By Richard Lord

It’s summertime, and the livin’ is easy. I’ve no doubt that athletically inclined fish are jumping, and I note that cotton futures are high. More to the point here, it’s time to escape the heat and catch a good show in an air-conditioned theatre. But it should be a summertime show, easy to enjoy and quite entertaining. May I suggest the People’s Light production of Little Shop of Horrors. The musical itself is a spoof of a cult fave 1960 B movie of the same title, which was itself a spoof of B movies of the Fifties and early Sixties. (That was the great Dumpster Decade of B movies.)

Little Shop of Horrors is a funhouse musical adapted from that B movie with book and lyrics by Howard Ashman and music by his long-time collaborator Alan Menken. It’s a delightful jaunt into fantasy which briefly flirts with dark elements, then overrides those dark elements with a wave of laughs.

In his introduction to the acting edition of the libretto, Howard Ashman wrote that the show “satirizes … science fiction, ‘B’ movies, musical comedy itself, and even the Faust legend” I don’t detect much Faust in this musical; its greater debt is to Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein. Plus, there’s a discernible nod to Invasion of The Body Snatchers, a true classic of Fifties B movies, beautifully remade in 1978.

The stage version revolves around Seymour Krelborn, who is the heartlessly exploited employee of a florist shop on Skid Row. Skid Row not being the optimal location for a florist shop, shop owner Mr. Mushnick is on the verge of shuttering the business. But things turn around rapidly after Seymour discovers a strange plant that resembles a long-snouted Venus flytrap. The plant is sickly and Seymour fears that it won’t survive very long. He then accidentally discovers that it thrives on human blood. (At first, Seymour’s, who nurses it back to health with drops of his own blood.)

Seymour names the plant Audrey II, after his co-worker, who he’s carrying a torch for. Seymour and Audrey think it might help boost sales if they place this strange looking plant in the shop window. The strategy is amazingly successful, as customers start dropping in to get a closer look at Audrey II, then walk out having purchased other plants or flowers.

Audrey II not only thrives, it grows enormously, but when that rapid spurt in growth occurs, the plant is no longer satisfied with just drops of blood. It wants large servings of meat – preferably human meat. Suddenly a star, Seymour agrees to gratify Audrey II’s appetite in order to keep the plant thriving, enhance his own celebrity and cement his romantic relationship with the original Audrey. But as feeding your fellow humans to carnivorous plants is generally frowned upon, even in that Skid Row milieu, Seymour soon finds himself in a deep ethical dilemma and serious legal trouble. You’ll need to catch the show to see how this all plays out.

As already noted, this is a wacky fantasy. You don’t believe the story for a moment – but that’s one reason its so captivating. A few minutes in and you’re ready to be drawn into something unbelievable. Not only do we willingly suspend our disbelief, we push our disbelief into a lonely corner of our consciousness until the final lights go down.

Little Shop of Horrors is not just a fantasy, it’s a delightful comedy. I’ll admit the title of this review is slightly misleading: it’s not actually a laugh riot, it’s more of a show that supplies a steady flow of chuckles. But all those chuckles are well-earned; they flow naturally from the plot and the characters and never seem forced. (In addition to Seymour, Muschnick and Audrey, another key character is Audrey’s nasty boyfriend. More on him later.)

Even though the musical was written in 1982, Ashman and Menken embarked on a retro-track for the songs. They intentionally chose styles straight out of early Sixties rock, mostly the Motown Sound. Accordingly, Little Shop features something akin to a Greek Tragedy chorus in three female singers who enhance the plot with musical context and commentary. The singers’ names are Chiffon, Crystal and Ronette. (If you sense in those names the Spector of that luscious period in the early 1960s when girl groups flourished, you may well be on to something.)

While the musical itself is an open invitation to a fun production, you do need a good deal of theatrical talent to make it work. The People’s Light production under the helm of director Molly Rosa Houlahan make it work in a stellar manner.

It starts with setting the scene. As we in the audience settle into our seats, we see that set is an unholy mess – which is absolutely appropriate for this section of Skid Row the script calls for. When the story starts taking shape, a long curtain is pulled back to reveal the uninviting Muschnick florist shop. Lauds to set designer Anton Volovsek for his artistry in this regard.

And then come the performances. Director Houlahan stages the complicated action well, but more importantly, she draws winning performances from all the actors.

The Greek chorus ladies (Chiffon, Crystal and Ronnette) are rendered in a sparkling manner by Madeleine Garcia, Jessica Johnson and Taylor J. Mitchell.

