Actor Luke Evans has reportedly achieved a staggering breakthrough in human emancipation simply by strapping on five-inch heels and reciting the precise dialogue Tim Curry committed to film half a century ago. The heavily insured Broadway production is being hailed as a triumph of boundary-pushing art that conforms entirely to the expectations of its wealthy patrons.
One must inevitably recall the visceral, blood-soaked catharsis of Hermann Nitsch’s obscure Orgien Mysterien Theater; the stark, unrelenting existential dread of the storm sequence in Shakespeare’s King Lear; and, perhaps most saliently, the 1997 Chef Boyardee television commercial in which a sentient can of beef ravioli relentlessly pursues a small child through a suburban home, when attempting to appropriately contextualize the sheer, unbridled danger of Luke Evans donning a sequined corset at the Circle in the Square Theatre. To witness a conventionally attractive, chiseled Hollywood leading man bravely step into a role explicitly designed to be beloved by millions is to observe a theatrical martyrdom that would have frankly terrified Antonin Artaud, provided Artaud was willing to pay a $185 premium on SeatGeek.
The profound ballad of Evans’s sexual liberation, we are breathlessly assured by the production’s marketing apparatus, manifests in his willingness to wear glitter—a substance previously thought entirely foreign to the musical theater district. This is a subversion so acute, so violently disruptive to the established order, that it has been meticulously blocked, heavily choreographed, and approved by a risk management team who ensure his nightly descent into untamed hedonism concludes promptly at 10:15 p.m. so that theatergoers might comfortably make their scheduled commuter trains back to Westchester.
To watch Luke find his light, hit his spike tape, and flawlessly execute an Equity-approved pelvic thrust is to witness the total dismantling of the Western gender binary.
It is, of course, a testament to the audience’s boundless capacity for self-deception that they might view a multimillion-dollar revival of a camp classic as a genuine act of rebellion, rather than the theatrical equivalent of a luxury cruise line offering a mildly spicy salsa at the evening buffet. Yet Evans persists in his grueling, five-inch-heeled labor, offering a polite, focus-grouped facsimile of deviance that ultimately challenges nothing, threatens no one, and ensures the continued, lucrative survival of the very structures it pantomimes dismantling.