Craig Urbani has the look of a man who’s about to do something faintly disreputable ... under a spotlight. He’s handsome in the old-fashioned, properly engineered sense: all angles, voice and presence, with the sort of face that suggests he could convince a jury to let a murderess go free (which he did as Billy Flynn in the stage musical Chicago) or seduce you into bad behaviour (as he did with Sandra Dee when he played Danny Zuko in the musical Grease).
Urbani says he loves to play iconic characters, known and loved by people around the world, which is why Frank-N-Furter suits him so perfectly. Not just because he can wear the heels, though he assures me he can sprint in them, but because The Rocky Horror Show has found in him something rare: an actor who knows that camp isn’t just over-the-top acting — it’s mischief, menace and allure in makeup and a wig. And if any one can, Urbani can get you up on your feet and swooning.
Urbani is returning to Rocky Horror in its latest South African incarnation, stepping once again into the fishnets of the “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” at a moment in life when the role seems less like casting and more like destiny catching up with him. It’s a story that takes his acting career, thus far, full circle. His first professional audition, after Rhodes and the Grahamstown festival grind, was for The Rocky Horror Show in 1992 at the old Victory Theatre in Orange Grove. “They said, ‘No, you can’t sing well enough. We’re going to cast you as Rocky. Go to the gym and bleach your hair’.”
That was the first lesson in theatre: if you can’t be the square, be the specimen.
He was 20, painted muscles and all, playing Rocky opposite Jeremy Crutchley’s Frank-N-Furter, and somewhere during a performance he had the sort of electric, private epiphany that actors dine out on for years. He looked across the stage and thought: ‘One day, I want that part. Not now, not yet.’ He understood, even then, that Frank required something he didn’t yet possess. “There’s a lot to this character that I didn’t even understand,” he says. “But I’ve been thinking about Frank since I was 22. Playing him in my head, in my living room … whenever I got a chance.”
Urbani didn’t set out to become a musical theatre actor in the polished, jazz-handed, academy-trained way of laminated programmes and warmed vowels. He wanted to perform, full stop. As a boy he was in a band, played drums and a handful of other instruments, idolised Harrison Ford and Kevin Costner, with George Michael on the side. He wasn’t reared on The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. He liked the rougher stuff: Grease, The Idolmaker, rock-and-roll musicals with grease under their fingernails. Teachers kept dragging him into school productions, insisting he prove to other boys that performing wasn’t naff. He was pushed into the arts like a reluctant colt into the paddock, only to discover he’d really like to run with it.
Then came his starring role in The Buddy Holly Story, a great, life-altering bit of theatrical fortune. “I was a 23-year-old kid … I could play a bit of guitar, but not much. I had to teach myself,” he says. “I had no idea I was delivering something that would change my life.” Suddenly his career was moving at the speed of people standing for an ovation. The production took him to London, then beyond: Australia, New Zealand, Spain, concert versions in Denmark, cast recordings, the West End in London. It was the sort of career acceleration that arrives before he’d packed enough life lessons into his overnight bag. “I got a lot very quickly when I was young,” he says with noticeable gratitude tempered with a wince. “And I squandered some of those opportunities.”
The show catapulted him onto the West End, into international touring, into a life that moved faster than he was ready for. Behind the success was a lot of fear. “I didn’t have the discipline,” he admits. “I was just busking it. I had a lot of stage fright … and I drank alcohol to help get me on stage.” His stage fright, he remarks candidly, was the kind that floats into the stomach on butterflies, their fragile wings whispering that the audience is waiting for you to mess up. Then he began drinking because he’d been drinking to get on stage. Soon, it stopped being a workaround and became the architecture of his life. He was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Contact — a musical “dance play” developed by Susan Stroman and John Weidman — and felt not triumph, but shame, because he believed he’d short-changed his audience by not being sober through the run.
Now he’s almost a decade sober. “With help — my mother and a counsellor, Maria Swart,” he says. “In June I’ll be 10 years.” Everything changed. “My head is better. It’s not a dangerous neighbourhood anymore.” He laughs lightly when he says it, but the weight of it lingers. “I take care of myself. I train. I work hard. I’m happier. I’m more present.” And crucially, the relationship with performance shifted. “It used to cost me,” he says. “Now it adds to my life.”
This second act has been generous. There’ve been roles in which he’s triumphed: Billy Flynn in Chicago, Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. He speaks especially fondly of Kiss Me, Kate, in which he played Petruchio and felt, for the first time, that he’d moved “from boy to man”. Some Birmingham critic said he strode around the stage “like a colossus”, and actors, being vain and wounded in equal measure, never entirely forget a good line in a review. “I’ve had a wonderful run,” he says. “A second stab at what kind of legacy I’m going to leave.”
But Frank-N-Furter remains the role in his bones.
For Urbani it’s not merely a good part, nor even a dream role. He’s a purist about the character, reverent about Tim Curry’s original performance, alert to the vital balance in Frank between camp frivolity and something more earthy, dangerous, maybe even masculine. “I love the naughtiness of it, the sexiness of it, the silliness of it,” he says. “I love the madness of it.” And he understands it now. Frank isn’t just camp. Not just outrageous — a man in heels. “He’s unpredictable,” Urbani says. “Gentle, cutesy, camp — and then violent and aggressive and horrific … and then charming again.” Too many actors, he thinks, float him away into featherweight drag. “It needs that earthy, guttural masculinity,” he says. “Sometimes it gets too light … too drag queen-y. That’s not Frank.”
Instead, he’s chasing something more layered — something that holds both glamour and threat.
“The power of the character,” he says, “is that women want him … and men feel a little uncomfortable that they want him too.”
Rocky Horror has always been more than a show. It’s a permission slip. “Don’t dream it, Be it,” Urbani says quoting a song sung by Dr Frank-N-Furter in the show. “Just be whatever you want to be.” He believes that message still lands. “People want to be a bit naughty,” he says. “Have fun. Let their guard down.” That’s why the show endures. Not because it shocks — it no longer does — but because it still liberates.
There’s a moment in the show every audience waits for: “That gong,” Urbani says, smiling. “Gong, gong, gong … ” Frank doesn’t appear until after The Time Warp song. The anticipation builds. “You’re watching … but you’re waiting for Frank,” he says.
And then — the reveal. “The cloak comes off,” he says. “And there I am. Six-foot-two, in heels, in their faces.” He pauses. “I hope they come along for the ride.”
And this time, he’s entirely present for it. For Craig Urbani, it’s an entrance three decades in the making: the boy with the bleached hair, the man who nearly lost his footing, the actor who came back wiser, steadier, and finally ready to inhabit the role he first saw from the wings.
