Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★★ (four stars)
Ticketing: Buy tickets to The Rocky Horror Show
“Give yourself over to absolute pleasure,” urges the absurdly named Dr. Frank-N-Furter as the silly, sexy cult musical The Rocky Horror Show nears its frenzied climax. Roundabout Theatre Company’s exuberant Broadway revival of the show, directed by Sam Pinkleton and featuring a killer cast led by international heartthrob Luke Evans as Frank, makes roughly the same invitation. It’s an awfully hard one to resist.
Richard O’Brien’s spoof of science-fiction and horror B movies—a delirious mix of satire, rock & roll and anything-goes queer sensibility—premiered in 1973, as glam rock was giving moralists the vapors. Frank, the story’s strutting all-purpose villain, reflects all of that: A self-proclaimed “sweet transvestite” from the planet Transsexual (in the Transylvania galaxy), he’s an alien, a mad scientist, a murderer and an all-purpose corrupter of morals, hellbent on sexual as well as interplanetary conquest. The powerfully spicy Tim Curry originated the role onstage and, more crucially, in the 1975 film adaptation, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which became the ultimate midnight movie and inspired rituals of viewership—costumes, props, a practical second script of jokes to be shouted at the screen—that continue to this day.
That interactivity has become an essential part of the experience of seeing the film, and some of its spirit carries over to this immersive revival. The production’s set, by the design collective called dots, extends kooky-spooky decor—part spaceship, part haunted house—out to the lobby and into every corner of Studio 54, whose history of 1970s decadence adds to the louche atmospherics. There are skeletons, movie posters, model castles and a row of metallic mannequins in the loge where half of the band is located; silver ducts wind through the space, wrapped in strings of green lights. A few devoted fans in the audience wear fishnets, maid uniforms and other Rocky Horror-themed items—isn’t it nice that some people still dress up for the theater?—and some of them yell lines at the stage at key moments, mostly from near the back row. Such moments reverse the usual direction of audience participation; instead of the actors corralling the spectators into action (as does happen briefly during the “Time Warp” dance number), it’s the spectators who initiate the interaction. Would-be participants are advised at the outset to avoid being too disruptive, and they largely comply, especially during songs. (The Narrator sections are open season.) But the possibility of such disruption, and the uncertainty of the ongoing negotiation, gives the performance a sense of dynamic tension.
It’s been a sparse Broadway season for musicals, but at the same time an unusually rich one for stellar ensemble casts in shows that have multiple good parts. We’ve already had Ragtime, Schmigadoon, Titanique and Cats: The Jellicle Ball, but the Rocky Horror cast is perhaps the starriest yet. All of the principals have significant careers in film, television, stage or some combination of the three—two of them are Oscar nominees—and they don’t disappoint. Everyone seems totally game; they’ve come to play. Juliette Lewis, dressed fetchingly as a retro usherette, begins the proceedings, purring the opening number with coy precision. It’s a little camp and a little weird—and then, suddenly, a lot camp and a lot weird, as a pair of outlandish creatures slide down the aisles like showgirls that just happen to have giant eyeballs for heads. (The costumes, by David I. Reynoso, are sensationally creative throughout; Jane Cox’s lighting and Brian Ronan’s are also distinguished.)
The pricelessly droll Rachel Dratch, in a smoking jacket, is the grave and foreboding Narrator who sets the scenes to come. Andrew Durand and Stephanie Hsu play the wholesome Brad and Janet, newly affianced and deeply rooted in squareness, who get stranded with a flat tire on a stormy night and are forced to take shelter at a nearby Gothic manse whose light they have seen through the dark. The creepy servants there—Riff Raff (a seething Amber Gray, in electric voice), a ghoulish major domo with an inky mouth, and his sister Magenta (Lewis again)—make Brad and Janet uneasy but, as the Narrator notes, “they would have to ignore such feelings and take advantage of whatever help was offered.” Little do they know that, soon enough, the help will be taking advantage of them.
Until this point, Pinkleton has kept the production looking modest and low-tech, with help from a quartet of campily menacing Phantoms who act as backing vocalists and stage hands. But that changes once Brad and Janet enter the castle’s main hall, whose glorious central staircase, partly carpeted in animal print, is surrounded by baroque statuary and lit by dozens of melting candles. It is here that we finally meet Frank, the domain’s master. It would be foolish to try to imitate Curry’s performance, and Evans doesn’t try. In some ways, he’s more masculine: Evans, who played Gaston on film in Beauty and the Beast, has a mustache and an impressive physique; and, to boot—to shiny, high-heeled latex boot—his costume is hard-looking, with a leather harness and a prominent codpiece. But where Curry’s naughtiness was tinged with posh haughtiness, Evans is more playful and excitable, at times almost girlish. He’s a different variety of genderqueer, and that keeps the portrayal continually surprising even if you know the show by heart.
Frank’s great ambition is to bring to life his version of Frankenstein’s monster: Rocky, a hot blond muscle bunny with a head for bleached curls and a bod for sin, packed into a flesh-toned lace-up singlet. Josh Rivera gives this puppyish love object a dash of real poignancy; he’s a misfit boy toy who may have feelings for both Frank and Janet, who uses him to explore her lust in the perky song “Touch-a-Touch-a-Touch–a-Touch Me.” (All of the seduction scenes are smartly handled to up the degree of consent.) The main cast is rounded out by Michaela Jaé Rodriguez as the squeaky Columbia—a glitzed out, blitzed out groupie—and Harvey Guillén as her biker boyfriend, Eddie, who returns in zombified form only to be dispatched by a chainsaw-wielding Frank in a grisly end that redefines the term buzz kill. Guillén also returns to play Dr. Scott, Eddie’s uncle and Brad and Janet’s former science teacher.
Brad and Janet are the story’s nominal heroes, and the show wouldn’t work if Durand and Hsu were not so expert and appealing in their early scenes of virginal naïveté as well as their later, post-deflowerment ones, when she is feeling newly empowered and he is feeling correspondingly deflated. But as everyone familiar with Rocky Horror knows, Frank is the character you care about, for all his nefarious deeds. Frank-N-Furter parties are not sausage parties, and neither is this production, whose ensemble includes gay and trans actors along with two straight cis women playing men. Through Frank, O’Brien has created a safe zone for oddballs: a sexual dreamland of default pansexuality where deviance is the norm. No wonder the show and the movie have attracted such passionate fans: Rocky Horror, not despite its goofiness but because of it, represents. And although he is eventually punished, in keeping with B movie conventions—“Society must be protected”—there’s a sense in which Frank wins: in the ongoing legacy of this musical to weirdos everywhere. In tempestuous times like ours, it holds out the hope of a liberating light, not too far away.
The Rocky Horror Show. Studio 54 (Broadway). Book, music and lyrics by Richard O’Brien. Directed by Sam Pinkleton. With Luke Evans, Stephanie Hsu, Andrew Durand, Amber Gray, Juliette Lewis, Rachel Dratch, Josh Rivera, Harvey Guillén, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez. Running time: 1hr 50mins. One intermission.
Buy tickets to The Rocky Horror Show: Broadway.com
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