Little Shop of Horrors review – gory musical blooms again off-Broadway
The musical comedy our climate-denying age requires, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s 1982 tale of a plant bent on human destruction blooms again off-Broadway. Funny, schlocky, nutty and sad, it’s a show about falling for (and sometimes into) the wrong guy or the wrong vegetable, but with doo-wop and gonzo puppetry.
Related: The Rose Tattoo review – Marisa Tomei is wasted in Broadway farce
Little Shop of Horrors is based on a Roger Corman B-movie about a humble flower shop assistant who unknowingly nurses a homicidal succulent. Revived by the director Michael Mayer with heart and sass, the show stars Jonathan Groff (unrecognizable beneath taped-together eyeglasses and bunchy khakis) as Seymour, the beleaguered botanist, and Tammy Blanchard, as Audrey, the tender, Bronx-honking trollop he loves. Audrey wastes her favors on Orin Scrivello, DDS (Christian Borle), a dentist with a creative approach to pain management. A trio of street urchins (Salome Smith, Chelsea Turbin, Joy Woods, cheeky and delightful) suggest that maybe she should just leave him. Audrey gestures with her broken arm. “If he does this to me when he likes me, imagine what he’d do if he ever got mad,” she says.
Spore-crossed lovers, Seymour and Audrey are Skid Row casualties, brought up to believe that they don’t deserve love or decency. Sure, Orin Scrivello DDS blacks Audrey’s eyes and breaks her arms, but as she explains to Mr Mushnik, “He makes good money. And besides … he’s the only fella I’ve got.” Yes, Seymour’s vegetal protege, Audrey II (sung by Kingsley Leggs with a thumping baritone, designed by Nicholas Mahon from Martin P Robinson’s original vision and puppeted by Monkey Boys Productions) sucks so much blood from Seymour’s body that he turns dizzy and anemic, but he wants to be wanted, so he lets the plant devour him.
Like Slave Play, its near neighbor, Little Shop of Horrors is a show about how generational trauma can really mess with your sex life. Its characters enter into abusive relationships because they have never experienced any other kind and hurt has come to feel like love. By the time they find their way to each other, Seymour has internalized violence and become a reluctant psychopath. (Maybe Groff’s Mindhunter character could profile him?) And Audrey can’t imagine herself as anything other than a victim.
“I’ve done terrible things,” Seymour tells a stricken Audrey. “But not to you.”
“But I want you to,” Audrey says.
Tonally, Mayer’s production, accented with Will Van Dyke’s fine arrangements and Ellenore Scott’s gestural, loose-hipped, giddy choreography, takes a chirpy see-what-sticks approach, but the script is daffy and capacious enough to allow performances as emotionally grounded as Blanchard’s, as blithely comic as Groff’s, as bananas as Borle’s, who plays Scrivello with the precision of a Swiss wristwatch and the derangement of a candidate for exorcism. He mugs, he twerks, he chews scenery like it’s a wooden amuse-bouche. If scene-stealing is a crime, someone should make a citizen’s arrest at the stage door.
The musical’s ending, which veers too abruptly from tragedy to silly costumes and irony, has never really worked and it doesn’t work here. But considering how humans have treated the environment, you may find yourself, rooting, perversely, for the murder shrub. Call it an herbivore’s dilemma.
