Everyone asks a recent Tony award nominee how they felt when they heard the news. “The day that it happened, I was feeling very overwhelmed, and now I feel really peaceful,” Stephanie Hsu, nominated for Best Actress for The Rocky Horror Show, tells The A.V. Club. But when asked how she felt about constantly being asked how she feels, Hsu said that while she “likes to answer those questions very honestly” and that she “digs down very deep every single time.”
“We’ve been open for two weeks and it’s been nuts,” she shares via Zoom. “And I’m a pretty slow processor, and sometimes I’m not totally sure how I feel yet. The gift of being on Broadway is that every night you have a space to express, whether that’s like channeling however you feel into the performance. So it’s actually feeling very fluid; there’s not a lot of time to process, but there’s a lot of time to move.” She adds, “That’s why I love making theater, because I’m a slow processor and I’m a collector of process.”
This kind of delicate balance makes sense given the role she’s playing: Janet, an ingenue that’s at once satirizing the archetype yet sincere in her transformation and path towards a freedom in desire and expression. Hsu mentions the Susan Sarandon approach to Janet in 1975’s film adaptation of Richard O’Brien’s glam rock B-movie ode extravaganza as, per Sarandon, “the personification of all the ingenues I’d played up to that point: kind of sweet on the outside, but a bitch underneath.”
Hsu was a virgin to Rocky Horror when Tony winner Sam Pinkleton, who is also nominated for Best Director for the show, asked her to play Janet, but they spoke about a similar kind of transformation and allowing the suppressed to explode. Pinkleton, who almost directed a production of Rocky Horror in 2020 in San Francisco that never came to fruition due to the COVID-19 pandemic, opines, “I think that ‘Don’t Dream It, Be It’ is a huge part of why the legacy of Rocky Horror has endured for so long, because I think that statement is a life raft. So in conceiving the production, in casting it, certainly in designing it, that is the moment we started with, and we worked backwards from there.”
Conceiving of Janet’s, ahem, strange journey, was then shaped by that ethos. “I was so inspired by the amount of research and how deeply, seriously he was taking this story that so many people have so many opinions about,” Hsu says. “And what really excited me after seeing the film and talking to Sam [was that he said], ‘If there was a sequel to Rocky Horror, then Janet would probably be Frank.’” (When asked if either had seen O’Brien and Rocky Horror Picture Show director Jim Sharman’s follow-up and loose sequel Shock Treatment, Pinkleton perks up and says, “Of course.”)
The Rocky Horror Show (Photo: Joan Marcus)
The “it” of “Don’t Dream It, Be It” is nebulous in a way both Hsu and Pinkleton found productive, particularly in terms of connecting the dreamy and charming nightmare qualities of Rocky Horror as a refraction of film and theater history. The “it” of course refers to the fluid, nameless, ever-changing aspects of sexuality, gender, identity, etc. But, inevitably given the show’s deep connection to film culture, the “it” can also refer to the iconography that movies (and theater to some degree) are capable of manufacturing.
Pinkleton says, “I think that the Rocky Horror in its original form was conceived as an act of obsession. It was made by someone and a group of people who had deep fondness for all of these films. And it’s a crazy collage of references.” He continues, “But it’s always been this kind of amazing, uncontainable omelet. So in creating it in 2026, it’s like you have everything that they were working with in the original [1973 show]. You have the original film itself. You have 52 years of the things that people have placed onto [it], whether it’s asked for it or not. And then you also have the shit that we’re bringing in 2026, which is genre excitement in directions that no one had.”
Doechii ended up on Pinkleton’s moodboard for this Rocky Horror after his phone call with Hsu, who had just seen her in concert and witnessed the rap and hip-hop superstar sport a jockstrap. “Doechii is a flame of [this] Rocky Horror and was not conceivable at the time the thing was made,” Pinkleton mentioned. Hsu thought to herself, “It’d be really cool to one day have an excuse to wear a jockstrap. And I’m suddenly thinking that maybe this is my chance. And Sam showed me his computer and Doechii was like all over the inspo board. And I was like, Okay, yeah, I think we’re deeply aligned.”
This production of Rocky Horror, staged at Studio 54, is nothing if not a spectacular reminder of how excellent, brash, funny, and thrilling O’Brien’s original score was. The glam rock is at the forefront, to be sure, but, music directed by Kris Kukel and featuring a five-piece rock band (a throwback to the original production), Rocky Horror’s score also revels in doo-wop, Motown, and R&B.
