Rocky Horror, the Fab Four and the Rascals: The Scottish Rite’s October Is a Love Letter to the Live Room

COLLINGSWOOD — There are plenty of ways to experience a movie or a song in 2026, and almost all of them involve you, alone, holding a screen. Which is exactly why I keep coming back to the Scottish Rite Auditorium. You can’t stream a room full of strangers all leaning the same direction at the same moment. You have to go.

You can’t stream a room full of strangers all leaning the same direction at the same moment.Jenna Joy

And this October, the grand old hall on the edge of downtown Collingswood is giving South Jersey three very good reasons to go.

A movie you take part in

It kicks off Sunday, Oct. 4, with “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” at 8 p.m. — and if you’ve only ever watched it on a couch, I’m sorry, but you haven’t really watched it. Rocky Horror is not a movie you observe; it’s a movie you participate in, props in hand, voices raised, the whole auditorium in on a 50-year-old joke that somehow never gets old. It’s the most communal thing you can do in a dark room, and doing it inside a space with this much character is the way it’s meant to be done.

Two nights of music

Then the music arrives. On Friday, Oct. 16, at 7:30 p.m., The Fab Four brings its remarkably devoted Beatles tribute to the stage — the kind of show that turns a whole room of people who’ve never met into one big sing-along by the second number. And the following night, Saturday, Oct. 17, at 7 p.m., The Rascals roll in with a catalog of blue-eyed soul that’s been getting people out of their seats for decades. Two nights, two generations of songs everybody somehow already knows the words to.

Why the room matters

What I love about all of this is where it’s happening. The Scottish Rite is one of those venues that reminds you Collingswood has quietly become one of the most walkable arts towns in the region — a place where you can grab dinner downtown, stroll over to a show, and run into three people you know on the way. The auditorium itself has the kind of scale and bones that make a night out feel like an occasion, not an errand. Nobody built a room like this for a quick transaction. They built it for people to gather.

That’s the thread running through every one of these events, whether it’s a cult film with a shadowcast or a tribute band or a soul act that’s outlasted most of the radio stations that once played it. They only work because people show up, together, in the same room, at the same time. In a year when so much of culture has retreated behind a login screen, a venue keeping that tradition alive deserves a packed house.

So pick a night — or all three. Collingswood will be waiting, and so will the room.

Based on reporting from the Scottish Rite Auditorium events calendar and Jersey Arts.