Luke Evans sauntered into Studio 54 as Frank-N-Furter and the room answered the way this show has trained audiences to respond for decades: with cheers, shouted lines and a brief invitation to join in the Time Warp. Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show has turned the old disco space into a full-tilt playground, with kooky-spooky decor spilling into the lobby and into every corner of the theater.
The production is built around the character’s command to “give yourself over to absolute pleasure,” and Evans leans into the role of the “sweet transvestite” with a performance that keeps the crowd leaning forward. On this night, a few devoted fans arrived in fishnets, maid uniforms and other Rocky Horror gear, while others called out familiar lines at key moments, treating the stage less like a proscenium and more like a shared ritual.
That response still makes sense because Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show, which premiered in 1973, was never a conventional musical to begin with. It was a spoof of science-fiction and horror B movies, laced with satire, rock and roll and queer sensibility, and Tim Curry made Frank-N-Furter unforgettable onstage before playing him again in the 1975 film adaptation, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That movie became an ultimate midnight movie, and the audience behavior it inspired — costumes, props and shouted jokes — is still part of the draw.
Director Sam Pinkleton does not fight that legacy; he feeds it. The immersive setup at Studio 54 stretches the show’s world beyond the stage and asks the crowd to live inside it for a while, which is exactly why this revival works now. It is not trying to replace the ritual around Rocky Horror. It is giving that ritual a Broadway-sized home.
The one question hanging over any revival of this title is whether a show so tied to audience participation can still feel alive when the trick is familiar. This production answers it by making the familiarity part of the experience. Evans gives the crowd the Frank-N-Furter they came for, and the room gives the show back its long memory.