Under tacky, garish light at Studio 54, luke evans arrives in a role built for theatrical mischief. The Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show opens with the kind of kitschy atmosphere that invites applause, laughter, and a little self-conscious nostalgia. It also carries a question that hangs over the room from the start: can a cult favorite still feel alive when the crowd knows every beat?
What does this Broadway revival try to revive?
Richard O’Brien’s 1973 musical was already a spoof of science-fiction and horror B movies before it became a cultural object with its own rituals. The show’s long afterlife has been shaped by the 1975 film adaptation, whose midnight screenings helped turn audience participation into part of the experience. This stage version leans into that history with a set that spills from the theater into the lobby, skeletons, movie posters, model castles, and metallic mannequins crowding the space around Studio 54.
The result is less a conventional revival than a suggestion of one: a production that wants to recreate the thrill of being in on the joke. Fans in the audience show up in fishnets, maid uniforms, and other Rocky Horror-themed clothes, and some shout lines at key moments. The production allows that energy, but also tries to keep it from running away with the evening. In that balance lies both its charm and its strain.
Why does the energy sometimes slip?
For all the visual playfulness, the staging does not always move with the snap that the material seems to demand. The first burst of pleasure is easy enough to find. Juliette Lewis opens the show with a wobbly but charming rendition of “Science Fiction Double Feature. ” Stephanie Hsu and Andrew Durand guide the audience through the story with winning assurance. Sam Pinkleton’s staging uses hands poking from curtains and tiny models of Frank-n-Furter’s mansion to underline the show’s absurdity.
Still, the revival can feel loose where it should feel sharpened. The movement across the stage sometimes reads as aimless, and the production’s drift into abstraction can weaken the sense of drive. That matters in a show whose power depends on momentum as much as mood. The comparison to a midnight screening is built into the piece itself, but a live Broadway revival needs more than a loose echo of the film’s atmosphere.
That tension gives the production its strongest and weakest quality at once. It is faithful to the spirit of permissive chaos, but it does not always supply enough theatrical pressure to make the chaos feel exciting rather than slack. The question is not whether the show understands its own mythology. It does. The question is whether that mythology has been turned into enough dramatic force.
How does luke evans shape Frank-n-Furter?
As Frank-n-Furter, luke evans brings star presence and a voice that opens up the score. He appears in the right heels and bustier, though the production saddles him with a wig that reads oddly limp and wet-looking. In dialogue, he can seem self-conscious, hesitant to fully commit to the role’s high melodrama. But in song, he comes alive.
His most striking moments arrive when he lets his rich, Elton John-ian tenor bloom, especially in “I’m Going Home. ” In a show built around excess, that song lands as one of the clearest reminders that musical theatre can still cut through camp with something direct and emotionally legible. It is also where the revival briefly finds the precision it needs elsewhere.
Rachel Dratch also earns the room as the Narrator, especially when responding to audience members who shout out the semi-scripted lines that often accompany the material. Those exchanges help restore some of the communal spark that the production elsewhere struggles to sustain. But beyond those flashes, the comedy does not always keep pace with the show’s ambitions.
What does this revival say about audience ritual now?
There is something revealing in the way the production handles participation. The audience is invited to enjoy the old rituals, but also nudged to keep them from becoming disruptive. That boundary reflects a broader reality around cult theater: the pleasure often comes from a shared code, yet the code can overwhelm the performance if the production does not hold firm control.
In that sense, luke evans and the rest of the cast are working inside a format that asks for both reverence and irreverence. The revival clearly knows what people want from The Rocky Horror Show: the costumes, the call-and-response, the camp, the soundtrack of recognition. What it offers, at its best, is a reminder that those elements still have life in a live theater. What it lacks, at times, is the sharper engine that would make the whole evening feel irresistible.
Back in Studio 54, amid the silver ducts and eerie décor, the production keeps returning to the same invitation: surrender to the pleasure. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the room feels ready while the show is still catching up. That gap is the story of this revival, and the reason the performance lingers after the lights come up.
