Jason Jacobs: How was approaching Rocky Horror different than reviving a more traditional type of musical? How were you informed by the show’s history, its fandom, and its cultural legacy?
Sam Pinkleton: There is nothing like Rocky Horror, period. It isn’t like doing a revival of another musical. Often with revivals, the logic is: let’s do it like it’s never been done before. But the joy of Rocky Horror is it has been done before. People come to Rocky Horror with their own stuff, with their Rocky Horror stuff, which might be, “I love it and I know every word” or “I hate it” or “I’ve never heard of it. I wish I was seeing a play.” But that’s your stuff. That’s your Rocky Horror stuff. There’s this incredible opportunity on Broadway to think about the collision of people. There are a thousand people who saw the show today. So that’s a collision of experiences and that is what is so special to me about getting to make this show in this big room with all of this history. Thinking about a thing that at this point is like a myth, it would be ridiculous for me to say, “I’m going to decide for you what Rocky Horror is.” That doesn’t make any sense. It belongs to all of us – or it should.
The puzzle, very joyously, with our collaborators has been to figure out how to make a thing that people can come into with whatever their Rocky Horror experience is and, hopefully, have a nice time. We’ve had a nice time making it. We love the material. We love it. We’ve loved spending time with it. And that collision of experiences that you all have is in our cast too. There are people up here who’ve been in shadow casts. There are people up here who were like, “I’ve actually never seen it.” And that’s been part of the fun.
JJ: You both were very influenced by Liz Swados. How does that kind of influence come into this show?
Ani Taj: Liz pushed us really hard to embrace – seriously – the zaniness of what we were doing in any instance when we were making stuff in college and when we made shows with her after. I think this is true in Rocky Horror, too. There’s an element of the surreal and the very playful and the wacky. We’ve chosen to take that seriously. I think that’s something that Liz encouraged us to do from very early on. I hope we’re doing that with and for her.
We really wanted to make this show with the people that we have in the room, which is different than coming in with an idea of what a Broadway show should look like and trying to engineer that onto people. It was important to work with the humans we have and learn about the show from them. It’s really exciting to crack it open with the specific people that you saw on stage today who dance not like one another and don’t come in with the same information about the show and to sort of learn about the vocabulary of being in the castle with those people.
SP: This thing about using what you have – that is a sensibility that I guess we developed from making things with no money with an IKEA bag at one o’clock in the morning. But it’s also how my favorite things have been made. There’s a long legacy of queer people making beautiful things out of trash and the original Rocky Horror Show is one of those things. Who are we to deny that legacy?
I’ve had really amazing experiences working on Broadway, but always with things that in one way or another defy Broadway expectations. I don’t know what those expectations are and, lovingly, I don’t care about them. We just listened to the material and in this case the material is, as Richard O’Brien would describe it, a trashy little musical. It was our assignment to not make it too slick or too fancy. We made a choice very early on of like: there’s no video, no crazy fancy automation. There’s something fun to us about the kind of analog nature of it that just feels like Rocky Horror. We’re not making it in a basement. I would’ve made really different choices if we were making this for 60 people. We had to obviously make some choices about scale to embrace being on Broadway. Hopefully, the fun of this was, or one of the many pieces of fun was, for weeks and weeks, wrapping things in literal aluminum foil. When you hear about the creation of the original show it’s people wrapping things in aluminum foil and being like, “I hope you don’t fall off of this stool because it’s not very sturdy.” That’s the spirit of the thing.
JJ: I’m curious if you could talk about how you started with the casting process and the sort of questions and ideas you were thinking of along with “Who’s going to do this show with us?”
SP: I’ll go back to that thing I said about the collision of different experiences. I think that’s a really important thing about Rocky Horror. It is uncontainable. It contains multitudes. It contains contradictions, which was really hard for us in 2026. So in thinking about casting it, I thought about a few things. I thought about who do you want to spend three months with? I mean that. These are really long hours.
But the other thing, when I watch Rocky Horror, the film, which I adore, I’m like, “how did those people end up together?” And in talking to people who have been affected by Rocky Horror, so many people tell stories about like, “Oh, I found my people at Rocky Horror. I somehow found my people.” Often, the next part of that story is, “We didn’t have people other places. We had people at Rocky Horror.” So we were thinking about putting a group together that has a diversity of experience. We have people from Broadway, we have people from film and TV, we have people from comedy, we have people from downtown, we have people who have danced on bars in Bushwick, including the two of us. And that was really important: thinking about the opportunity of doing this on Broadway. When you go through those doors, you’re maybe excited about somebody on stage, but I bet you’re excited about somebody different from the person sitting next to you. That’s just another tiny little door that you can walk through. I think that part of our job is to make as many doors as possible for people to walk through. When that cast was announced, I think a lot of people were like, “How did those people end up together?” That was by design.
