The musical, like the movie it inspired, maintains a widespread following and helped pave the way for other gender-bending musicals like Hedwig and the Angry Inch. City Lights opens its production of The Rocky Horror Show on May 15.

A campy sci-fi and B-movie send-up, The Rocky Horror Show has become best known for its tongue-in-cheek dismantling of sexual taboos. To that end, the show's central—almost signature—character is Dr. Frank N. Furter, played by Bay Area actor and director Kit Wilder for City Lights' production. "He is a classic B-movie hero/villain," Wilder says of his character. "He is a mad scientist from the planet of Transylvania in the galaxy of Transsexual—or vice versa. And he's hell-bent on making the perfect man—for himself. What he says is that he's discovered the secret to life itself, which of course, given the metaphor of the show, is sex. There's nothing shy about this show."

Perhaps it's that lack of restraint that has made both the musical and the film version (The Rocky Horror Picture Show) such longtime cult favorites. But there are definite challenges to staging a work that audiences are so familiar with, particularly when the film incarnation is the best-known. "We wanted to make something that was certainly recognizable but not just a stamp of what people see in the movie. We set about to create something with our own little twist on it but not such a radical interpretation that people aren't going to recognize it," says the company's artistic director, Tom Gough, who is directing the show. "So our musical director has experimented with some different sounds for the band, and we've got some very cool-sounding instrumentations for the guitar and so forth: some surf guitar sounds, some grunge sounds—one of the songs is even a bossa nova."

Also helping delineate stage from screen is the fact that the stage version varies slightly in scene order from the film and has an extra song. Gough notes that the 2000 revival script, which the company is using, even features a nod to safe sex.

One distinctive element of the Rocky Horror experience for movie audiences that had to be adapted for the theater is audience participation, which ranges from yelling key lines to tossing, among other things, rice and toast at the screen. For safety reasons, Gough says, the company is discouraging audiences from throwing anything, but just about anything else is fair game. "As long as it's not involving hurling of food items or things, we're set to expect whatever, in terms of people shouting back at the stage and so forth," he says. From what Gough describes, even without the hail of high-carb foodstuffs, people won't feel too left out, especially with some numbers that may take the show literally into the laps of the audience. "A lot of what we do is going to depend on how the audience responds," says Wilder. "So it's going to be really alive every night and a new show every night."

The company also tips its hat to the movie audience tradition of dressing up as the characters—or anything else—with Leather Night on June 13. Audience members are invited to dress as their favorite Rocky Horror character, or in leather. A leather fashion show and an auction sponsored by Leather Masters will follow the performance. Leather Masters also lent a hand in the production's costuming.

But isn't all this free love and S&M silliness a little dated? "The style may be dated in some ways—I don't really think so—but there's nothing dated about stories of overcoming obstacles, facing danger and coming through it," says Wilder. "The big slogan line from the show is 'Don't dream it—be it.' So I don't think that being 30 years old is going to hurt the show in any way."

Besides, as he says, "You gotta love a show where people are walking around in their underwear, don't you?"

"The Rocky Horror Show" plays May 15­June 21 at City Lights Theater in San Jose. Tickets are $15­$35. For more information, call 408.295.4200.