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Flower power
Little Shop still sells
BY IRIS FANGER

The vegetative version of Dracula — Audrey II, the blood-loving plant that steals the show in Little Shop of Horrors — has settled in at the Colonial Theatre (it’s there through this Sunday, May 15), where each night she begs in dulcet baritone tones, "Cut the crap and feed me." And she’s not talking Miracle-Gro. But in the context of the everyday real-life horrors in Iraq, the quartet of singing corpses on stage at the climax of the show hardly seem a blip on the graph of human mortality.

Based on the 1960 Roger Corman film and emulating the growth pattern of Audrey II herself, the musical that started in a tiny Off Off Broadway theater in 1982 ballooned into an Amazon-jungle-sized hit that ran more than 2200 performances after moving to an Off Broadway house and winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical. It propelled book writer/lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken into high-profile careers with Disney, and no wonder given their sassy, Motown-infused music and lyrics. The pair went on to write the scores for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin before Ashman died in 1991, at age 40, of complications from AIDS. The 2003 Broadway revival, directed by Jerry Zaks and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, spawned this touring production.

The setting is Skid Row in ’50s or ’60s New York City. Nerdy grown-up orphan boy Seymour Krelboure diddles with exotic plants in the back room of Mr. Mushnik’s floral shop, a business that’s as near death as the floppy flowers in the cooler. But when Seymour comes up with the tiny, weird potted specimen he calls Audrey II, after the blonde bombshell of a shop salesgirl he secretly loves, and feeds it his own blood, which makes it grow, business begins to flourish. Spoofing society’s yen for the next new thing and the kinky romance of Audrey and her Elvis-like sadistic-dentist boyfriend, the show piles more gags onto a tangle of garden-variety jokes from the venerable Faust retellings of Marlowe and Goethe. The plot gets filtered through the song-and-gesture commentaries of a lively Greek chorus of "urchins" (Yasmeen Sulieman, Amina S. Robinson, and LaTonya Holmes) who belt out saucy numbers including the title tune. If you don’t get the references to the pop charts of the past straight off, you will when the women don wigs and gowns that hark back to Dreamgirls.

Jonathan Rayson makes a suitably obtuse Seymour, and he’s backed up by the nasal-sounding Tari Kelly as Audrey I, who has the plaintive paean to the pleasures of a tract house in Levittown, "Somewhere That’s Green," and the love ballad "Suddenly Seymour." But it’s the puppets designed by the Jim Henson Workshop and Martin P. Robinson to represent the ever-growing Audrey II that are the character to watch — and carefully if you get too near the shop. Topped by a glowing red mouth and tendrils manipulated by a pair of puppeteers, and voiced by the off-stage Michael James Leslie, Audrey II and her antics are the reason to see the show.

Buried in the press kit, amid a list of "frequently asked questions" and their answers, is the suggestion that when it comes to the young set, Little Shop of Horrors is "best suited for mature elementary-school-age kids and up." Which makes one wonder what it is the tykes are reading — or watching — in the wake of Dick and Jane and Sesame Street.


Issue Date: May 13 - 19, 2005
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