JJ: How do you two share the room and collaborate during rehearsals?
AT: I feel very fortunate that there’s a great deal of fluidity between our departments. It’s wonderful to work with a director who understands movement and music and energy as part of the language of the piece. The words are not the only thing. They’re really important, but there are other things that are also communicating from other parts of ourselves. Sam has a really keen understanding of that and opens the door for us to discover it with the people we have in the room. We are pretty targeted about how we divide things up. In the room we’ll be like, “Okay, pitch it to you. This is your part. Do you want to sketch something out and then I’ll jump in here?” There’s a lot of tennis as we’re working. There’s a lot of jokes. There’s like, “Do you think that would be funny?”
SP: We were college roommates, so we have 20 plus years of experience being idiots together and making things. I’m in theatre because I enjoy collaboration. If I just wanted to have an idea and execute it perfectly, I would be a painter. But to me, the fun of making theatre is to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and who look at a thing differently than you. That’s especially important with Rocky Horror. I wanted to bring people together, not just Ani, but our music supervisor, Chris, and all of our designers, our stage management team, who looked at this thing differently, who said, “I know you’re excited about that, but I think it’s this. I think you need to do this. I disagree.” That makes good stuff. And we’ve worked together so much that we can have opposing perspectives sometimes. The fun of making theatre is “may the best idea win.” Who cares? I’ve gotten some of the best ideas for this show from the front of house staff. An usher will be like, “Have you thought about this?” That’s a big part of how we work. I think our collaboration has sustained through so many seasons because we’re just smashing our brains together, solving a puzzle.
AT: Creative tension is good sometimes. Sometimes there’s a little bit of wrestling with the thing until you see it emerge and we like that. We have a foundation underneath it so there can be that tension and you can keep going. I also think it’s one of Sam’s superpowers that he sort of fans the flame in each of his collaborators. Sam and Dots [Scenic Design Team] were working together for years, putting together a space that we could play in. Then that means the choreography has a place to live and that means the actors have… It all is interconnected.
JJ: This space that you created with the scenic design collective Dots, what was the process? What were the cultural influences that really got you and excited about making this space?
SP: I would say the first thing is Studio 54. When we learned that we were going to be in this theatre – once I came back from death, because I passed out basically – we just wanted to embrace everything that’s awesome about this theatre. I know there’s probably people in here who are so excited about the Studio 54 renovation. I personally am not excited because I love how this place is so beautiful and completely decayed. I think that the spirit of this show lives in the spirit of this building. We don’t have to do any work there. A big part of our work was to get out of the way of the building, embrace the building, make it feel like The Rocky Horror Show has always lived at Studio 54.
Another thing that we talked a lot about is hospitality. We hope you have a nice night out. You chose to put your pants on and leave your house which you didn’t have to do because there is plenty to watch on Netflix and it’s much cheaper and you don’t have to wear pants. I do believe when you walk into a theatre, the actual building should be like, “Hi, I’m glad you’re here.” Whether they say that or whether there’s just signals that say that.
We also just wrestled with 53 years of Rocky Horror. If you’re somebody who loves it, maybe when you look around or when you see things on stage, I hope you feel at times embraced by visual secrets and Easter eggs and ideas from the legacy of this show and not only the show itself, but the experience of being a fan of this show, which I think is the most special fandom in the world.
JJ: Riffing off one of the big themes of the show, “Don’t Dream It, Be It” – a lot of fans through the years have found a connection to artistic liberation and sexual liberation. How does that inform the choices and the interpretation of the show for you?
AT: I remember seeing Rocky Horror when I was 11 and watching the movie at a friend’s house and going, “I feel things. What are they?” And having something wake up that I didn’t yet know what it was and couldn’t identify and maybe didn’t place for another 10 or 15 years. That continued to iterate as I moved through life and worked creatively and in my personal life. I think Rocky Horror lit one of those flames or opened a door that I didn’t know was there. Working on it, we’ve just found that there are more and more doorways to go through. Some of that has to do with, again, listening to the people in the room and seeing what they also refract from the material because there are so many possibilities of how to be represented in the work. We take “Don’t Dream It, Be It” very seriously and hope that, a little bit by example, people can walk through that door into like, “Oh, maybe I could. Maybe tomorrow instead of this, I’ll…” I think we try to do that in everything we do, but this material particularly serves that up.
