Published: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 10:58 AM PDT
James Whitmore used to peddle Miracle-Gro® on TV. He vowed it would grow your tomatoes to the size of basketballs.
James Whitmore, meet “Sesame Street” and “Soylent Green” in “Little Shop of Horrors,” written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, directed by Steven Glaudini for Musical Theatre West.
It’s rollicking fun, delightfully underplayed, and quirky, to say the least.
Dissonance reigns supreme here. The visual mood is graveyard while the songs recall the soundtrack of “American Graffiti,” giving it a kind of “Munsters” feel, spooky though not really; tongue-in-cheek (not to mention body in mouth) diabolical. The story? Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl and feeds her and everyone else to a people-eating plant.
It’s a perky sci-fi horror spoof. There’s a carnivorous plant that sings R&B, flower shop employees who sing the blues (real life blues: business, love and other Life-Threatening troubles, not to mention the always-present travails that attend success), and a fetching trio of schoolgirls (Chiffon — Fredericka Meek, Crystal — Kamilah Marshalla and Ronnette — Melody Collins) who serve as a street urchin/Greek chorus singing doo-wop backup.
Scott Pask’s set is literally to die for. His sinister, bleak and neon skyline looks like something out of a German Expressionist painting. And though you don’t walk away humming the production’s melodies, the rhythm creates the same sort of hip, TV show “Dexter” mood as the theme song from the “Addams Family” TV show.
This sci-fi spoof is set in a flower shop in Harlem (Why not? As the song says, there’s a rose that grows in Spanish Harlem). All’s appropriately morbidly capitalistic at the beginning: no demand for flowers in that part of town means that the owner, Mr. Mushnik (Stuart Pankin) must shutter the shop. This compounds the already-miserable lives of cute but low self esteem shop girl, Audrey (Lowe Taylor), abused girlfriend of S&M dentist Orin Scrivello (Peter Paige), and botanist/schlemiel Seymour Krelborn (Danny Gurwin), who has a crush on Audrey.
Then Seymour concocts a unique plant (voice by Michael A. Shepperd, movement by James W. Gruessing) that originally looks like Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent and ends up looking like a Crayola Crayon version of Fat Albert. The shop becomes wildly successful (supplying flowers for the Rose Parade), thanks to the celebrity brought on by this weird-looking plant. Speaking of Pasadena, it’s got the same marketing appeal as the city’s stinky plant that always packs the place. And Seymour gets Audrey; Orin’s mysteriously disappeared. Hmmm.
Only one teensy, weensy little problem. Tooey (Seymour named the plant Audrey II, the big softie): requires more-and-more amounts of, not bat guano, not coffee grounds, but human blood.
One thing leads to another and, well, as your mother says, you should eat your greens before they eat you.
Performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday through – Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday with a 7 p.m. performance on Sunday, July 19. The play runs until July 26.