Craig Urbani’s bespoke Frank-N-Furter stilettos aren’t the only things that make the actor achieve such a towering presence on stage. Though he looms high above everyone, it’s his bravado performance that fills the stage, seduces everyone in the audience, too. His energy is insane, the depth of his creativity boundless — with his nimble baritone voice and unhinged rock-star swagger he imaginatively reinvents one of musical theatre’s most outrageous characters, revealing layers of the eccentric, sexually omnivorous extraterrestrial that will take even the show’s most ardent fans by surprise.
Urbani’s wildly satyromaniacal mad scientist is the centrifugal force around which spins a South African production of The Rocky Horror Show that’s been playing to packed houses in Cape Town. Fifty-three years after it premiered in London as a macabre little fringe show rooted in the sensibilities of a Weimar cabaret, the musical is in excellent hands, defiantly rolling its eyeballs at mainstream conservatism’s obsession with manufactured morality and social conformism.
It’s an absolute blast, in other words, and will, on June 12, open in Johannesburg.
In Cape Town, the show, directed by Steven Stead and starring a flawlessly talented ensemble, has raised the roof night after night, enticing audience members to dress for the occasion: red feather boas and lots of black, sometimes a raunchy fishnet twist, all meant to complement the subversive shenanigans of an uproarious production that goes all out to encourage you to give yourself over to absolute pleasure. Its vivaciousness is bracing, the comedy depraved and it’s wall-to-wall with opportunities not only for the cast to have the time of their lives, but for the audience to be taken — kicking, screaming, howling with laughter and quite likely more than a little turned on — on a big-hearted counter-cultural ride.
Urbani was apparently born for the part of the untameable, corset-clad free-love enthusiast from outer space. He plays Frank-N-Furter with such scheming, schizophrenic relish and has fashioned him as a cartoonishly narcissistic monster hellbent on getting his own way and forever on a mission to deflower just about anything with a pulse. It is, despite Frank’s voracious sexual appetite, a tendency to grow bored with lovers and occasional turns as a chainsaw-wielding murderer, such a commanding, passionate, loving performance.
Urbani manages to be both a convincingly strapping hunk and an egomaniacal weirdo whose brilliantly executed mood swings — from cute to mischievous, menacing to charming — sometimes occur within a single, unpredictable beat. It’s that edge, a sense that he might at any moment snap — cry crocodile tears, hack up a former lover with a chainsaw or fall head-over-heels in lust — that makes both the character and Urbani’s realisation of him so tantalising.
Joining Urbani in this frolicsome madcap endeavour is a wondrous cast, starting with Robert Everson as the straight-laced Brad Majors and Léa Blerk as his fiancée Janet Weiss, a pair of virtuous virgins who, despite initial protestations, ultimately can’t say “no”. Everson leans into the comical narrow-mindedness of a “decent” American dope who refuses to be flustered, even when he’s being stripped down to his tighty-whities in a room full of suspect strangers. Blerk, meanwhile, is all “aw-shucks” innocence until she gets a taste of Frank’s signature brand of absolute pleasure and suddenly yearns for more.
These two unsuspecting sacrificial virgins are balanced by a castle full of radical hooligans, starting with Riff Raff, performed with a devilish combination of shifty-eyed menace and long-suffering pathos by a phenomenally talented Schoeman Smit. Also devilishly brilliant — and understatedly funny — is Jasmine Minter as Magenta, the intergalactic siren in a maid’s uniform who occasionally lapses into a world entirely all of her own. Minter does a double role as the movie theatre usher who bookends the show, and she’s sublime in that part too, perkily bright-eyed and gorgeous even when she’s picking up lost knickers and used condoms from the cinema floor.
Anna Olivier combines tap-dancing and a cheerfully shrill voice to produce an infectiously likeable and sizeably funny Columbia, the sequin-clad party girl who loves so much that it ultimately breaks her heart. And then there’s Zak Hendrikz as Eddie, the doomed rock ’n’ roll delivery boy whose concert-scale rendition of Hot Patootie makes you want to get up and let loose right there in the auditorium. Later, in a hideous wig and in a wheelchair, Hendrikz returns as Eddie’s energetic opposite, transforming into Dr Scott, a scientist with a dodgy German pedigree.
