The Everlasting Baroque ‘Time Warp’ of Broadway’s ‘Rocky Horror Show’

In the Village Voice in 1979, unjustly forgotten cultural critic Ellen Willis published an essay entitled “Classical and Baroque Sex in Everyday Life.” She posited two sexual antipodes in American culture, the classical and the baroque. “Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine” she wrote. “Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation’s sake, and stereotypically masculine.”Toying with her freshly minted duality, she proceeds to delineate different sexual modes as either Classical or Baroque. Night, darkness — or candlelight — and complete nudity are classical. High noon, neon lights, and black lace underwear are baroque. The number two is classical, three or more Baroque. And so on.I bring this essay to light because it helps frame the fifty-year old baroque sexual phenomenon that is “The Rocky Horror Show.” More than that, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the 1976 film version, is the production that introduced baroque sexuality to mainstream America, and it has been titillating audiences ever since with its mix of racy subversion and campy snarky fun. For many it became a cultural rallying point.Now, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is having a new Broadway revival at Studio 54, its first time on the Great White Way for a quarter of a century. This current iteration, which has just extended until November, is directed by Sam Pinkleton who won a Tony Award last year for “Oh Mary!” Rachel Dratch of SNL is the narrator, Andrew Durand (“Shucked”) plays Brad, and Stephanie Hsu (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) is Janet Weiss. Luke Evans, from “Beauty and the Beast,” plays Dr. Frank-N-Furter, and Juliette Lewis makes her Broadway debut as Magenta.“The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” created by Richard O’Brien, remains the most enduring tribute to baroque sexuality in American 20th century culture. It likely continues to be a hit because of the playfully loopy way it subjects Brad and Janet — its classical Barbie and Ken squares — to hedonism in all of its tawdry cabaret glory. Except that things have changed drastically since its premiere in 1973 and its subsequent growth as a cult phenomenon, buoyed by the film becoming a weekend staple for misfit theatre kids in arthouse cinemas across the United States.I was part of the fledgling crew that followed the film in high school. As the son of foreign academics, newly transplanted to rural California from France, I hardly fit into the rigid binaries of small-town American culture. Playing classical piano already meant I was suspect (i.e. likely queer), so “Rocky Horror” it was, when my bookish parents allowed me to leave the house at all. I wasn’t necessarily going to wear garters, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to play football. The normal kids had already been given “Grease” as a cult movie. Now the misfits had a turn.The film spoke to that subcultural segment — queer youth, artsy rebels, unclassifiable miscreants like me — at a time when America was in broader revolt against the sixties, and the Reagan eighties had taken hold. That sixties spirit had collapsed anyway, into bland pacifist bromides spoon-fed to us by our formerly hippie schoolteachers. “Rocky Horror” was different, a weird unclassifiable pastiche that wore its contradictions gleefully, not bothering to make any sort of sense other than it was subversive, kinky, manic and fun. Ultimately it wasn’t the greatest art, but Tim Curry’s screen-devouring delight in his role as Dr. Frank-N-Furter made him an icon for unconventional teens chafing under suburban boredom. One thing that allowed the show to endure, oddly, was the film’s initial lack of success. After a very popular theatrical run in London and then LA, the screen version flopped hard. Critics couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. A cabaret musical transvestite monster movie? Time magazine said, “It is not easy to see why this campy trash was a long-running hit in London and a smash success in Los Angeles.” Roger Ebert gave it 2.5/5 stars, noting, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show would be more fun, I suspect, if it weren’t a picture show. It belongs on a stage, with the performers and audience joining in a collective send-up.”Now that success was out of the way — its target audience couldn’t possibly like anything popular — we did exactly what Ebert thought we should do. We played along. A marginal subculture grew incrementally in art house cinemas across the land, too tiny to notice, sporting feather boas. When it debuted pre-Stonewall, it was daring and brave and a larger splash might have instigated a moral panic. Now the boudoir hijinks seem positively tame. A gender fluid doctor in a shifting polycule with two young professionals inside his alternative household? We could be watching an episode of Prime Video’s talk show “Influenced.”That aside, the show’s enduring charm lies in its unabashed American roots. There is a strong overlay of British glam, but its DNA is pure Americana: James Whale gothic horror, noir melodrama, the muscle movies of Steve Reeves, and schlock sci-fi are all thrown in for good measure. Musically it’s a pastiche of rockabilly, country, rock’n’roll, doo wop, vaudeville and cabaret. There’s the celebrated dance number “The Time Warp.” Even Meatloaf makes an appearance in the film and Frank-N-Furter gets a tear-jerking pop ballad at the end.Juliette Lewis as Magenta in ‘The Rocky Horror Show.’ Joan MarcusWhich takes us back to the current production. It appears that Sam Pinkleton wants to return to the production’s roots, with a set that looks playfully scrounged by a rogue experimental theatre troupe. There is plenty of tin foil, LED tube lighting and cardboard props. It’s reminiscent of Joe Cino’s off off-Broadway shows at Café Cino, the midnight plays that launched Bernadette Peters. The costumes are similarly updated, especially Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s outfits, with the old baroque staples of black lacy underwear and bustiers replaced with goth vinyl fetish ensembles one might find at a sex store. It comes across as slightly cheap and tired, which might very well be the point. Perhaps we have a reached a point of peak “Rocky Horror.” Or perhaps this is because I am now, gasp, a “Rocky Horror” purist.This is why I wrestle with the Studio 54 production, as well executed and well-loved as it is. Luke Evans does a standout job as the posh accented master of kinky ceremonies, at turns suave, seductive and frenetic, and the ensemble is as on point as you would expect a Broadway cast to be. But the depth and sincerity, the sly knowing fun of the original seems to be gone. These actors are more frantic caricatures than wittily transgressive characters. Then again, who can blame them? It’s hard to have a knowing smirk at the classical sexual elites when, for the most part, Baroque sexuality, at its most diluted and commercialized, is ascendant. Just as one wouldn’t want to compare a swinger’s party in Levittown with an ancient Roman orgy, there is something a little thin about this current revival, less gothic castle and more adult boutique in a strip mall. It is what the Village Voice’s Ellis would have called establishment, middlebrow baroque.It is possible we have reached an inflection point between the two antipodes, which Ellis was clear to point out are not on opposite ends of a line, but rather a horseshoe. Perhaps a brief return to classicism is just what the baroque needs next.

The Everlasting Baroque ‘Time Warp’ of Broadway’s ‘Rocky Horror Show’

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