If you have a weird impulse to interpose the word “Picture” while talking about the new Broadway revival of Richard O’Brien’s “The Rocky Horror Show,” that might be because you grew up on (and with) the cult movie from 1975. Further, you may have been part of the cult yourself. Did you throw toast at a midnight screening? Did you scream choreographed insults — pretty vile ones, now that I think about it — whenever the actors said “Brad” or “Janet”?
Clearly there are enough “Rocky Horror Picture Show” fans attending Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of the stage musical, which opened on Thursday at Studio 54, that the establishment has felt the need to put up signs to encourage decorum. “This is live theater,” they say, somewhat pleadingly. Somewhere, someone is stuffing a bit of dry rye back into her purse.
O’Brien’s introductory song, the doo-wop “Science Fiction Double Feature,” sung by a pie-eyed Usherette (Juliette Lewis) establishes the musical’s aesthetic of B-movie grindhouse, if all the celluloid in the projection room had melted together: Aliens, who are also sexy sadomasochists who are also mad scientists, will lure human fools into their vampiric castle, which is simultaneously a spaceship and a lab. Lewis, hypnotic and unsteady in her velvet pillbox hat, also acts a little melted, which gives us a window into how things will go. The walls, and maybe the voices, will wobble. And then the yelling starts.
So there’s a tension between the audience and the stage in the director Sam Pinkleton’s production, which tries to give us everything we want — big gay mayhem, basically — while also maintaining the control that an eight-show-a-week schedule (and a nonprofit cleaning budget) demand. “Let’s do the time warp again!” sings a gorgeous chorus line of actors in steampunk lingerie, beckoning two lucky audience members onstage to take “just a jump to the left and then a step to the right.” The night I saw it, here and there in the dark, other theatergoers were on their feet too, dancing uninvited.
It might not have been Pinkleton’s original intention to surf this antagonistic frisson from his audience, consisting of the palpable defiance of those who participate and the sometimes perceptible annoyance of those who don’t. But to rediscover O’Brien’s air of transgression, to taste again the gelignite of the odd-old days of the 1970s, one does need something beyond the dutiful.
And casting the comedian Rachel Dratch as the Narrator now looks like Nobel-level brilliance. O’Brien’s musical, originally written in 1973 as a lark for the minuscule Royal Court Theater Upstairs, requires quite a bit of narration, since the dialogue scenes themselves don’t provide for things like motivation, exposition, character introduction, the plot. In this function, Dratch is proudly giving her least, occasionally spinning herself in an office chair, or pointing to a how-to time-warp chart with a deadpan stare.
But when the variously audible “callbacks” — there’s an open-source document of these online that chronicles hundreds of possible raunchy interjections — start coming, you need a narrator who has experience in the comedy crucible of “Saturday Night Live” and improv. The heckles activate Dratch’s deep drollery. “Kind of hard to hear down here,” she says, while gamely trying to understand someone shouting in the balcony. Her energy is that of a homeroom teacher wearing her baseball cap backward: Totally willing to play along with the kids, and thus entirely deflating and hilarious.
She is, in every way, the counter to the production’s charismatic Frank-N-Furter (Luke Evans), the extraterrestrial sexual omnivore whose desire to build himself an earthling man-toy, Rocky (Josh Rivera), blinds him to the signs of homicidal rebellion from his sort-of servants Riff Raff (Amber Gray) and Magenta (Lewis again).
Evans, whom until now I mainly thought of as one of the “Fast and the Furious” villains, rasps his songs with palpable emotion — instead of imitating the glam-camp evil of Tim Curry from the original, Evans becomes the show’s romantic Heathcliff, abandoned by his great loves, all of whom are dead or disappointing. (One is in the fridge.) His magnetism is off the charts: Pinkleton can, more or less, point him at the audience and fire him like a cannon. Evans towers over the rest of the cast in skyscraper boots, his long hair slicked wetly down his back and his chest playing peek-a-boo above his latex corset. Won’t someone, anyone, love him? Half of the orchestra nearly followed him out when he ran off for intermission.
