Review: ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ Revival Gives Us What We Want

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.