The Rocky Horror Show

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With its spring mountings of Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels and Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show, the Roundabout Theatre Company is in the mood for verboten love during the final thrust of this Broadway season. But while the latter production knows what it’s doing, the former’s antiquated bawdiness struggles to generate the flushed titters Coward might have provoked a hundred years ago. That’s when the playwright’s chatty, well-heeled depiction of two adulterously hopeful British wives was indeed risqué; now, however, Coward’s quaint transgressiveness offers little, if any, capacity to shock–or, to put it another way, Fallen Angels has turned bedroom bland. By striking contrast, approximately five decades after it premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre, the libidinous antics of The Rocky Horror Show still haven’t lost their spicy fun.

While artistic memory tends to favor the silver screen over the stage, that preference is much more fondly pronounced for The Rocky Horror Show, whose cult following has largely come from its much-cherished celluloid incarnation with the word “picture” squeezed penultimately into the title. Continuing to fill endangered cinemas all over the world, the film’s devotees famously bring their own theatricality to the flickering dark, cosplaying O’Brien’s outlandish characters, singing and dancing along to the campy score, and shouting crowd-sourced dialogue that has become akin to a series of liturgical responses. During my attendance of The Rocky Horror Show, this evolving ritualism led to a few performative clashes between the laity and the revival’s in-the-flesh actors. Most hilariously, as Brad–half of an engaged, uber-square couple sexually transformed by a matching pair of gender-fluid bed tricks–the sweet-faced Andrew Durand improvised a profanely reproachful lyric that could have brought Patti LuPone to her feet.

Yet, undeniably, preserving both real and fake propriety mainly falls to the brilliantly droll Rachel Dratch. She keeps the audience’s participatory enthusiasm in side-eyed check while “educationally” narrating the musical’s ribald goings-on in the manner of a hippie-era sexploitation film trying to skirt obscenity laws. Dratch is at the height of her amusingly schoolmarmish abilities when using a visual aid to demonstrate the ridiculously rudimentary steps for the show’s iconic number “The Time Warp” (choreographer Ani Taj sparkles elsewhere). But this lesson is a delicious taunt, as only two members of the audience are brought to the stage to “jump to the left” and “step to the right.” The rest of the rejected congregants must stay seated and jealously watch, as if in a timeout.

Despite being the product of a groovier countercultural period, the major influences for O’Brien’s book and score extend further back to the golden age of horror and science-fiction B-moviedom, which had the inspirational power to twist a kid’s otherwise dull Saturday afternoon into a gloriously inappropriate adventure. Director Sam Pinkleton, who helmed the magnificently outré Oh, Mary!, is obviously cut from the right creative cloth for The Rocky Horror Show, with his daringly inventive commitment to the preposterous and special talent for nonbinary joys. Besides blocking a thrilling Hello, Dolly!-esque staircase arrival for the black-corseted and fishnet-stockinged Frank-N-Furter (debuting British film and stage star Luke Evans), a melodically self-proclaimed “sweet transvestite” from the planet Transsexual in the Transylvania galaxy, Pinkleton also deliriously blurs the production’s physical boundaries through a gimmicky immersiveness reminiscent of cinematic schlockmeister William Castle.

Pinkleton’s production achieves that low-budget perfection primarily from Jane Cox’s lurid lighting enhancements, as well as chintzy touches deployed by the design collective known as dots, which has wrapped the front orchestra seats in tinfoil, hung silver ducts anywhere their existence makes absolutely no sense, and positioned a row of metallic, hinge-headed mannequins in the loge. These shiny, faceless beauties comprise a puppet chorus that first comes to life during the opening number “Science Fiction Double Feature.” Sung with film-nerd quirkiness by Juliette Lewis–who is garbed in a fetching usherette uniform–it surreally prepares us for everything and nothing we’re about to see. But, in case you’re thrown, the rosetta-stone line is definitely not, “Dana Andrews said prunes/Gave him the runes.”

Lewis is a genius casting choice, the actor’s mere presence evoking the greatest stygian hits from her filmography, any of which is still worthy of a midnight meet-up: Cape Fear; Kalifornia; Natural Born Killers. The unsettlingly winsome Lewis also portrays Frank-N-Furter’s maid Magenta, who is part of an extraterrestrial, servile triad that includes Magenta’s butler brother Riff Raff (a delightfully ghastly Amber Gray) and Frank-N-Furter’s volunteer lackey Columbia (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez), a tragic character whose out-of-step conduct is the closest The Rocky Horror Show ever comes to wholesome entertainment. Meanwhile, far on the opposite side of the behavioral spectrum lurks Frank-N-Furter, a mix of Dr. Frankenstein, glam-rock David Bowie, and just a soupçon of Leni Riefenstahl. That bizarre combination deceptively entices Brad and his fiancée Janet (Stephanie Hsu), who stumble upon Frank-N-Furter’s Gothic castle on a dark-and-stormy night, to extremely abandon chastity. As the freshly turned-on Janet, Hsu is a riot in a boldly unabashed performance that puts her cinematic counterpart’s comparatively mild effort to shame–sorry, Susan Sarandon.

In case it needs emphasizing, Frank-N-Furter’s single-minded character motivation is to boink as many attractive people as possible, leading to the godlike creation of Rocky (understudy Boy Radio), an aesthetically impeccable mate to address Frank-N-Furter’s prodigious lust. That need, unfortunately, wasn’t met by his ex-lover Eddie (Harvey Guillén), a zombified, 1950s-style Elvis wannabe whose physique and monogamy Frank-N-Furter questions. The second supposed shortcoming is a romantic loyalty standard the impetuously carnal mad scientist only applies to others, a solipsistic expectation that leads to a severing of his relationship with Eddie–and of Eddie himself. This cutting callousness upsets Eddie’s uncle, Dr. Scott (the chameleonic Guillén again), and also decisively contributes to a domestic staff mutiny.

As Frank-N-Furter, Evans amply fills the towering platform heels of Tim Curry, who originated the role on stage and, much more indelibly, that supreme silver screen. To put it as delicately as possible, Evans owns a distinct advantage in bodily charms over a 1970s Curry, which costume designer David I. Reynoso maximally emphasizes. But the sizable difference between the two fellas doesn’t make Evans any less emotionally vulnerable in the later numbers “I’m Going Home” and “Floorshow/Rose Tint My World.” Despite Frank-N-Furter’s deeply problematic take on love, Evans sentimentally honors his character’s need for a very peculiar and lonely form of it.

The Rocky Horror Show (through November 29, 2026)

Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-719-1300 or visit http://www.roundabouttheatre.org

Running time: one hour and 50 minutes including one intermission