The two virginal naïfs, Brad (Andrew Durand) and Janet (Stephanie Hsu), who are stranded in a rainstorm and take refuge in Frank’s creepy castle, stumble into what looks like a Spirit Halloween takeover of Studio 54. David I. Reynoso designed the costumes to convey a certain luxury, but the rest is defiantly D.I.Y.: The set design company called dots has draped the once elegant room in tinfoil and black plastic; the lighting designer Jane Cox bathes everything in lurid violets and greens.
The thrillingly loud five-piece band, situated in the theater boxes on both sides, is accompanied by a puppet-chorus of blank-faced silver mannequins, whose heads all hinge open in unison, a little like Pez dispensers trained by the Rockettes. In one spectacular moment, the design team pays tribute to Studio 54’s prop from its heyday — a flying cutout of a crescent moon sniffing from a coke spoon — by transforming it into a chariot for Frank’s alien-ex-machina entrance.
“There’s a light / over at the Frankenstein place,” the young couple warbles, in one of O’Brien’s on-the-nail ’50s pastiches, but of course they are traveling into darkness, where their erotic limitations will be first tested, then exploded. And yet, while everyone in this show takes a bow in their underwear, the aura is surprisingly clean: Only in one very funny flash do we see Brad doing something genuinely naughty with Frank. The rest is cheerful grinding (Ani Taj choreographed the somewhat pro forma dances; Ann James took care of the intimacy), with Hsu’s newly, uh, activated Janet crawling around in a lace merry-widow bustier like Sabrina Carpenter.
There is a risk that the very familiarity of “The Rocky Horror Show” — those killer songs, like Ziggy Stardust making out with an old jukebox — and a culture comfortable with codpieces and fishnets will make a revival feel like cute nostalgia rather than still-active provocation. But then, given recent opposition to gay and transgender rights, we can no longer take that comfort for granted. “I’m just a sweet transvestite / from Transsexual, Transylvania,” Frank sings, and instead of referring to his galactic home, it’s as if he’s singing about a safer place, one that was on its way here, just a minute ago.
That word sweet does pervade this revival. After an exhilarating first half, the show softens in the second, when the plot relies on Pinkleton’s Broadway newcomers: Michaela Jaé Rodriguez as Columbia, one of Frank’s ex-paramours; and Harvey Guillén as Dr. Scott, who barges in to investigate. Rodriguez hits one high operatic note that’s more beautiful than anything in the show, but then we lose nearly all her lyrics. Still, she’s darling, as is Guillén. Hsu, riding Rocky like a rocking horse, is double-darling.
Perhaps those of us who love “Rocky Horror” in both its stage and film versions will never be able to recapture that early sense of shock simply because the wildness has been overcome by our affection and gratitude. A lot of people first encountered rambunctious queerness through O’Brien’s musical. “Don’t dream it, be it,” Frank sings, and a whole lot of people did. These performances and movie rituals torpedoed inhibitions, established communities and set many a foundation stone for a wider liberty. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a show that also contains the lyric:
You’re a hot dog But you’d better not try to hurt her Frank Furter.
So, damn it, Janet, I’m glad that the show hasn’t entirely worked out how to do deal with the audience. The show can’t just be a sacred relic — it needs a bit of destabilizing, a tussle between the stage and the seats. Roundabout’s professionalism and coy signage can’t entirely keep the fans in check, which gives the revival itself a sense that it might spin off its axis. What will it be like the night you go? Dratch will probably say something hysterically quelling; Evans will probably knock your stockings off. But who can say? The point of “Rocky Horror” is to lose control. C’mon, let’s do it again.
The Rocky Horror Show Through July 19 at Studio 54, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
Helen Shaw is the chief theater critic for The Times.
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