SP: Before I really dove into Rocky Horror, when I had seen it once, I was like, “Ah yeah, it’s like people gyrating on each other.” A thing that I really love about Rocky Horror is that it offers a world where shame doesn’t exist around sex or our bodies. Which is just wild, especially in 2026. That is a radical and beautiful thing to dip into. But in terms of the liberatory force of Rocky Horror and of sex in Rocky Horror, the thing that I love about “Don’t Dream It, Be It” is it’s a gradient. “Don’t Dream it, Be It” doesn’t have to mean you’re going to have an orgy. “Don’t Dream It, Be It” might mean you don’t think you look good in blue, you look amazing in blue. Buy a blue shirt, get bangs. Liberation is a gradient and I hope that that phrase and Rocky Horror is just this little pilot light for whatever thing that needs to be liberated, which for some people may be a deep sexual awakening. And for other people, it might be like, “I’m going to make eye contact with a stranger because that’s really hard for me and maybe it’ll lead to something.” I think it’s so, so, so much deeper than people grinding on each other and fishnets – which is also fun, to be clear.
Questions from the Audience.
This show balances so much: the Sci-fi B-movie element, the horror element, the queer expression of it all. What was your process in navigating all of that and balancing everything the show holds?
SP: I think one of the very first things was… I talked to Richard Hartley, who’s the original music supervisor, and arranger and he was like, “Don’t smooth it out too much. It’s a mess.” And that was such good advice because it does hold all of those things. One minute’s making you laugh and the next minute it’s making you cry. At one minute you’re like, “Should I be laughing? I’m sad that he died, but there’s weird fake aliens on stage.” It’s a mess and embracing its jagged edges and all of the things hitting against each felt really important and fun and not what you usually get asked to do in the theatre. We had to say yes to the mess with love.
How do you see Rocky Horror fitting into our world today in 2026 and what sort of discussions went into producing this show now in our world as it is?
SP: I think that I’m not particularly good at “in these times” because we’re all choking to death from in these times. Sometimes I think the most political thing you can do is ask people to have a nice time. Frank says, “It’s not easy having a good time. Even smiling makes my face ache.” Magenta says, “When do we return to Transylvania? I grow weary of this world.” That hits deep some nights. In some ways, the job was not to ignore the absolute horrors that we’re living through on a daily basis, but the job was: what if we made something that, at the end of what was probably a crappy day for a lot of people, can make them laugh and be with each other so that they have fuel to get through the next day of horrors.
The other thing I would say is that a thing that is amazing to me about science fiction is that it’s a way to imagine a world other than the one that we live in. And doing that for the last few months has been deeply moving to us. I think part of what has made Rocky Horror endure for so many people for 53 years of terrible things happening in the world is that it has offered an alternate world, an alternate universe to live in and steal things from to take back to the real world.
Ani, you mentioned that a lot of the work was done in the room with the cast and a lot of the exploration was done there. Did you have an extended rehearsal period or was there a workshop or something that sort of gave you the framework of what it was going to be?
AT: Both. There was some time to do a movement workshop because it feels really important to me that the movement vocabulary is something in and of itself. It’s not decoration, it’s not backup. I wanted it to have a vocabulary and a momentum of its own. We took some time with a group of rad weirdo dancers and started making some structures that we played around with and had conversations leading up to rehearsal. That was seven days of very intense work that gave us a foundation to stand on so that we weren’t coming in just riffing once we were in rehearsal. It also felt important to be working very specifically with the people that we had in the room who don’t dance like anybody else. They don’t sing or act like anybody else, too. There are really one-of-a-kind humans in the room. We tried to follow their lead as to how this specific production wanted to live in their bodies.
Rocky Horror is almost like a huge open book for a choreographer. What do you think was your most obscure choreographic inspiration that came into this space?
AT: The original show was made by a bunch of nerds. And this production is also made by serious nerds. There’s fun in sort of diving into the well of those movies and the other genres that are informing it. The music is also giving very clear directives. The style is not specific in the directives, but for me, I’m the daughter of a musician, I listen to music first. Then I’m like, “Is it telling the story? And should she be seen in a different way here?” There’s a way of listening to what the music is asking for that I take very seriously.
The most obscure… that’s really interesting. I don’t know if anybody caught it. There’s a couple of moments of homage to the film because Tim Curry has a great move in “Charles Atlas.” There are little things like that because we thought that the original cast of performers had inspiration that was worth drawing on. I don’t think it’s obscure, but maybe it is: elbow sex is a move that you wouldn’t want to not do. And same with “The Time Warp.” It didn’t seem interesting to reinvent “The Time Warp” from the bottom up. There’s architecture there. There are clear instructions for what to do. We also want to be able to do it; although people know many different versions of it – there’s the UK tour version and there’s what happens in the film, and then there’s what happens in the screenings that I’ve been to in New York, and there’s overlap – it felt really important to make sure that people could do the moves with us if they wanted. It’s a Broadway house. People don’t necessarily stand up in the middle of the show, but the invitation is there at a couple of moments, and we want people to be able to do that.