She is, in every way, the counter to the production’s charismatic Frank-N-Furter (Luke Evans), the extraterrestrial sexual omnivore whose desire to build himself an earthling man-toy, Rocky (Josh Rivera), blinds him to the signs of homicidal rebellion from his sort-of servants Riff Raff (Amber Gray) and Magenta (Lewis again).
Evans, whom until now I mainly thought of as one of the “Fast and the Furious” villains, rasps his songs with palpable emotion — instead of imitating the glam-camp evil of Tim Curry from the original, Evans becomes the show’s romantic Heathcliff, abandoned by his great loves, all of whom are dead or disappointing. (One is in the fridge.) His magnetism is off the charts: Pinkleton can, more or less, point him at the audience and fire him like a cannon. Evans towers over the rest of the cast in skyscraper boots, his long hair slicked wetly down his back and his chest playing peek-a-boo above his latex corset. Won’t someone, anyone, love him? Half of the orchestra nearly followed him out when he ran off for intermission.
The two virginal naïfs, Brad (Andrew Durand) and Janet (Stephanie Hsu), who are stranded in a rainstorm and take refuge in Frank’s creepy castle, stumble into what looks like a Spirit Halloween takeover of Studio 54. David I. Reynoso designed the costumes to convey a certain luxury, but the rest is defiantly D.I.Y.: The set design company called dots has draped the once elegant room in tinfoil and black plastic; the lighting designer Jane Cox bathes everything in lurid violets and greens.
The thrillingly loud five-piece band, situated in the theater boxes on both sides, is accompanied by a puppet-chorus of blank-faced silver mannequins, whose heads all hinge open in unison, a little like Pez dispensers trained by the Rockettes. In one spectacular moment, the design team pays tribute to Studio 54’s prop from its heyday — a flying cutout of a crescent moon sniffing from a coke spoon — by transforming it into a chariot for Frank’s alien-ex-machina entrance.
“There’s a light / over at the Frankenstein place,” the young couple warbles, in one of O’Brien’s on-the-nail ’50s pastiches, but of course they are traveling into darkness, where their erotic limitations will be first tested, then exploded. And yet, while everyone in this show takes a bow in their underwear, the aura is surprisingly clean: Only in one very funny flash do we see Brad doing something genuinely naughty with Frank. The rest is cheerful grinding (Ani Taj choreographed the somewhat pro forma dances; Ann James took care of the intimacy), with Hsu’s newly, uh, activated Janet crawling around in a lace merry-widow bustier like Sabrina Carpenter.