The performer who takes on the role of Seymour needs to be not only a skilled actor, but also an able singer, dancer and puppeteer. Anna Faye Lieberman earns high marks in all three of these adjacent skills.

Lieberman’s Seymour manages to be charming even when the lad’s being conniving. Not an easy balance, but Lieberman pulls it off. And yes, director Houlahan decided to go with a woman in this role. It works nicely, as Lieberman’s soft looks suggest a wimpy young man too easily bullied by his employer and his competitor for the love of Audrey until he sharply snaps into payback mode.

Jessica Money delivers a full package as Audrey. Money is especially strong in delivering her songs, but it’s not just Money’s singing skills that make this Audrey effective. Her character portrayal is spot on, particularly in those moments when she’s trying to rationalize staying in a wincingly abusive relationship. (Not with Seymour, it must be noted.)

As Audrey’s botanical namesake, Chabrelle Williams is comically threatening and amusingly so. And all the while we’re laughing at this Audrey II, we can feel a chill running down our spines. Williams is able to keep this delicate off-balance in all the moments the plant becomes dominant in a scene.  (The program notes don’t tell us who in the company is responsible for constructing the plant at its peak, whoever it was, that person or persons deserve hearty praise.)

Speaking of threatening, Andrew Kane is outstanding as sadistic dentist Orin. He channels Andrew Dice Clay at his most obnoxious and then throws in a smidgeon of early Elvis and a fistful of Brando in his Wild One incarnation. It’s a perfect blend for this character and this show.

As Mr. Muschnik, Mary Elizabeth Scallen provides the production’s second successful gender-bender performance. In a recent performance for People’s Light, Scallen put together a most sympathetic female in Off By One. Here, Scallen presents a rather unsympathetic florist who strives to be as mean as the mean streets he operates his business in. But Muschnik can’t be too obvious in the ways he uses and misuses both Seymour and Audrey, and Scallen manages to pull this underhanded nastiness off as well.

The handful of small roles in the play are handled ably by one and the same actor: Connor McAndrews. McAndrews seals but never steals the scenes he turns up in. It’s quite the right tone for those characters and the production.

In addition to praise for Anton Volovsek’s set design, kudos are in store for costume designer Camilla Dely ( almost all Dely’s costumes are in exquisite bad taste), choreographer Melaniee Cotton, music director Brigitte Rottman and music supervisor Benji Goldsmith, and lighting designer Ebony M. Burton

Little Shop of Horrors runs Tuesdays through Sundays until August 3. Performances are at 7:00 p.m. Tuesday – Friday, 2:00 and 7:00 Saturdays and Sundays. No shows on Sunday, July 20 and only the 2:00 show on August 3.

The Trivia Trail
Composer Alan Menken is a member of that select group of EGOT winners (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony). Menken’s mother was herself in show business – a dancer, actress and playwright. His father played the piano, sometimes for side money, but his true paying job was that of a – wait for it – dentist. In his early days of college, Alan Menken had actually planned to follow his father into the dentistry field. When you see the show, you’ll appreciate that connection.

The Ashman-Menken collaboration predated their big success with Little Shop by a few years, but this was their biggest success writing together for the stage. However, arguably their biggest success came while writing for films. A few years after the success of Little Shop, the two gravitated to Walt Disney Animations, where they turned out numerous songs for films like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid. A number of their songs won Oscars while others received Oscar nominations.
Sadly, the successful collaborations came to an abrupt end when Howard Ashman died at the age of just 40, a victim of AIDS.

The original, 1960 film Little Shop of Horrors is considered a prominent example of a project that should been a disaster but instead became a cult favorite.
According to film lore, Roger Corman was given unexpected temporary access to the sets he had used for his previous black comedy, A Bucket of Blood. He met up with screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, who had written that film as well as a number of other Corman B movies. Corman and Griffith started brainstorming to see if they could come up with a film plot that would fit the still available set.
They eventually made their way to a laid-back eatery where they tossed ideas back and forth. Griffith came up with an idea for a salad chef who starts eating some of his own diners. Producer-director said that idea wouldn’t pass the Hollywood Code censors of the day, but it might just work if the frenetic fresser was a man-eating plant rather than a salad chef. Griffith agreed and that very evening, at the eatery, started churning out the basics of the script.
Both Corman and Griffith confirm that by the time they reached the basic idea for the film, they were both rather drunk, and the crazy ideas for Little Shop of Horrors seemed altogether reasonable. It’s further claimed that the whole project was squeezed into three days of rehearsal, followed by two days and one night of shooting the film.