New ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’: Let’s NOT Do the Time Warp Again

Featuring a fine performance by Laverne Cox (Orange Is the New Black), The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, airing Thursday night on Fox, tries to revive the 1975 cult classic, but the corpse of its monster-movie parody remains mostly inanimate.

Directed by Kenny Ortega, now best known for his High School Musical films, the production will be familiar to anyone who has seen the original stage production or the Tim Curry-starring movie. Newbies may well be baffled as to what’s going on and what all the fuss is about.

The casting of Cox is the production’s most notable achievement. Taking over the Dr. Frank-N-Furter role claimed definitively by Tim Curry (who appears in a cameo), Cox is magnetic, holding the screen with her star power and effective vocalizing, if not excelling as a dancer — but, then again, neither do nearly any of the other stars of this production. The overriding problem with a Rocky Horror revival is that the mixture of genres that gave the original its fizz — horror movies, teen-rebellion flicks, and stag-party-level sexual naughtiness — now means virtually nothing to a contemporary viewing audience.

When this Rocky was announced, I thought it was odd that Fox wasn’t going to do a live production, in the manner of NBC’s Sound of Music and The Wiz. Now that I’ve seen it, the decision to present a taped version seems like the only remaining perverse thing about this Rocky Horror broadcast: The original attained its cult status by engaging its audience to such a degree that showings in movie theaters became spontaneous theatrical events, with audience members singing along and tossing things at the screen. (The new production is framed as being a movie-theater showing of the show we’re watching, complete with actors-as-audience reactions, but that only further distances us from becoming involved.) These days, were a live production of Rocky Horror to air, people would be tossing barbs on Twitter and having a merry old time praising and ridiculing. Fox has denied itself an opportunity to be the center of a social-media party for an evening, which probably won’t help the ratings.

The songs seem to go on endlessly, but perhaps that’s because I’m not a musicals fan. (The last one I was dragged to was Jersey Boys, and afterward I had to go home and listen to some original Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons to erase the sludgy Broadway versions from my brain.) The TV Rocky Horror brings along all the things that make theatergoing so awkward, including the delivery of punchlines after which the actors freeze for a moment, waiting for the audience to laugh. There isn’t much to laugh at in this production, which has taken its arch irony and presented it with an earnestness that works against the nature of the material.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show airs Thursday at 8 p.m. on Fox.