In this production even the weather — very changeable and slightly screwball — becomes its own character. Natasha Sutherland plays the show’s tight-lipped narrator-cum-criminologist as a kind of strict librarian, who, with a delightfully unique sibilance, not only does battle with intrusively loud thunder and the insistent hoots of ominous owls, but brilliantly fends off rude one-liners from the audience.
Rocky, the bronzed beefcake who shares a brain with Eddie and is consequently a grown man with the mind of toddler, is played by Micah Stojakovic who leans into the fun of making him as dumb as a bag of rocks. His goofy sweetness and toned physique, though, also make him a quick study in the ways of sexual pleasure — lessons given freely by his permanently horny creator.
Whatever you think about its perverse sexual antics — multi-partner couplings, interspecies cuddle-puddle orgies, intimations of alien incest and Frank’s freakish obsession with fashioning his very own living, breathing, weight-lifting sex doll — the show is somehow far more than the sum of its parts. With its utterly bonkers plot, portentous dialogue, nonsense technology, loopy songs and characters who refuse to conform, Rocky Horror is constantly winking at the audience, ensuring that we’re in on the joke, sharing in the joy of a wayward story with all its tawdry salaciousness and unconventional lust and desire.
It is also tender and big-hearted and musically unforgettable. It has become, as Richard O’Brien, the show’s creator (now 84), said in an interview last year, a “rainbow event”, a “kind of sanctuary” in a world where “the authoritarian, far right, anti-gay, anti-rainbow brigade” have become so “loud and obnoxious”.
As much as Rocky unapologetically foregrounds its queer sensibility, it is vehemently not into labels. Everyone — insiders, outsiders, straights and weirdoes — is made to feel at home, even if not entirely comfortable. It is a spirited, uproarious and extremely camp romp that simply wants to bring some fun into the world. The message? Leave your pitchforks at home and discover what it’s like to be truly accepting of everything and everyone.
It is not meant to make sense in any traditional way. Its outrageous spoof format hinges on its exaggeration of the tropes and clichés and cheap, trashy aesthetic of late-night schlock cinema that O’Brien, who played Riff Raff in the London original and in the 1975 movie, was obsessed with as a teenager growing up in New Zealand. This production absolutely understands that imperative: it is exquisitely nonsensical, borne from an imagination unafraid to push the limits of a depraved experiment.
Stead and his design team have done a crafty job of fashioning a world that combines the vague trashiness of a B-grade movie set with costumes that lean into the show’s sex appeal and props that have no intention whatsoever of making realistic sense. And it all just works, because even the slightly out-of-sync sound effects and a cocktail shaker posing as sophisticated alien technology are part of the show’s winking comedy.
Choreographers Duane Alexander and Naoline Quinzin have done a tremendous job of reinvigorating every routine — hip thrusts, head tilts and intricate finger gestures abound — even The Time Warp, that proverbial singalong dance-floor treasure, has been taken up a few notches, made to feel that much more pulse-quickening, dippy and undeniably leftfield. The dancing is just as sharply articulated as the consistently brilliant singing, which is supported by an excellent live band with musical direction by Kevin Kraak.
Suspend-your-belief sci-fi shenanigans and twisted Frankenstein influences aside, it is a very hot show — not merely because the action is genuinely titillating, but because few things are sexier than seeing so many highly talented performers having the time of their lives together. There are moments when, I swear, you can almost feel the electric sparks between the actors.
After more than half a century, it remains an outlandishly inventive show, fuelled as much by wet dreams as it is by horror-film nightmares. In a way, the entire musical serves as a kind of metaphor for the uplifting experience of going to live theatre, of entering a dream and participating in a fantasy that’s shared with a room full of strangers, connecting with others who are experiencing the same rush of pure, energising enjoyment.
Though this show will not literally transport you to the planet of Transexual in the distant galaxy of Transylvania, it will — for its duration — take you to another dimension. It is a rocket ship of unalloyed pleasure — precisely what we Earthlings are craving right now.
- The Rocky Horror Show opens in Johannesburg on June 12 at Montecasino’s Pieter Toerien Main Theatre.
