Biggest problem with Fox's live 'Rocky Horror': It's not live
Fox's Rocky Horror Picture Show is the latest in a long line of musicals experiencing a TV resurgence, with one key difference: It isn't live.
Unlike NBC's The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, and The Wiz, and Fox's own Grease adaptation earlier this year, the "Fox television event" was pre-taped in Toronto, with cast members lip-syncing to a previously recorded soundtrack.
Adapting another classic musical with cult appeal, catchy songs and a seasonal hook seems like a no-brainer, given that it's the current TV trend du jour. But despite the widespread misconception -- or is it misdirection? -- it was never designed to be a live broadcast.
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If you thought it was, you weren't alone.
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An quick informal poll of Mashable employees indicated that most of the office also assumed the "event" was a live special in the same vein as Grease. Because ... why wouldn't it be?
At the remake's red carpet premiere, executive producer Lou Adler told Mashable that the director, Kenny Ortega, wasn't interested in participating in the project if it was going to be a live production, specifically because of the technical considerations.
"Kenny didn’t want to do it; he said we weren’t gonna do it if they wanted us to do it live," he said. "He wanted to make a film, he wanted to be able to go down and come up and show all of it -- he’s a choreographer, so he wanted to film it in that way."
From an aesthetic standpoint, that decision is justifiable, but that ambition rarely translates to what's onscreen: The telepic looks like many of the live shows that have previously aired -- often with static camera positions and quick cuts used to simulate movement, rather than handheld or crane shots that could've brought viewers into the thick of the action.
When a setpiece as rowdy as "Time Warp" feels perfunctory, despite the athletic performances of its high-kicking cast, you know something's been lost in translation.
Part of the appeal of the recent musical endeavors is the anarchic "anything can happen" quality inherent in a live broadcast. Would someone flub a line? Would a dancer miss their mark? Would Allison Williams accidentally smack into a wall while attempting to soar on a wire as the Boy Who Never Grew Up?
Usually, the answer was no, but the possibility was tantalizing enough to prompt viewers to tune in as the special aired -- creating the kind of communal viewing experience that these days is reserved only for sporting events or The Walking Dead.
Rocky Horror has always been communal, from its first iteration as a live stage musical in London to its big screen adaptation, which has been in continuous limited release since 1975 and still prompts audience participation in movie theaters across the globe.
Fox's version -- the full title is The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let's Do the Time Warp Again -- tips its hat to those roots with an odd framing device that begins with an usherette (Ivy Levan) welcoming costumed fans into a midnight screening of the new movie. The production occasionally cuts back to the theater during the action to see those on-screen audience members reacting to what they're seeing, but instead of replicating the gleeful abandon of the real-life crowds who still flock to midnight showings to shout at the screen, it only serves to heighten the artifice of the whole ordeal.
The songs themselves have undergone an unfortunate Glee-ification, with group numbers auto-tuned and overproduced into monotony, and established belters like Adam Lambert and Annleigh Ashford rarely allowed to demonstrate their range.
Taking over from Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon as the milquetoast Brad and Janet, Victoria Justice and Ryan McCartan are serviceable (if almost distractingly pretty), but they both look far too polished to play convincing squares, meaning that their eventual descent into indecency feels more like pantomime than character development.
For a project that earned a cult following for its riotous energy and saucy innuendo, Fox's take feels strangely vanilla as a whole. There are few changes to the script itself -- Dr. Frank-N-Furter's bisexual bedhopping is still unabashedly intact, and Laverne Cox brings a lascivious intensity to the role -- but whether it's because the shock value has worn off over the past 40 years or because the whole thing feels a bit too High School Musical (a project also directed by Ortega), you often find yourself wishing for a little more edge.
Adler noted that the main goal of the new iteration was "to pay tribute to the original in every way that we can," and the inclusion of Tim Curry as The Criminologist narrator was clearly intended as a sign of respect for the film. But since the ribald winks and unpolished flair of the original have been sanded down to something far more pedestrian, his presence only serves as a reminder of what worked so well and is so glaringly absent here.
If the intent was pure pastiche instead of reinvention, you can't help but think that the most fitting homage to such a beloved picture show would've been leaving it alone.
As many viewers will likely do -- when they find out it isn't live.
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