Passing Studio 54 on a spring evening feels like stepping into a 1970s flashback. The mirrored lobby thrums with glittering guests beneath swaying chandeliers; cheeky posters—“DON’T GET HOT AND FLUSTERED” and “LET THEM THRILL YOU!”—cover the walls. But it’s 2026, and the crowd has gathered for the Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show, which opened April 23 at the nightclub-turned-theater.
Directed by Sam Pinkleton, fresh from the Tony-winning Oh, Mary!, the revival leans hard on Rocky Horror’s cult-movie DNA: a young couple wanders into a castle ruled by a flamboyant mad scientist and his unruly followers. The cast is a headline-grabbing mix—Stephanie Hsu as Janet, Juliette Lewis as Magenta, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez as Columbia, Luke Evans as Dr. Frank-N-Furter—and comedian Rachel Dratch serves as a bedazzled, side-stage narrator.
What sets this production apart is how visibly the building itself becomes part of the show. When Roundabout announced the transfer to Studio 54, Pinkleton felt the fit was uncanny. The club’s maximal sparkle, its rough DIY corners, and its legendary nightlife mythology naturally echo Rocky Horror’s blend of spectacle, camp and transgressive fun. Rather than masking the theater’s age, Pinkleton and his designers let its history and imperfections collide with the musical.
That meant adapting to the venue’s idiosyncrasies. Original alcoves glow in neon green; an aluminum-foil crescent moon—a nod to Studio 54’s dance-floor decorations—hangs in view; the decades-old leopard-print carpet was left intact. Designers intentionally preserved signs of wear, so the set reads as if Rocky Horror has always inhabited the space. The overall aesthetic is an energetic jumble of ’70s glam, B-movie horror, sci-fi flourishes and punk camp—an approach informed in part by research visits to venues like Bushwick’s House of Yes.
The production design was overseen by the collective Dots, with co-founder Andrew D. Moerdyk playing a prominent role and Santiago Orjuela-Laverde credited for much of the visual detail. Their guiding principle was restraint: rather than impose a new interpretation on the show’s accumulated cultural baggage, make the truest, most vivid Rocky Horror the text allows. That philosophy manifests in a deliberate blurring of where the set ends and the theater begins, as if Frank-N-Furter and his extraterrestrial entourage have come to raid Studio 54 for props and inspiration.
Small theatrical touches reinforce that idea. The space feels like a slightly decayed castle—silver palm trees tucked into upturned trash cans, plastic skeletons dispensing popcorn, spray-painted mannequins piled like ruins—and the preserved leopard carpet runs underfoot. Hidden sequins and gems scattered around the house invite audience discovery. Orjuela-Laverde sums up their aim as an embrace of “beautiful otherness,” and the team leaned into their own brand of weird to honor Rocky’s heart.
Pinkleton encouraged tapping into the building’s mystique. He noticed glitter trapped in the floorboards and even a disused “cocaine safe” in the basement. Before rehearsals began he invited Pam Grossman, a New York witch, to perform rituals to introduce the cast and crew to the theater—a symbolic gesture to acknowledge the venue’s past inhabitants and to ask their blessing for this new, unapologetically queer production.
David Rockwell, whose Rockwell Group worked on earlier Rocky Horror sets and who has a long history with the building—he once designed a sushi bar on the balcony in the 1980s and has helped oversee shows there—also figures into the revival’s design lineage. Rockwell is part of Roundabout’s broader $100 million renovation plan for Studio 54, aimed at restoring a permanent stage and orchestra pit while revealing layers of the building’s past instead of erasing them.
The production foregrounds Rocky Horror’s invitation to experiment and self-expression. Studio 54’s reputation as a space for flamboyance and boundary-pushing dovetails neatly with Frank-N-Furter’s staging of Janet’s sexual and personal awakening and the show’s enduring call to action—“Don’t Dream It, Be It.” The designers and performers worked to preserve that open, liberating spirit: an encouragement for audience members to be their truest, most unusual selves.
In practice the creative team has made Studio 54 part of the play’s DNA. They’ve left traces—hidden gems, sequins, and small set pieces—so that the theater itself feels complicit in Rocky Horror’s mischief rather than merely a backdrop. For Pinkleton, Rocky Horror resists tidy definition; it’s a prism of contradictions that remains relevant because it is untameable. Staged in Studio 54, the revival embraces that rambunctious energy, fusing theatrical history and nightclub myth into a version of Rocky Horror that feels born from that specific, glittering and slightly decrepit space.
