‘People kept showing up’: Clinton Street Theater celebrates 50 years of ‘Rocky Horror’

Nearly every Saturday night for more than 40 years, it’s been the same routine in front of Portland’s Clinton Street Theater: A line of people dressed in risqué androgynous outfits arrive in the late evening. Theater employees hand out bags of rice and toast, and they draw a red “V” on the forehead of anyone visiting for the first time.

Those are trademarks of a live showing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the cult classic rock musical that celebrated its 50th anniversary in September. And for almost as long, the Clinton Street Theater has shown the film every weekend, often with an in-house cast acting out every song and dance.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is legendary for its chaotic live shows. An entire shadowcast will act out the movie, while the audience shouts explicit callbacks at the characters on screen. From throwing rice during the opening wedding scene to screaming at the sight of the Criminologist, nearly every scene has some audience participation.

Since 1986, those performances have been put on by the non-profit Clinton Street Cabaret. Raven Ward, the master of ceremonies during the show, said the cabaret seeks to create a hectic and fun atmosphere.

“It’s the perfect type of chaos,” Ward said. “There are callbacks being yelled, there’s stuff being thrown, but the energy is just welcoming and accepting.”

Shadowcasts are not unique to the Clinton, but the theater has garnered a reputation for its longevity and outlandish performances. Even during the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, the theater kept showing the movie each week.

Those early weekly showings came about organically. Lenny Dee co-owned the Clinton Street Theater in the 1970s and remembers first seeing Rocky Horror during a double feature with another rock musical called “Phantom of the Paradise.”

“I liked that one better, but I couldn’t get it and wound up booking Rocky Horror,” Dee said. “And people kept showing up.”

Since the crowds remained large, the theater kept Rocky Horror on the bill. It didn’t take long, Dee said, before people began to jump on stage and act out the movie for themselves.

Rocky Horror also became a financial boon for the Clinton Street Theater, which was typically showing avant-garde and experimental cinema.

“It was very hard in those days for a single-screen theater to survive,” he said. “(Rocky Horror) really helped us financially.”

Over the past 50 years, the film and the live show itself have become a rite of passage for many Portlanders. Ward said their mother met her ex-husband during a live show.

“If not for this movie and this theater, my older brother wouldn’t exist,” Ward said. “It’s just become a big family thing.”

That enthusiasm has continued to grow. The cabaret put on a sold-out performance of the show on Sept. 20, which by showtime had reached a fever pitch. The cast danced around the theater’s large stage in front of the movie, as spotlights hurried around to capture all the characters.

Skye Logan, who serves on the cabaret’s board, said people used to have to see the movie in a theater multiple times in order to learn the lines and the costumes.

Logan keeps a box full of the cabaret’s archives, including old programs and street flyers for promoting the show dating back to the early 1990s. There are also old photographs of performers wearing many of the same costumes that the cabaret uses today.

“I admire the effort they had to put in,” Logan said. “I can order something off Amazon and have the costume here tomorrow and go get makeup and have a pretty decent costume, and they did not have that availability.”

Logan said that, 50 years on, Rocky Horror still stands out for its open attitude toward sexuality, which they said is liberating for the many LGBTQ+ members of the cast.

They want to continue that for the show’s next five decades.

“The movie was originally a place for a lot of people to come together and experience sexuality and be themselves in a lot of places where they couldn’t,” Logan said. “It is one of my goals to continuously make this a safe space for anyone and everyone that wants to participate.”