Copious Notes

Edwin Schiff stars as Frank-N-Furter in Berea College Theatre Labaratory's "The Rocky Horror Show." Photos by Aaron Gilmour | Berea College.

Fans of Rocky Horror have two ways to see the show this Halloween weekend which as Mr. Tunis reminds us, is an hour longer on Halloween night.

The kids at the Berea College Theatre Laboratory are presenting The Rocky Horror Show, the original 1973 Richard O’Brien musical that started it all. Like it’s cinematic incarnation — we’ll get to that in a few sentences — audience participation is encouraged, and members of the Berea audience will actually receive participation bags with things like confetti for the audience to throw. Please do remember there are live people playing Dr. Frank and company, so don’t try to go and upstage them like you do at the movie. Tonight and Saturday, the students will put up two shows nightly at 8 and midnight at Berea’s McGaw Theatre. Tickets are $5-$10 and can be reserved by calling (859) 985-3300 from 1-5 p.m. Friday and one hour prior to curtain. Berea students get in free, but must present a valid Berea ID.

Anyone know if Transylvania University ever did Rocky Horror? Seems like it would be a lot of fun there.

Of course, the annual party at the Kentucky Theatre reconvenes at midnight tonight and Saturday for 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Meat Loaf and all the rest. Feel free to try to upstage Curry — just try. According to the Kentucky’s blog, Lexington ranked Numero Tres (I am probably phrasing that as competently as Chad Ochocinco says 85) behind only Chicago and San Francisco in Rocky Horror Halloween attendence last year.

So, there it is: Live from Berea or on film in Lexington. But really, there should be time to get from Berea after the 8 p.m. show to Lexington for the midnight movie. I mean, if you’re not going to Time Warp twice on Halloween weekend, when are you going to Time Warp twice.

Don’t forget: The Thriller dance marches through Downtown Lexington again, tonight.

Quest Community Church's new state-of-the-art 2,400-seat auditorium was built with private funds. Could Lexington arts supporters do something similar?

What do you think of Lexington’s inventory of theaters and other venues for live performances?

Currently, leaving aside our behemoth of Rupp Arena, our major arts and entertainment venues are the Singletary Center for the Arts, which seats about 1,500, and the Lexington Opera House, which accomodates just under 1,000. Then, in the seats-a-few-hundred category, you have the black box theater in the Downtown Arts Center, the Lyric Theatre, which is currently being rennovated, and the Kentucky Theatre. There are also venues such as Studio Players’ Carriage House Theatre and the Lexington Children’s Theatre that are almost exclusively used by the groups that occupy them, and University spaces such as the University of Kentucky’s Guignol Theatre and Transylvania University’s Haggin Auditorium that are primarily used by the institutions.

Am I leaving any Big Kahunas out?

So, is that a good inventory. What do we lack?

Some lament we never got the major performing arts center that was supposed to happen where the courthouses now stand at Main and Limestone. Others say Lexington isn’t ready for a venue of that caliber. Others look at smaller spaces such as the Woodford Theatre’s venue in Falling Springs Arts and Recreation Center and wonder why Lexington couldn’t have something like that for groups that may see the Opera House as too big for their needs.

Still others say creativity trumps venues, and point to places such as Charleston, S.C., that have built vibrant performing arts scenes without an ideal inventory of venues. Here, we have examples such as Balagula Theatre at Natasha’s Bistro and Bar and the chamber music festivals that bookend the summer taking place in  an old tobacco barn at Shaker Village and Fasig-Tipton’s horse sales pavilion showing a creative use of non-traditional spaces in town.

Here’s another fly I’ll throw in the ointment: I just attended a concert last week in a new, state of the art 2,400-seat Lexington venue that would have been the envy of many area arts groups: Quest Community Church’s new sanctuary. If there is a desire for a new theater or theaters in town, do you need to have public funds to build it, or can the arts community come together to make something happen like, oh, Quest or a little baseball park near Broadway and New Circle that was built with private funds.

That’s sort of a distillation of conversations and thoughts I’ve had over the last several years about Lexington’s theater space.

So, what do you think? Hit the comment button and let’s talk.

The full title was Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It could also be, How I Learned How to Laugh at the Cold War, because the Stanley Kubrick classic certainly got us to do that.

If you are too young to know a world without computers and with black and white TV’s, then you probably have no recollection of what it was like to live with a persistent fear of being nuked. But that was the world in 1964 when Kubrick, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Slim Pickens and others united to deliver this hilarious satire about nuclear annihilation.

The plot centers on Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) who goes mad and launches an attack on the Soviet Union which would set off a “Doomsday Machine” that would destroy the world and the clumsy efforts of Western officials to avert catastrophy.

You can travel back to that cold war era Wednesday when Dr. Strangelove is the feature in the Kentucky Theatre’s Summer Classics series at 1:30 and 7:15 p.m. Tickets are $4.

Paul Newman in an iconic role as Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler.

The impetus for showing The Hustler now is, of course, showing the late Paul Newman in his prime.

In 1961, Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats was probably as big an attraction, but the movie was the story of Newman’s “Fast Eddie” Felson, a pool hustler who loses big in the beginning and struggles to get back at great personal expense. It shows at 1:30 p.m. and 7:15 p.m. Wednesday as part of the Kentucky Theatre’s Summer Classics Series. Admission is $4.

The story actually visits the Kentucky Derby as the setting for a key match for Eddie, though Louisville is not listed as a filming location. Most of the action takes place in New York City.

