Off The Beat 5: Don’t dream it, be it – A farewell to Tim Curry with ‘Simply His Servants’

News of celebrity deaths don’t hit me as hard as they do some people. I didn’t know them, and unless their art has personally been a touchstone for me, I don’t mourn the loss of someone I’ve never met too terribly hard.

But on Aug. 25, when Tim Curry passed away, it did hit me hard because I had already been going through a very hard time. I am a human being, and I suffer, as all of us do, but sometimes I feel like I don’t handle it as well as others. I won’t make a big thing about it here, but I wasn’t aware how much I needed to go to “Rocky Horror” at Cedar Lee Theatre on Saturday. 

I needed to revisit something that used to make me happy so I could remind myself that there is still a person inside me who used to feel things. Maybe, by going back to that show; a show that I’ve been to so many times, I could go back and revisit a part of myself who still saw a wide-open space in front of them while also saying goodbye to a man who had a firm grasp on my development from the moment I saw him in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” as a teenager. It was the first time I saw a man in women’s clothes and the scene wasn’t treated as a comedy bit. You’re laughing at what he says and does instead of who he is. 

In the “Rocky Horror” world, the straight-laced Eisenhower Americans were the send-up. They were the joke.  Even as a kid, I understood that the squareness of Brad’s stiffness and faux-bravery is what made him the “asshole,” and Janet’s demure reliance on her fiancé is what actually made her the “slut.” The fear that existed and still exists inside of white middle-class suburbia of anything that doesn’t look or act like itself is what makes them the aliens in a castle surrounded by actual aliens.

Curry’s character of Dr. Frank-N-Furter endures because he is the most human of them all, even though he’s from a different planet. He understands something about humanity that a lot of people in this world don’t. Suppression isn’t a virtue, and the things we are told to be ashamed of about ourselves are precisely the things that make him want to stay on this planet and be human in the first place.

It’s a great lesson if you watch “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” with the right kind of eyes and ignore the fact that he murders Meat Loaf with an axe and eats him at a dinner party.

Now, it didn’t inspire me personally to dress in women’s clothes, have wild sex with everyone constantly, or become a cannibal, but what it did do was show me early on what a person who is completely sure of themselves looks like, and I think everyone who adores that film carries the tiniest bit of Curry’s character around with them.

Which is why when I heard the news of his death, my first instinct was to go to The Cedar Lee Theatre, where they have been screening “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” for the last 39 years. I first went when I was 17 and then occasionally after that, and then went nearly every month for almost two years pre-pandemic to watch Cleveland’s Rocky Horror floor show, “Simply His Servants,” perform the film live in front of the screen.

I got there early and chatted with Cedar Lee General Manager Liz Waski and House Manager Jackson Kordan in the lobby about how excited I was to be back to see the show. She told me it was sold out and that they were expecting a packed crowd, which pumped me up even more because the “Rocky Horror” experience is better when there are more people to share the experience with. As people were walking in, I started talking to them, and I noticed a lot of the crowd were coming not only to see it live for the first time, but they were seeing the film for the first time in general. 

I noticed there were a lot of mothers bringing their kids for the first time. It made me think of my mother and how she introduced the film to me, and it made me wonder if this is how “Rocky Horror” survives. Is this a rite of passage that moms have with their children? Do fathers get baseball games, and mothers get “The Rocky Horror Picture Show?” 

I ran into floor show members Emily Zima and Julian Grim before the film started. They play Riff Raff and Magenta, respectively. 

“It’s a bummer, honestly,” Emily told me before the show. She has played Riff Raff, Columbia and Magenta with “Simply His Servants,” and said Curry and Frank-N-Furter had been “groundbreaking” for “so many people to find their identity.”

Julian was a little less philosophical about losing him, but no less poignant. He was pissed off about it, and so was I. It does feel like the world is taking the wrong people when there are so many right people. Between Curry and Dolly Parton dying on the same day, it felt like the world became a little less kind, a little less compassionate and a little less weird. This is also coming from someone who doesn’t really care about the loss of people I didn’t know. 

By the time the show actually started, though, all of that sadness seemed to turn into something cathartic.

Ed Bobincheck, a longtime member of “Simply His Servants” who also serves as the show’s MC, came out for the introduction and went absolutely nuclear. He screamed, worked the crowd and threw everything he had into getting a sold-out Cedar Lee ready for the movie. By the time he was finished, he had practically thrown out his voice.

“This is different,” he told me in front of the concessions before the show had started.

There had been other nights when Rocky Horror suddenly became the place to be on a Saturday night again. The Fox remake brought people out. So did the 40th anniversary and even the Glee episode inspired by the film. Bobincheck remembered one crowd stretching out the door, around the corner and down the block.

Those nights were different, though. This wasn’t the same.

“A big part of Rocky is gone, and we all knew it was going to happen eventually, but it’s here, and we’re all celebrating what he gave together,” he said.

