As an admittedly elder millennial, my first encounter with Tim Curry was not his defining role — not for most people, at least. His delicious, lascivious Dr. Furter in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” may be the Curry performance that takes up the most real estate in the imagination once you get around to seeing it; a certain bracket of still-haunted Gen-X viewers may argue for his original Pennywise in the TV miniseries “It” on that front.
But for kindergarten-age me, Curry announced himself and his flamboyant gifts in a far more modest enterprise: the shabbily budgeted 70-minute British television adaptation of Jill Murphy’s children’s book “The Worst Witch,” a kind of pre-Potter magic-academy romp with much less complicated lore. For the most part, it’s innocuous, sweet-natured kids’ entertainment, even if 21st-century tots might be bewildered by its chintzy-even-for-the-’80s effects and the spirited stage-school performance style from much of the ensemble (including a pre-teen Fairuza Balk in the lead). For a full five minutes, however, it operates on a higher level — when Curry swoops into proceedings as the Grand Wizard Egbert Hellibore, and delivers a catchy little ditty called “Anything Can Happen on Halloween.” Musically and lyrically, it’s not exactly Sondheim: “Anything can happen on Halloween/A dog can turn into a cat,” he croons, over clunky mid-’80s synths.
But Curry, swirling a voluminous pink satin cape and baring his famously, fabulously imperfect pearly whites, sings it with full-tilt drama and snarling conviction, barely suppressing a wink at his young audience as he promises them that, on October 31st, “your blood begins to run.” It’s a performance of Broadway-scale theatricality and cabaret wit oddly slotted into the world of daytime children’s TV; I was mesmerized, even if I couldn’t altogether explain why. Later, I realized this was one of my first encounters with outright camp: that hard-to-articulate but immediately knowable balance of artifice, earnestness and irony that can make high art of pop art, and vice versa. And when, years later, I eventually saw “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” — at a still-tender age, old enough to thrill to its color and danger, and young enough to miss all manner of innuendo — I could draw a straight (or not-so-straight) line between what Curry did in that perky Halloween earworm and the taboo-busting explosion of genderqueer polysexuality that he brought to Jim Sharman and Richard O’Brien’s landmark adult musical.
The latter film was shooting for outrage and all-time cult status; the former, to amuse grade-schoolers for a little over an hour. Curry’s great, generous gift as a performer was that he brought equal energy and enthusiasm to both. It wouldn’t be altogether correct to call Curry’s performance in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” a revelation.
It was, after all, a screen transfer of what he had already achieved on stage in London, Los Angeles and, briefly and unsuccessfully, on Broadway: Going in, the filmmakers knew exactly what kind of lightning in a bottle they had, as did any of those lucky early-doors theatergoers. But who else could have possibly known what to expect? Even when you watch the film for the umpteenth time, Curry’s entrance is always a jolt.
Sporting a drag queen’s beat and Queen Elizabeth’s diction, his Frank N. Furter arrives somehow as an extra-subversive presence in what is already a joyfully anarchic affair: At once beautiful and grotesque and frightening and rampantly sexy, he belts out his rock ‘n roll-infused showtunes with militaristically rehearsed precision, all while making his fetishwear-clad body a supple, spontaneous, unpredictably sensual instrument. He hits his every mark but blurs every other line, setting out to make viewers of all genders and sexualities suddenly confused about what they desire.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
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