A ‘ROCKY HORROR’ BASH

Just in time for Halloween, Fishnet Inc. is gearing up for a run of its elaborate stage performance, which complement local screenings of the musical horror flick.

Andy Doyle has portrayed several different “Rocky Horror” characters over the past 30 years, both male and female. But he always comes back to the maniacal handyman Riff Raff.

Why is that? Doyle ponders the question for a moment.

“I don’t know? The paranoia?” he suggests. “The fact that he kills everyone and takes off with the house? I don’t know. I just identified with him.”

Doyle is a founding member of Fishnet Inc., the “Rocky Horror” troupe that provides an elaborate stage performance as a simultaneous complement to local screenings of the musical horror flick. With Halloween just around the corner, Fishnet Inc. is gearing up for its regular October rush — seven shows in seven nights, starting with Thursday’s performance at Boathouse Live! in Newport News.

The film was adapted from Richard O’Brien’s bizarre and decadent stage musical about an unsuspecting couple that stumbles into a convention of gender-bending aliens led by a demented doctor who is building his own Frankenstein creature to be his sexual plaything. When it was released in 1975, nobody knew what to make of it — not critics, not theaters, not audiences. But when a cinema in New York began showing it at midnight, fans began showing up in costume, repeating lines of dialogue, calling out catchphrases and throwing props such as hot dogs, toast and rice. They learned to dance The Time Warp, starting with “a jump to the left. And a step to the right.”

The film became a cult classic, with late-night screenings across the country and local casts who acted it out below the big screen for enthusiastically interactive audiences.

Considering that the performances involve engaging with the crowd, shouting out loud things that are generally not even