Then the movie started.

Jennifer Kimble, who has been with Simply His Servants since 2015, typically plays Frank-N-Furter. But that night the fishnets belonged to Melina.

Melina Gabele usually plays Janet. She had played Frank before, but only a handful of times, and she had already been scheduled to play him before Curry died.

Call it kismet. Call it fate. For one night, something had chosen Melina to help Cleveland say goodbye to Tim Curry.

And she delivered.

“I felt like I had to do him justice,” she told me afterward.

When Melina realized that Curry was gone and that she would be playing his most famous character at the very next Cedar Lee show, she was nervous. Playing Frank already felt different from playing anyone else.

“When I play Frank, I feel like I just kind of emulate Tim Curry for a minute,” she said. “I just feel like my face becomes his.”

That night, the feeling carried more weight.

During “I’m Going Home,” Frank’s final number and plea to stay on Earth, I stopped watching the movie and started watching the cast, then looked around at the audience. People who had spent most of the night screaming jokes, dancing, throwing themselves around and generally behaving like lunatics suddenly looked emotional.

Melina was feeling it too.

Melina, who wrote a 10-page essay on “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and its cult following for her bachelor of arts degree and who had been immersed in this cult for a very long time, even felt it. 

“I felt like I was gonna cry during ‘I’m Going Home’,” she told me.

“It needed to be extra meaningful, and it needed to, like, really evoke the feeling that Rocky evokes in me. I was raised religious and had to petition the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland to allow me to attend prom with my female prom date, so I went to Rocky every month in high school as my chance to be authentically myself. When Jen sat on my lap and sang ‘I’m Going Home,’ I knew that I wanted to be up there with the cast, embodying the movie that felt like home to me. I took Frank-n-Furter’s advice of ‘don’t dream it, be it,’ and I have been performing with “Simply His Servants” for seven years, for audiences of up to 800 people. Rocky Horror and the community I’ve found surrounding it have shaped me into the proud queer person I am today.”

By the end of the show, it felt less like a group of actors performing underneath Tim Curry and more like kids he opened a door to life for, carrying what he left behind.

That idea came up again when I talked to Ash Hopson, who played Dr. Scott and Trixie that night.

“I was scared of everything,” Ash told me. “Like, I would cry if I had to do a presentation in class.”

That fear was part of the reason Ash joined the cast in the first place. “Rocky Horror” offered a place where somebody who was terrified of performing, or maybe of life in general, could eventually get onstage in front of hundreds of people and become someone else for a little while.

“It’s a safe space for so many different communities,” Ash said. “Always will be.”

Jennifer, who usually plays Frank-N-Furter but played Rocky this evening, described Frank as giving her something similar.

“It gave me confidence in a way that I didn’t quite expect,” she told me.

That confidence followed her outside the theatre.

“After I started doing that character, I also carried myself a little bit differently outside of here into a confidence that is really kind of cool.”

Apparently, there is a moment when the transformation happens.

“The minute you turn around for that first turn and throw the cape off, you just… you’re Frank-N-Furter.”

But Jennifer’s relationship with “Rocky Horror” started long before she ever put on the fishnets herself.

Her mother and grandmother introduced her to it.

Jennifer’s grandmother had been going to “Rocky Horror” shows before her. Jennifer remembers being around 10 or 11 years old, listening to the music and dancing around with her grandma. 

And there it was.

I had spent the beginning of the night wondering whether “Rocky Horror” had somehow become a rite of passage passed from mothers to their children, and then I met a family that had apparently been doing exactly that for generations.

Jennifer’s grandmother died about a year before Jennifer joined the cast in 2015. She never got to see her granddaughter become part of the same tradition she had participated in years earlier, but then again, neither did Tim Curry. 

But, it doesn’t matter. The tradition got there anyway because it isn’t about repaying people who give you a gift. It’s about all those kids seeing them for the first time, and if it changes at least one of their lives and helps make them a more confident person, then you gave that gift back. 

A mother shows the movie to her child. That child grows up and brings somebody else. Somebody sitting in the audience decides they want to be on the stage. Eventually they put on the makeup, the corset or the fishnets and become the person another teenager is seeing for the first time and it inspires that kid to become a better version of themselves.

Bobincheck understood that cycle because he had experienced both sides of it. Before he was in the cast, he remembered the thrill of Frank sitting on his lap during “I’m Going Home.” Years later, when he played Frank himself, he got to watch somebody else react the same way when he sat on theirs.

“It’s our show,” he told me. “It’s not the cast’s show. It’s the whole audience together.”

That may be the real secret to why “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” has lasted this long.

It exists because of the people who let it change them for the better, taking on the responsibility of letting someone else know that everything is going to be okay. 

You’re going to be OK.

On October 3rd at 10 p.m. you can see “Simply His Servants” floor show perform “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” for their “Oops! All Curry” special presentation at the Cedar Lee Theatre.