Zachary Parsons-Lozinski as Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror Show, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
It’s time warp time. Picture this: a little kid in the single-digit age bracket, with Halloween insomnia, sneaks downstairs way past his bedtime and turns on the TV. He flips through the channels; he stumbles on a sight, and an attitude, he would never forget. He finds himself immersed in the fun and games at Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s place.
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“It was the first film I ever watched,” says the exuberant Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The 1975 celluloid incarnation of a sci-fi rock n’ roll goth fantasy cult musical devised two years earlier by an out-of-work B-movie-obsessed London actor (that would be Richard O’Brien) made an indelible impression. “I was swept away by the outrageousness and the irreverence, not knowing either of those words — and the aggressive unashamed queerness of it!” Talk about “another dimension, with voyeuristic intention,” as the Time Warp number has it.
Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in Rocky Horror Show, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.
That was the ‘90s. And Parsons-Lozinski’s awestruck, and receptive, younger self (“I don’t know what this is, but I’m confident I AM this!”) could hardly have predicted that his grown-up theatre artist self would be onstage in the Halloween season of 2024, starring as the “sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania” in the cult classic. Byron Martin’s production of Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show launches Grindstone Theatre’s first-ever mainstage series of big musicals at the Orange Hub (Oct. 18 to Nov. 3). “I think shows come into your life when they’re meant to!”
“I jokingly say that the plot is ‘straight couple makes gay friends’,” declares Parsons-Lozinsky, who arrives at a Strathcona coffee joint in pink sequinned clogs and a leopard coat with cuffs the size of truck tires (“my fashion sense is ‘enthusiastic’”). He has one of those laughs that could pop the earbuds out of email-ers three tables away.
Bella King, Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Cameron Chapman in Rocky Horror Show, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.
If you’ve ever snapped your rubber gloves along with Frank-N-Furter at an interactive performance on stage or screen, I don’t need to tell you this. But, what the hey, it involves the dark-and-stormy-night arrival of newly engaged innocents Brad (Cameron Chapman) and Janet (Bella King) at the mansion of the enterprising scientist, “an unapologetically queer space” as Parsons-Lozinski puts it. The raucous (singing) household includes the show-stopping creepy butler Riff Raff (Josh Travnik) and his sister Magenta (Kendra Humphrey) — and Frank-N-Furter’s pièce de résistance. Which is the unveiling of his latest lab creation, the muscular specimen of the title (Mark Sinongco).
Parsons-Lozinski arrives in fishnets (“and lots of skin”) on the Orange Hub stage that once belonged to his alma mater MacEwan Theatre Arts, and his student performance as Man #1 in The Music Man, now lost, alas, in the mists of time. He brings with him a resumé packed with punk, club dates, cabarets, drag shows as his high-heeled persona Lilith Fair, and playwriting (The House That Fucks played Off-Broadway in the Fringe Encore series in 2022).
His drag debut was in a show for a vanished Edmonton troupe wth an enigmatic name, Rabbit Marmot. And after graduation he worked for Aimée Beaudoin (now the co-owner and co-producer of Spotlight Cabaret) on the Jubilations Dinner Theatre circuit. He was the first full-time drag cast member in their Orange Is The New Pink — as Lilith Fair.
He’d long been fascinated by drag and its theatrical possibilities. A remount of Guys in Disguise’s BitchSlap! was “the first drag show I’d seen where the drag wasn’t the joke; it was the medium for telling the story.” And he held that thought.
The Pansy Cabaret, starring Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Daniel Belland. Photo supplied.
Recently, Parsons-Lozinski, Calgary-based “for now,” has been leaning into theatre. “I feel like I’m moving into a different stage of my career,” he says. The turning point, he thinks, was The Pansy Cabaret at the Fringe in 2022, Darrin Hagen’s meticulously researched exploration of a vivid, playful, and brave chapter of showbiz history: the flowering of queer and drag culture on Broadway and vaudeville during the Prohibition era in New York. And its utter erasure by homophobia in a single decade when Prohibition ended. The jaunty performance style, the sounds of that era and its cheeky and sometimes poignant Edwardian song repertoire, the sassy interaction with the audience … all were well within the Parsons-Lozinski compass in a bold, resourceful star performance, as Edmonton audiences discovered.
“Darrin,” he says, “has been my biggest inspiration…. He changed my life by putting me in The Pansy Cabaret. That show put me on a completely different path.” And its “homage to the people who came before me and who bravely put it all out there so I can be the artist I am now” inspired a post-Pansy Cabaret creation of his own. Millennial Sex Witch is “a continuation of that thought, through a contemporary lens, what it’s like to be a drag artist now.”
Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Thomas Jones in With Bells On, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, EPIC Photography
In With Bells On, the 2023 Devanand Janki/ Tommy Newman holiday musical based on Hagen’s two-hander comedy of that name, Parsons-Lozinski played a drag queen, in full seasonal regalia, stuck in an elevator with a mousey sad-sack accountant. “Family friendly! A lovely heartwarming Christmas show. And transgressive because of that,” says the actor cheerfully.
At the other end of the spectrum, tonally speaking, is Liam Salmon’s furiously articulate, politically scathing solo play Local Diva which premiered at last summer’s Fringe. Fuelled by exasperation, then outrage, the Local Diva character was “the most aggressive thing I’ve ever done,” says Parsons-Lozinski. And it unleashed, not unexpectedly, a toxic deluge of homophobia on social media.
He’s done lots of musicals, and is about to do another. But even though he graduated from a theatre school specializing in musical theatre, Parsons-Lozinski doesn’t really think of himself as “a musicals person” per se, “I don’t read music. And I love to smoke…. I sound more like Kathleen Turner every day.”
Rocky Horror is “the perfect intersection of the aggression of Local Diva and the frivolous fun of With Bells On,” he thinks. “It’s so powerful to be able to come into this show which formed so much of the comfort I have with my identity now, and the body of work I would pursue. And to use it as a middle finger….”
The timing is right: “there’s so much aggression and resistance to queer work,” he says. “I have been on the receiving end of so much vitriol on social media, from people who want to vilify my community…. I’m channelling both my love for the material, and this anger I have about we are being talked about,” he says. “That aggression, that resistance … I feel like I’m able to throw it back!” And, hey, there’s no fourth wall.
Each performance of the show will feature a new guest as the Narrator. And Grindstone is going full-interaction with the production. Which makes Rocky Horror “a great choice” for the little company that brought us Hot Boy Summer and Die Harsh. “Their roots are in improv,” as Parsons-Lozinski points out. And in this musical “the audience is its own character.”
With his club cred, Parsons-Lozinski has always savoured that direct connection. Be warned. He can hardly wait.
Check out Grindstone’s mainstage season lineup at the Orange Hub (where they manage the theatre spaces) here.
PREVIEW
Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show
Theatre: Grindstone Theatre
Created by: Richard O’Brien (music, lyrics, book)
Directed by: Byron Martin
Starring: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Bella King, Cameron Chapman, Kendra Humphrey, Mark Sinongco, Josh Travnik, Karlee Squires, Evan Dowling
Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.
Running: Oct. 18 through Nov. 3
Tickets: showpass.com
