(I have to apologize for not posting this on 11/15, but I’m running a few days behind.) Playbill.com’s “Today in Theater History” feature from 11/15 remembers the Broadway opening of The Rocky Horror Show starring Joan Jett as Columbia.
2000 The Rocky Horror Show, Richard O’Brien’s camp science-fiction/horror/musical, gets a Broadway revival starring Daphne Rubin-Vega, Lea DeLaria, Alice Ripley, rock star Joan Jett, and, as the Narrator, onetime talk show host Dick Cavett. It runs 437 performances at the Circle in the Square Theatre. The British import was a 45-performance flop in its original 1975 production, but a movie adaptation, The Rocky Horror Picture Show attracted a devoted cult. In accord with that, audiences for the Broadway revival are issued sacks with newspapers (to use as rain hats) and rice (to throw in the wedding scene), along with other wacky interactive goodies.
Click HERE to read what else happened on 11/15 in theater history on playbill.com.
Here’s an nyrock.com review of the play from January 2001:
Notable in the cast is Joan Jett as the coquette Columbia, the part that in the Rocky Horror movie made a star of Little Nell who tap danced her way into 15+ minutes of fame that she later parlayed into a successful nightclub bearing her name. Obviously Jett wouldn’t be caught dead doing anything as girlish as tap dance, so she’s allowed to play her guitar instead, which adds an extra degree of rock ‘n’ roll authenticity to a show that even John Waters would call a little “campy.”
And here’s Joan performing the “Time Warp” with the cast on The Rosie O’Donnell show on Wednesday, November 1st, 2000. (Newbie hint: Joan is the bald one.)
Born to be Jetthead 