“I think a lot of people, when they think Rocky Horror, are like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s so kooky. It’s the audience.’ But it’s an incredible musical score,” Pinkleton tells us. “I think that Kris did really brilliantly in approaching Rocky Horror [by] taking it at face value and not treating it like it was broken. Our job is to honor the spirit of the score. Very early on, we made a decision to basically do the original instrumentation. That is radical in the context of Broadway in 2026. We made a decision to make that rock band visible to the audience so you feel them making the music.” Pinkleton’s rockish philosophy extended to his casting impulses; rather than typical “musical theater voices,” he opted for a range for his cast—from Welsh actor-singer Luke Evans as Frank-N-Furter, to musical theater performers like Amber Gray and Andrew Durand, to alt stars like Boy Radio and Juliette Lewis.
“When you listen to various versions of the original, it’s just people who are going for it fearlessly. I think this score has a crotch in a way that musical theater scores often don’t,” Pinkleton notes. “And so our responsibility to it was to not be reverent in a museum-y revival way, but to, I’m sorry to say this, but embody that crotch and give it fire. And, you know, it’s just like kick-ass music from the ’70s.”
Rocky Horror belongs to an era of musical theater that incorporated aspects of the emerging sexual revolution and counter culture into its vision of theatricality and performance, along with shows like Hair (1968), Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), and Grease (1972). These shows put into dramatic conflict the nostalgia for the recent past and its music of its eras, and the surfacing changes and evolutions in both social, political, and cultural attitudes and the music that soundtracked those changes.
Talking about Rocky Horror, Pinkleton says, “It’s just like this crazy smart dramaturgical thing because it’s the ‘70s looking back on the ‘50s, sometimes looking back on the ‘30s, and now here we are in 2026 doing this whole retrospection.” In a bizarre way, the culture that Rocky Horror and all those other shows were responding to—replete with political corruption, social upheaval, and queer people and people of color used as scapegoats—is not so different than the one its revival is currently situated within.
The Rocky Horror Show (Photo: Joan Marcus)
“What’s been really healing for me personally doing this show is, it is both such a gift to get to do Rocky Horror and have it be relevant now,” Hsu tells us. “And it is also like a deep tragedy that it is still so relevant. One of the key tenets of it is to find pleasure in the doing of it. I mean, look at the world around us. It feels really beautiful to get to live on stage in Frank’s castle, but also extend that castle outward night after night to, you know, a thousand-plus people and say like, come here, come be safe with us. Come enjoy, come understand the beauty and mess of being a meaningless human, a little tiny insect on this planet Earth.”
For Pinkleton, his view of the show’s cultural relevance is tied to genre not merely as dramatic lens, but point of view. “Rocky Horror is a work of science fiction and that cannot be forgotten. I sometimes like, reject a contemporary read of the politics of Rocky Horror because [the show] is about aliens and is about a world that is not the world we live in,” he said.
Pinkleton continued, “The gift of science fiction is that it allows us to create a world other than the one that we live in. And in the case of Rocky Horror, I think it’s a world that is louder and funnier and more dangerous and more sexy and where risks are rewarded and where people can bloom in ways that just like we can’t have right now. “
Hsu elaborates, “Obviously, Rocky Horror is such a tentpole for queer culture. It’s really exciting to be in a castle full of aliens and realize that even as much as queerness has expanded in its languaging and scope over the last however many years, that in the world of aliens, it’s even bigger. That’s why I am excited to get to see another revival when I’m 80 because I have no idea how [much] more expansive the world of queerness and sexuality will be then and I’m excited for it.”
Pinkleton was enthusiastic about highlighting Rocky Horror’s sense of radicalism. “Rocky Horror offers a vision of gender and sexuality that is both expansive and also always changing. It’s constantly shifting. It doesn’t look at gender, sexuality, or identity as a fixed point. And that is a radical liberation,” he said. “Especially at a time, with reason, we are as a culture obsessed with naming things. We often have to [in order] to protect ourselves. [For Rocky Horror], it’s not like, ‘It’s this’ or ‘it’s this’, or ‘it’s this’. It’s ‘yes and’, it’s what if it’s both, what if it’s this one minute and this the next.” It’s true that, particularly in its original context, the show and the film offered a truly transgressive paradigm for selfhood. But, over a decade after Glee did a Rocky Horror-themed episode and Fox did a remade-for-TV version in 2016 with Laverne Cox as Frank-N-Furter, there’s a lingering question if the show is even counterculture anymore. It has, with worldwide productions and merchandising, become a culture unto itself.
But perhaps in spite of its ubiquity, the show’s affection for freaks and queerdos doesn’t need provocation or transgression to exist on the same terms as its original for Rocky Horror to serve as a refuge when your metaphorical car’s broken down in the rain. “The gift of doing this show eight times a week is that the medicine itself is working on me in real time and changing in real time. I have never felt freer or safer inside of an artistic project, and permission to continue to change in my own relationship to pleasure, to queerness, and what I dream of being for myself on that day,” Hsu says. “It’s nice to feel so free.”
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