RICHARD O’Brien’s schlock-horror rock’n’roll musical comedy sextravaganza usually returns to York every three years. Even quicker this time.
Last here in March 2022, on a tour when Kristian Lavercombe clocked up his 2,000th performance as flesh-creeping servant Riff Raff, the focus on the 2024 travels falls on Australian treasure Jason Donovan as he sparks fishnet fever anew in high heels, gothic make-up and alluringly dark, Byronic wig.
Twenty-five years since he last played sweet transvestite transsexual scientist Dr Frank N Furter, this tour is his Rocky 2, and he delivers it with knockout panache.
“Rocky now plays to my strengths, less musical theatre, more edgy, a little bit rock’n’roll. More me really!” he said in his tour interview. ““I’m in touch with my feminine side but I come from a masculine sensibility. The character embraces both sides of me: a strength and a vulnerability, as well as danger and denial.”
A fixture on the British entertainment scene since his Neighbours soap days in the late 1980s, Donovan knows his audience, knows the fruity lead role inside out, and is as at ease with lipstick, powder and paint as he was in his last musical theatre role at the Grand Opera House, playing drag queen Mizti Del Bra in Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert in November 2015.
Mitzi and Frank N Furter share an agent provocateur’s sense of danger in all they do, matched by Donovan’s delight in his delicious sauciness, with just the right application of B-movie ham/camp.
You know when The Rocky Horror Show is in town, nights when the men dress more like women on a weekend hen party in York. Glittering Cult of Rocky devotees are out in force in burlesque fancy dress, while Horror Show freshers are swept along on a tide of giddy joy, willingly submitting to initiation to their Frank N Furter rites of passage. And once bitten, they are never shy to do the Time Warp again and again.
Would it be sacrilege to say that The Rocky Horror Show is not as good a show as it is an experience? In truth, the shock of the once new has been usurped by the superior, more rounded Spring Awakening and Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, where there is no lull in momentum or quality of song in the second half. Rocky Horror, by comparison, suddenly rushes to the finishing line with a pile-up of bodies reminiscent of a Jacobean tragedy.
What Rocky Horror has to its advantage is trigger points for audience participation like no other musical theatre show, the only equivalent being that great British staple, pantomime. No wonder, Jason Donovan has called it “panto for adults”. Spot on, Jason. A Weimar pantomime, to be precise.
Fifty-one years since its premiere, with its bravura embrace of transvestism, freedom of self-determination and homosexuality, Rocky Horror feels freshly resonant in this age of gender fluidity, to complement the perennial tropes of infidelity and loss of innocence. The tone remains totally, defiantly tongue in cheek, the expression bold in all matters sexual, sartorial and satirical (like an episode of Fleabag).
What happens in O’Brien’s uproarious send-up of horror and sci-fi B-movies? A newly engaged, squeaky-clean American college couple, geeky Brad Majors (Connor Carson) and sweetheart Janet Weiss (Lauren Chia), lose their way in the Transylvanian woods, then their virginity under the seductive powers of Donovan’s castle-dwelling Dr Frank N Furter.
In a show propelled by song, set-piece, colourful character and carnal pleasure, under Christopher Luscombe’s lustrous direction, O’Brien’s plot loudly echoes Frankenstein in Frank N Furter’s drive to create a new life in the form of the glitter-dusted, ripped Rocky (Morgan Jackson).
Songs are raucous, raunchy and riotous in their pastiche of Fifties’ rock’n’roll, like The Cramps would later deliver too. Equally important are the audience rituals, often in response to the Narrator, the time-honoured recipient of the audience’s often-scripted, sometimes improvised abuse.
The likes of The Now Show comedian Steve Punt and actor Philip Franks have donned the blue smoking jacket at the Grand Opera House, and now Let’s Talk About Vex comedian Nathan Caton fills those shoes and later high heels. Blessed with a voice as deep as James Earl Jones, he is a cool dude, urbane, unflappable, quick to respond to any audience saucery (CORRECT) and equally quick with topical comments. What a canny piece of casting.
Welcome too to a new Riff Raff in Job Greuter, as deadpan and unnerving as he should be. Job, well done. Likewise, the Grand Opera House ushers and usherettes, dressed up to the max.
Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show, Grand Opera House, York, 8pm, tonight, Wednesday and Thursday; 5.30pm and 8.30pm, Friday and Saturday. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.