My Variety Review: 'The Rocky Horror Show' on Broadway

“Enjoy the show. Don’t be an asshole,”

While it’s not your typical musical theater greeting, “The Rocky Horror Show” is not your typical show. It’s one that is flamboyantly abnormal and anarchical and one that famously thrives on enthusiastic audience engagement and interplay — but only up to a point (as the pre-show warning suggests. No projectiles, please.)

That makes this Broadway revival of the ‘70s cult musical — the granddaddy of all experiential shows — fit right in with the wave of end-of-season, party-hearty shows. But this Roundabout production at Studio 54 — the site of glittering debauchery of another era — just isn’t all that much fun, being mostly effortful, maddening and finally exhausting.

That might not make a difference to its faithful cos-playing fans but Rocky newbies attending the show’s first return to Broadway since the 2000 Circle-in-the-Square revival, might wonder what the fuss was all about.

The musical — a rock-and-raunch, goth-and-gay parody of cheesy, mid-century horror/sci-fi flicks — was created by Richard O’Brien (book, music, lyrics and who performed as the snarling butler Riff Raff). It was initially a flop when the London hit transferred to Broadway in 1975.

But, unexpectedly, its film version released that same year became a midnight movie phenom, marked by its impromptu audience outbursts and eventually becoming a counter-culture landmark, widening the generational divide even further. Later stage productions over the decades drew new audiences of outcasts and rebels discovering personal connections to its subversive spirit, camp sensibility and untethered celebration of sexual liberation, fluidity and identity.

Like those nonsensical, cheap B-movie flicks of mad scientists, alien invasions and monstrous creatures, the musical’s plot, characters and dialogue are equally arch, portentous and purposely stupid, making it a welcome spoofy escape from an even more disturbing real world.

This relic of a production, however, doesn’t feel particularly dangerous, shocking or even gleeful. The casting is also a mixed bag.

Fitting most comfortably here is Juliette Lewis of “Yellowjackets” and “Cape Fear” fame. A quirky and spellbinding actor with a touch of trigger-sensitive crazy, she opens the show looking like a demented Roxy usher, welcoming the audience with one of the show’s signature songs, “Science Fiction Double Feature.” She also plays the maid Magenta with the same sense of unworldly bizarreness.

Rachel Dratch, a master of comic peculiarity, moves the flimsy storyline along as the show’s wide-eyed, portentous narrator (and deals with the audience’s shout-outs with amusingly befuddled exasperation.) The vocally strong Andrew Durand (“Dead Outlaw,” “Shucked”) plays square and square-jawed Brad, and Stephanie Hsu(“Everything Everywhere All At Once”) is prim-but-soon-slutty ingenue Janet. The engaged and virginal couple finds refuge at a strange castle one dark and thunder-stormy night when their car breaks down — and where these naifs discover transformative sexual awakenings they didn’t expect.

They’re welcomed as part of the unveiling of a new creature made by the sweet transvestite from Transylvania, Dr. Frank-N-Furter played by Luke Evans (TV’s “Nine Perfect Strangers”, Gaston in the live-action “Beauty and the Beast” film). In fishnet stockings, black leather corset and perky nipples, Evans posh-queen performance as the androgynous, ambisexual, pleasure-seeking alien is a wobbly one, ever game but not quite achieving the light and bright balance of sex, wickedness and play.

Other aspects of the production also feel off. As the doc’s creation Rocky (John Rivera), usually depicted as a glistening depiction of male beauty, appears here as a non-Adonis — a beefy, WWF-looking contender, in singlet and without a clue. Amber Gray (Broadway’s “Hadestown”) is wasted here and is given an unfortunately creepy look as Riff Raff, the butler.

The iconic glam-rock, hint-of-“Grease” tunes — especially in the first act with “Damn It, Janet,” “Over at the Frankenstein Place” and the giddy “The Time Warp” — give the show an occasional lift. But basically, it’s just a messy drag. And though, in a sense, the mess is the message and coherence isn’t the point, one expects that someone somewhere is orchestrating the chaos, even if it’s only a mad scientist with a vision.

But the clear-eyed loopiness and razor-sharp timing that director Sam Pinkleton brought to “Oh, Mary!” (and which earned him his Tony) are missing among this line-up of aliens, ghouls, minions and innocents roaming the stage.

Though the cheap, thrown-together look of the show is usually part of the show’s charm — and which is why it often works so well in non-Broadway settings — there still should be some sense that it’s all of a piece and not like its pulled together by a disparate — if not desperate — committee. (The hodgepodge set and theater environment was created by the usually impressive design collective dots — and clearly here it didn’t connect them.)

The production will no doubt satisfy “Rocky Horror Show” fetishists who still find comfort in the liturgical rituals of a by-gone counter-culture. Others, however, will just find themselves in a tired time warp.