![]() Michael Simon White was born in Glasgow on Jan. Through a misbegotten business deal, White failed to profit from the movie. It became a cult hit through several generations of moviegoers who attend midnight showings around the world. In 1975 White produced a film version, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick. “The Rocky Horror Show” opened in a tiny space upstairs at the Royal Court Theater in London, but moved to other sites around London, notably the Kings Road Theater, where it became a smash, running for seven years and nearly 3,000 performances.īy the time it closed, in 1980, the show had appeared in Los Angeles and (not very successfully) on Broadway and had begun to engender the myriad companies that continue to tour. Perhaps most notably, White produced an obscure musical parody of horror movies, written by Richard O’Brien, involving a honeymooning couple and a transvestite mad scientist. In the 1970s, White produced “Housewife! Superstar!,” an early full-length performance by Australian comic actor and female impersonator Barry Humphries as his alter ego, Dame Edna Everage. ![]() In London it opened in 1970 and ran for seven years, and a Broadway revival in 1976 lasted nearly 13 years. Reviewers treated it harshly, finding it puerile or vulgar or both, but its open bawdiness, though pretty tame by today’s lights, made it notorious in its time. In 1969, White and others produced “Oh! Calcutta!,” a revue of sex-related skits based on a concept by Kenneth Tynan and performed largely in the nude, which ran three years in New York. It was one of several shows that White put on in seeming defiance of England’s official censor, and that by 1968 helped loose the requirement that a show had to be licensed by the office of the censor, known as the Lord Chamberlain. His first West End production, in the early 1960s, was “The Connection,” Jack Gelber’s grim depiction of drug addicts anticipating a fix. ![]() “And we thought, ‘What?’”īut White’s reputation was largely built on his willingness to get behind the nutty, the sexy, the outrageous - challenging shows that pushed the envelope of popular taste in one way or another. “We were suddenly told that someone called Michael White wanted to put us on in the West End,” Cleese said, referring to London’s commercial theater district. They included actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, outlandish director John Waters, artist and singer Yoko Ono, television producer Lorne Michaels, actress Naomi Watts, fashion editor Anna Wintour - who said White alerted her to a young model, Kate Moss, before anyone else - and Monty Python stalwart John Cleese.Ĭleese recalled that it was White who spotted him in 1963 as a participant in an unheralded comedy revue called “Cambridge Circus” (which also featured another future Python, Graham Chapman), and put the act on a big commercial stage. The film also featured testimony to White’s accomplishments, affinities and charms from an eclectic range of other celebrities. He was a showbiz insider who knew everybody, a regular at the Cannes Film Festival - “the most famous person you’ve never heard of,” as actress Greta Scacchi said in a 2013 documentary about him, “The Last Impresario.” A report by Reuters, citing a former girlfriend of White’s as a source, said he died of heart failure in Ojai, California.Ī gifted talent scout with a gambler’s nerve and occasional recklessness - he played the horses - White was a colorful gadabout for whom the famous were catnip and the after-party was as important as the show. The Society of London Theater announced the death on its website. Michael White, a Scottish-born theater and movie producer whose catholic but often risqué taste and devil-may-care attitude helped bring to life “The Rocky Horror Show,” “Oh! Calcutta!” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” died Monday.
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