Apr 1, 2022 3 min read

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with the correct showtimes.

Karin Maresh has been interested in presenting “The Rocky Horror Show” at Washington & Jefferson College since the day she started teaching there close to 20 years ago.

But back in the early 2000s, the associate professor and advisor to the student theater company didn’t think W&J students would cotton to a musical about a transvestite scientist and his muscle-man creation. But times they have a-changed, to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, and Maresh decided that students in the early 2020s would be more game to tackle something like “The Rocky Horror Show.”

“They’re more open to the spectrum of gender and sexual identity,” Maresh explained last week. “I think our students would be interested and excited about it.”

The musical by composer and writer Richard O’Brien, which debuted in London almost 49 years ago, has become ubiquitous on stages around the world. You can bet that somewhere in the world, on any given day, someone is staging “The Rocky Horror Show.” A cast of about 20 W&J students will be taking their turn with it next weekend, with Maresh directing.

The stage production has been eclipsed over the decades by the movie adapted from it. “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” gathered a passionate cult following, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was shown as a midnight movie on Friday and Saturday nights to raucous audiences who came decked in costumes, threw rice, fired off squirt guns and built a spectacle of their own as the film unspooled. Midnight screenings have become less and less common as home-viewing options have multiplied, and what was once a rite-of-passage for a couple of generations has largely faded away.

However, Maresh explained, “just about all” of her students were aware of it.

“They were all familiar with it in some way,” she said.

At W&J, students can participate in stage productions whether they are communications majors or not, and the size of “The Rocky Horror Show” cast is larger than what the college typically pulls together. An intimacy coordinator was also brought to a rehearsal “to discuss boundaries,” Maresh said, “kind of like if there was a lot of fight choreography. …There just needs to be a frank discussion.”

Curtain times are 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, April 7 through 9. For additional information, go online to www.washjeff.edu or call 724-223-6546.