The Hustler is considered by many to be an American classic and Fast Eddie became an iconic American film character, though it took 25 years for Newman to win an Oscar for the part. He did that when he reprised the role in The Color of Money (1986), a  sequel that finds aging Eddie trying to nurture a talented-but-cocky young Hustler played by Tom Cruise. The Martin Scorsese film featured Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Cruise’s girfriend and a soundtrack highlight by some solid Eric Clapton tunes.

But the original remains the classic.

The robot, Gort, attends to a fallen Klaatu (Michael Rennie) as Helen (Patricia Neal) looks on.

The Kentucky Theatre has made a good habit of bringing in summer classics shortly after remakes have come out, and usually the result is reminding us how much better the original was.

Such is the case with this week’s summer classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The 1951 sci-fi classic stars Kentucky’s own Patricia Neal as a woman who unwittingly takes an alien in as a boarder and later helps him in his mission to learn about and save earth.

Neal has admitted over the years that while working on the movie, she thought it was just a throw-away movie about flying saucers, and she did not realize the Robert Wise film would go on to be really good and regarded as one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time.

No one will be saying the same thing about last year’s Day the Earth Stood Still remake starring Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, the role originally made famous by Michael Rennie. According the Internet Movie Database, Rennie was selected because the London stage actor was unfamiliar to American audiences and would be easier for viewers to accept as “alien.” By contrast, many viewers just find Reeves hard to accept.

But he actually was one of the better things about a movie that just didn’t get its source material.

The original Day the Earth Stood Still was an engaging cautionary tale about mankind’s over reliance on violence in the Cold War Era, while the new one tried unsuccessfully to be an action film and graft an environmental message onto the plot.

Check out the original at 1:30 and 7:15 p.m. at the Kentucky. Admission is $4, and don’t forget, “Klaatu barada nikto.”

Groucho Marx in 'Duck Soup.'

So, you think that a win-at-all-costs attitude is a new phenomenon in college sports? Ha! Has the Kentucky Theatre got a 1932 Marx Bros. movie for you.

Horse Feathers is part of a Marx double feature at 1:30 and 7:15 p.m. Wednesday, this week’s installment of the theatre’s summer classics series. The other feature is Duck Soup (1933), one of those movies that was considered a near bomb when it premiered, but is now regarded as a comedy classic.

Duck Soup is the one where Grouch Marx is appointed the leader of fictional Fredonia by a rich widow, played by Margaret Dumont. Harpo and Chico play spies from the rival state of Sylvania, and Zeppo is Groucho’s advisor who inadvertently helps him start a war — as only war can be waged in a Marx Bros. movie.

And in Horse Feathers, they play football as it can only be played in a Marx Bros. movie. Watch for the final touchdown. The film is about a football game between Darwin and Huxley colleges, and a lot of humor focuses on colleges stretching eligibility requirements to be competitive.

Of course, we relay all of this like people care about the plots of Marx Bros. movies.

Yes, Duck Soup has a pretty serious satire of war, and both movies poke fun at the new film censorship board of the day. But the real point of these films is classic comedy, like Duck Soup’s mirror scene and the speakeasy joke in Horse Feathers.

With these, the brothers’ last two films for Paramount, the quartet made Depression-era audiences howl with laughter. And today, the same thing will happen at the Kentucky.

Some things never change.

If you have ever been creeped out seeing a solid line of birds sitting on a power line or hearing a deafening squawk of a flock of birds during migration season, it’s probably because you’ve seen a certain Alfred Hitchcock flick.

That squawk can be particularly unnerving because Hitch made it the soundtrack of his 1963 hit, The Birds, which shows at 1:30 and 7:15 p.m. today as part of the Kentucky Theatre’s Summer Classics series. Tickets are $4 at the door.

Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, and Jessica Tandy in The Birds.

Leave it to Hitchcock to take creatures normally associated with peace, love, and tranquility and turn them into murderous monsters.

It actually is a pair of love birds that Melanie (Tippi Hedren) buys for Mitch (Rod Taylor) that gets the drama started on Bodega Bay. Melanie buys the birds after a contentious encounter with Mitch as an excuse to get close to Mitch again, and maybe endear herself to him.

Soon after she arrives, massive flocks of birds begin staging gruesome attacks on the maritime village, including an unnerving assault on school children. One of the classic scenes of The Birds, where Mitch, Melanie and others walk among thousands of quiet birds in an attempt to escape, was brilliantly parodied by The Simpsons in the episode A Streetcar Named Marge (one of the best Simpsons episodes ever).

In the scene, set at the Ayn Rand School for Tots, Maggie has just retrieved pacifiers that were taken from her and all her friends. When Homer, Bart, and Lisa arrive to pick Maggie up, they must step gingerly through hundreds of babies to the deafening sound of pacifier sucking.

Part of the creepiness of the movie is it doesn’t answer questions. Was it the love birds? Was it Melanie? Was it just a freak of nature? Hitch seems to provide one possible explanation in the trailer, above.

OK, I don’t know how they left Samurai Delicatessen (above) out of the lineup, but the Kentucky Theatre does have a pretty cool Samurai film festival the week after next.

The four day festival of somewhat more serious samurai fare includes a movie some film buffs consider the best movie ever made: Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954) at 4:30 and 8 p.m. April 20.

Zatoichi, or The Blind Swordsman of Zatoichi is the feature at 5:30, 7:40 and 9:40 p.m. April 21. The Takeshi Kitano film won the people’s choice award at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival.  Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), starring Forest Whitaker as a hitman who models himself after the Japanese warriors, is next at 5:15, 7:30 and 9:40 p.m. April 22.

Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) closes out the series at 5, 7:40 and 9:40 p.m. April 23. Judging by reviews, the English-language film starring mostly Japanese actors is a love-love-it-or-hate-it proposition.