The Night Studio 54 Sold Out for a Man Who Wasn't There

Every married couple has a version of this conversation. Ours happened on a weeknight, standing in the kitchen: you know The Rocky Horror Show is playing at Studio 54, right?We'd looked at tickets earlier in the week. Seats everywhere. Good ones, even. So we did what everyone does with Broadway tickets — we decided to decide later.

Then Wednesday, the news: Tim Curry had passed, at 80, peacefully at home. The original Dr. Frank-N-Furter — the man who pulled on the pearls in a little London theater in 1973, took the part to Broadway, and then put it on film in 1975 and accidentally built the most durable cult classic in movie history.

When we went back for those tickets, they were nearly gone. We grabbed two of the last seats in the house and went — two grown adults at Rocky Horror on a school night, which is exactly as ridiculous and exactly as right as it sounds.

Here's the part I keep turning over. On Monday there were seats everywhere. By showtime there wasn't an empty one in the room. A man who hadn't played the part in decades filled a Broadway house overnight, without being in the building. That's not hype. That's what fifty years of making people feel welcome buys you.

Because that was always the trick of it. Underneath the fishnets and the mad-scientist camp, the show Tim Curry built is about the permission to be exactly as strange as you are — and the audience he created took that permission and ran with it for half a century. You could feel it in the room: people who'd clearly done the Time Warp a hundred times, people in costume, people like us who decided at the last minute, all doing the callbacks together like a congregation that knows the liturgy by heart. It was funny and it was sad in the same seat, and nobody in that room would have had it any other way.

The cast felt it too. You could hear it — every line that touched the character he created landed a little heavier, and the house answered a little louder. A wake, the good kind. The kind with a full band.

We Salute You, Dr. Frank-N-Furter

One actor, one role, one piece of advice the character gives that outlived him the moment he first said it: “Don't dream it, be it.” Millions of people took that line personally, and the proof was a sold-out house on a Thursday in August, fifty-three years after opening night.

Rest easy, Tim Curry. And thank you for the reminder that came with the tickets: the show you keep meaning to see — go see it. The seats won't wait, and neither will anything else. That's the whole lesson tonight. No rates.