The Rocky Horror Picture Show verbatim at each screening. Performance groups became a staple at "Rocky Horror" screenings due in part to the prominent New York City fan cast. The New York City cast was originally run by former schoolteacher and stand-up comic Sal Piro and his friend Dori Hartley. Hartley who portrayed Dr. Frank N. Furter, was one of several performers, including Will Kohler as Brad Majors, Nora Poses as Janet, and Lilias Piro as Magenta in a flexible rotating cast. The performances of the audience was scripted and actively discouraged improvising, being conformist in a similar way to the repressed characters. On Halloween
The Rocky Horror Show a BBC Radio 2 listener poll of the "Nation's Number One Essential Musicals". As an out-of-work actor in London in the early 1970s, Richard O'Brien wrote "The Rocky Horror Show" to keep himself busy on winter evenings. Since his youth, he had developed a passion for science fiction and B horror movies; he wanted to combine elements of the unintentional humour of B horror movies, portentous dialogue of schlock-horror, Steve Reeves muscle films, and fifties rock and roll into "The Rocky Horror Show". A major theme running throughout the musical is transvestitism, which according to O'Brien was not originally meant