Back when the design collective dots was dreaming up a set for the current Broadway revival of “The Rocky Horror Show,” they initially went way over budget. So they pared back, keeping in mind that — as Orjuela-Laverde, one of the partnership’s founders, said — the show is “a trashy little musical.”
In describing it that way, he wasn’t denigrating “Rocky Horror”; he was simply looking cleareyed at its nature. A slapdash seediness has been embedded in the musical’s aesthetic DNA ever since it started in 1973 in a tiny upstairs space at the Royal Court Theater in London. Certainly that’s part of what ardent fans of the 1975 film adaptation, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” have embraced in its half-century of audience-participatory midnight screenings.
So it was helpful for the designers to keep in mind that making things too nice would be a mistake.
“That ‘too nice’ line, it’s a scary line in the world of ‘Rocky Horror,’” Orjuela-Laverde said. “I feel like it’s also a scary line in the world of Studio 54, because nothing here is too nice.”
Directed by Sam Pinkleton, the production received nine Tony Award nominations including for the set design by dots and Reynoso’s costume design.
The characters in “Rocky Horror” have a strong “visual iconography,” Reynoso said, and he wanted to honor those existing associations in his design without being tethered to them.
“What we try to do is find elements that feel recognizable about the film and sort of throw them in a blender, but then maybe have them come out in unexpected places,” he said.
The set works that way, too. Silver duct hose wrapped in green rope light is a motif, snaking along the edges of the audience and suggesting the sci-fi creation of Rocky occurring elsewhere in Frank-N-Furter’s castle.
The building’s inhabitants are intended to look as if they might have cobbled together their outfits themselves. Similarly, the space is meant to look as if they decorated it, fake-looking candles and all: “Rocky Horror” meets Studio 54 meets a party-supply store.
