”
Yes, we know: We’ve paid up to $430 per ticket for the privilege.
Most dishearteningly, the show’s director, Sam Pinkleton, gave the New York Times vague guidelines on the formerly free-flowing ways one is permitted to enjoy the spectacle.
He said hurling call-backs can be done “once in a while.”
We’re talking about calling the character Brad Majors an “a-hole, and yelling out that Janet Weiss is a “slut.”
Just do it occasionally, though.
Once a performance? Twice? Not clear.
Cast members, too, seem eager to disparage the ethos that makes this revival possible.
Rowdy “hard-core” fans “just sound nasty and heckling,” sniffed Luke Evans, the production’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter.
It’s instructive to remember that “The Rocky Horror Show” began as a successful live show in London back in 1973.
Two years later, the film version — titled “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and starring Englishmen Tim Curry and creator Richard O’Brien, plus Americans Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick and Meat Loaf — was initially a flop.
But then it caught on in the midnight circuit, and audience participation was essential to its re-emergence as a cultural phenomenon.
It was a raucous good time, a shared communal experience.
No longer, it appears.
Have we, as a society, become opposed to all expressions of humor and kink?
Has #MeToo driven consensual playfulness out of our culture?
Has theater itself become so unbearably solemn that it can’t let loose?
Don’t let it happen!
If you’re going to see “Rocky Horror,” call back at the actors, and not just “once in a while.”
Do it often.
Dress up, if that’s your thing, and make sure to dance.
Don’t let them tear the heart out of this glorious show.
Break the rules: It’s what Dr. Frank would want you to do.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
