Stephanie Hsu Does the Time Warp
The actress Stephanie Hsu likes to call herself a “soft witch,” meaning that although she has some supernatural powers of perception, her intuition can be off by a few clicks. Case in point: last year, Hsu had a sudden vision that she would be cast in the Broadway hit “Oh, Mary!” as Abraham Lincoln. (The sight gag appealed to her: Hsu is five feet tall.) The next day, she heard from Sam Pinkleton, the show’s director, who wanted to discuss an opportunity. “I was, like, Sam, this is soooo spooky, but I already know you’re going to ask me to be Lincoln,” she said. “And he was, like, What the hell are you talking about?”
Pinkleton was calling to offer Hsu the role of Janet in the new Broadway revival of “The Rocky Horror Show,” the high-camp glam-rock musical that débuted in the West End in 1973 and whose 1975 cult-film adaptation, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” is the longest-running theatrical release in history. Hsu, who is thirty-five, had never seen the movie, but she watched it the night Pinkleton called, and signed on. The story follows an uptight young couple named Brad and Janet (played in the film by a baby-faced Susan Sarandon), who wander into a castle occupied by a flamboyant, cross-dressing mad scientist named Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) and a gang of colorful oddballs. Janet, who begins the night as an innocent ingénue, undergoes a sexual awakening within the castle walls. “I was shocked, when I started playing her, with what was coming out of my body,” Hsu said. “She has this fudge-brownie earnestness, but her desires are very real.”
On a recent Thursday, Hsu was in the mirrored lobby of Studio 54, on her dinner break during “Rocky Horror” tech rehearsals (the show opens on April 23rd). She had changed into baggy Levi’s, but from the neck up she was still in her post-awakening makeup for Act II—red lips, doll-pink cheeks, false eyelashes, glitter-splashed cheekbones. She’d tied a blue scarf over a wig cap. “This is a classique Broadway look,” she said. “Everyone goes out to get their little juice in midtown wearing a baseball hat and a full beat.”
“Rocky Horror” marks Hsu’s return to Broadway. She was born and reared in the Los Angeles area and attended N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts, after which she got immersed in what she described as “the experimental downtown theatre scene.” She landed her first Broadway role in 2017, as a sentient supercomputer in the “SpongeBob SquarePants” musical, and did a bit of TV work before being cast in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a kooky, world-bending independent film, from 2022, directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Hsu plays Joy, a morose daughter of two Chinese immigrants. She relocated to the West Coast and earned an Oscar nomination, but she found herself missing Manhattan. On the morning after Trump was elected a second time, she decided to move back. “I was, like, If we’re going down, I gotta go down with the freaks,” she said.
At Studio 54, Hsu pointed out the worn leopard-print carpeting, which was decades old. “We like to say it’s embedded with cocaine,” she said. During rehearsals, members of the cast, which also includes Luke Evans, Juliette Lewis, and Rachel Dratch, had held a séance in the mezzanine, trying to contact some of those who had twirled under the room’s giant disco ball in times past—Prince, the drag queen Divine. “We talked to all the ghosts,” she said.
Hsu had befriended the theatre’s in-house carpenter, Dan Hoffman, who has worked there for twenty-three years. In a tiny windowless office off the lobby, Hoffman sat at a desk, poring over archival photographs. He showed Hsu a picture of the space in the nineteen-thirties, when it was a night club called Casino de Paree and a naked woman would pose in the lobby in a giant Martini glass. “The thing about this place is, when you do standard theatre productions here, they are not successful,” he said. “But when you do something like ‘Cabaret,’ or like this show, the history comes alive. It’s, like, boom! ”
Hsu asked Hoffman if he’d been a “Rocky Horror” fan. “I was a fan of Susan Sarandon in lingerie, I’ll tell you that,” he said.
Hsu laughed. “I’m glad you said that,” she said. “Because, when I watched it and saw her, I was, like, in heat.”
She walked up to the stage, whose curtain was made of shredded vinyl, and explained that the set designers had hidden several Easter eggs for diehard “Rocky Horror” fans to discover. She wouldn’t give them away, but she did offer hints: “Look for the iron rods,” she said, and “Look for wet leather.” She also whispered about an “upside-down butt plug” hidden in the molding. Hsu said that Richard O’Brien, who wrote the show’s original book, liked to say that “Rocky Horror” should always feel like a “trashy little musical.” She added, “We say that phrase with absolute delight and glory.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misidentified a character in “The Rocky Horror Show.”