Trans Glam

The “Time Warp,” we’re told, is simple. Just a jump to the left, a step to the right, a pelvic thrust that really drives you insane. The song never explains what time we’re trying to warp, or why, but in its boogie-woogie piano figure, the way it comes on like T. Rex trying the “Monster Mash,” we can make some sense of what Richard O’Brien might have been going for: This is the ’70s yearning for the early ’60s, a bunch of fagged-out hedonists longing not just for fresh-popped cherries and Wolfman Jack but also for a time when their transgressions actually meant something.

But that was then. When the time warp comes around in this latest Kansas City revival of O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show, we still feel its kick, thanks largely to the glam-rock chops of Spencer Brown and a hardworking, nearly bare-assed ensemble. Humping and bumping as though the Late Night stage were their own private primate house, this Eubank Productions cast goes at it with such abandon — and the audience loves it with such fervor — that there’s little point in carping about how something that shocked back in 1973 is tame even by broadcast-TV standards in 2006. Everything outré here — dance-floor group sex, underwear as clothing, cross-gendered lechery — has been integral to American pop since at least 1984. The transgressions hardly register.

Fortunately, co-directors Steven Eubank and Jeff Mace know how to freshen material that should by all rights be stale. This is a vigorous mounting. It hurtles from highlight to highlight and celebrates — as all drag musicals seem to — society’s outcasts and weirdos with a cast so hip and good looking that real outcasts and weirdos can’t possibly relate.

Fully aware that we’ve had 30-plus years to acquaint ourselves with the wherefores and whofucks of Dr. Frank N. Furter and his pansexual house servants, Eubank and Mace slice away the show’s narrative fat. Showstoppers keep a buzz going, but they also stop a show. In the rush, whatever sense Rocky Horror might once have made as a story is hopelessly lost.

Not that anyone has ever bothered following it anyway. In case you care: Newlywed twerps Brad and Janet (Nathanael Card and Blythe Renay) find themselves trapped in Dr. Frank N. Furter’s haunted castle, a B-movie nightmare where the inhabitants live the good-times, great-oldies credo: wild sex and ’50s rock. Sometimes everyone is happy when fucking or singing; sometimes, they do so under duress. At the end, the castle is a spaceship, the butler is starbound, and Meat Loaf has been killed midsong, which, horrifyingly, is considered a bad thing.

Much of the time, this stage cast makes incoherence shine. In their spectacular lingerie, they dance lustily and thrust their pelvises like champs, and most of the principals distance themselves from their movie counterparts. Scott Cox, a widescreen baritone, makes every song an epic; as Frank N. Furter, he’s like Liza Minnelli playing a horny Joker. Spencer Brown is a dynamo, a man crafted almost entirely of charisma and cheekbones, but his Riff Raff is an outer-space dandy instead of the usual undead slob, and, thank God, he has more David Bowie in him than musical theater. He’s almost matched by Vanessa Severo, whose kittenish hissing and odd-angled faces make Columbia an audience favorite. Also good is Bill Pelletier, as the narrator, and ensemble member Ashley Otis, who sings even better than she writhes, which is saying something.

Brown and Severo demand our attention even when they’re shunted to the background, as they too often are in this breakneck production. To the show’s detriment, only Cox’s ham-in-stockings Furter is consistently showcased. Eubank and Mace seem inspired less by the performers they have than in hustling us from spectacle to spectacle, always crowding the stage.

In short, we get too much happening too quickly (and too quietly — much singing is drowned out by the prerecorded music). But much of what happens is frisky good fun. A noisy, drunken audience helps.

Still, even as it sells out each weekend, this is of the past. Here’s the time warp: These days, Rush Limbaugh can get pinched schlepping unprescribed Viagra to the Dominican Republic (the sex-tourism capital of the hemisphere) without losing his moral authority. Of course Rocky Horror‘s nostalgia has shifted. We miss the days when you could shock your parents.

In the case of Eubank, those parent-shocking days never even came. That’s his mom, sweet as can be, smiling hugely as she gives you your ticket.