His overscale Elvis-pompadour bobbling, he leaps up and down the stoops, or flops into the laps of Crystal (Salome Smith), Chiffon (Joy Woods), and Ronnette (Ari Groover). But when he’s given the scene, like the one with his song “Dentist” - performed with the Greek chorus–like Urchins (sometimes known as the Skid Row Supremes) - he devours it.
LITTLE SHOP OF HORROR S PLOT' GENERATOR
He’s a Chaos Generator through and through, popping up in tiny roles (a passerby, an NBC executive), and exploiting every opportunity for a laugh. So when you do lavish the show with marquee talents, it feels like superabundance.Ĭhristian Borle (who does indeed have Tonys, for Something Rotten! and Peter and the Starcatcher) is sort of the show mascot. Alan Menken’s imitation Motown harmonies and yearning suspensions sit as easily on an unprepared voice as one that’s won a Tony. The show is nearly indestructible: Even junior-high productions can’t ruin it. And when you watch Little Shop you can feel both the teenage enthusiasm and those initial flying rushes toward creation. Menken and Ashman, after they’d decided on ’60s kitsch pastiche, wrote the musical in two months. What could be cozier than a favorite cult movie, goofy as a dog in pants?Ĭorman had shot in two days. I never met anyone who saw it as an adult.” He and Menken, coming off an unsuccessful production, needed a pick-me-up, so they decided to indulge themselves with something purely fun. “Later,” he said, “I met tons of people who saw it when they were 14 or 15.
LITTLE SHOP OF HORROR S PLOT' MOVIE
In 1980, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman decided to adapt Little Shop from Roger Corman’s bananas 1960 B movie The Little Shop of Horrors, which Ashman had loved since he saw it on TV as a 14-year-old in Baltimore. And so Seymour lets himself be coaxed into a deal with the devil. “Feed me, Seymour!” as the old saying goes. The exotic brings attention attention brings fame fame brings money and love. One day, Seymour begins to tend a strange and unusual plant, a Venus flytrap-type monstrosity that he calls the Audrey II. His flower-shop colleague and dream girl Audrey (Tammy Blanchard) is out of reach: She dates the abusive dentist Orin Scrivello (Christian Borle), sure that’s all she deserves. Mushnik (Tom Alan Robbins) in his terrible flower shop down on skid row. The hapless Seymour Krelborn (Jonathan Groff) works for Mr. The story is familiar, since it’s essentially Faust.
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But - and my eyes look like hearts while I type this - the infectious energy is pure amateur. Yet the show’s most charming quality is its feeling of having been put on for the hell of it. Under Michael Mayer’s direction, this Little Shop is glossy and plump, its Julian Crouch set tucked comfortably into its little Off Broadway stage. You might not think that’s praise, considering its A-team cast members - all pitching hard with nobody saving his arm - and the uniformly high production values. The highest compliment I can pay to Little Shop of Horrors, now bopping away at the Westside Theater, is that it feels like a high-school production. Jonathan Groff and Christian Borle in Little Shop of Horrors, at the Westside.