''Little Shop of Horrors': IRT feeds its public with a musical after a decade away

Seymour mulls over Andrey II's growing demands.

"Little Shop of Horrors" offers  the first soup-to-nuts helping of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, later to become the most definitive movie-songwriting team since the Sherman brothers. 

As a stage show, it's  also deserving of a  splashy technical elan from any theater company with the right resources and skills to create the show's bete noire, Audrey II. That's the bloodthirsty exotic plant that lifts Seymour, a lowly plant-shop employee and botanical nerd (Dominique Lawson), to unimaginable success at great moral and ultimately physical cost. 

Friday night's audience filled Indiana Repertory Theatre to capacity as the company ended its 2023-24 season. The cast, amplified vocally and presenting itself unambiguously embedded in the characters, drew repeated whoops and hollers in addition to more conventional applause. 

Czerton Lim's set design signals the wry turn the show takes immediately in depicting what urban life at the low end involves. The flower shop and its environs suggest desolation, while skyscrapers gleam in the background. Visually, a reality we've all read about is stamped on our senses, even though its cartoonish distortion here quickly places our expectations in the realm of comedy. Those expectations are repeatedly rewarded over two acts.

The girl-group Greek chorus of Chiffon, Ronnette, and Crystal guides our reception of Seymour's story.

Orin the dentist introduces himself as the girls hail him.

Breon Arzell's choreography has them evoking Motown moves. Their changes of costume, an astonishing array of designs by Izumi Inaba, convey the plot shifts and character portraits. Their harmonies are tangy, and when Ashman's words can be understood, the lyrics are trenchant and witty. Tiffany Theona Taylor, Jessy Jackson, and Raquelle Taylor achieve near-flawless balance with the offstage band led by Andrew Bourgoin.

Through what their commentary in song implies, the American Dream is mainlined addictively once again. That fantasy is always looking for the next icon, isn't it?, and a huge, well-fed plant works just fine. Seymour can hardly avoid its allure. It eventually acquires deep-throated soul vocalism (Allen Sledge) to keep the pressure on Seymour to provide blood sustenance. An unseen actor (Rob Johansen) manipulates the monster, giving particular eloquence to its wagging, thrusting tongue. 

Audrey yearns for "Somewhere That's Green"

If there's a problem with Benjamin Hanna's zestful direction, it may be that the lineaments of Seymour's emergence as a hero are a little too clear early on. Admittedly, it's hard not to see this coming if you know the show. Another problem, which may be mine,  is taking seriously character development in any fiction that depends on fantasy as driver of the action. 

Still, the hapless figure of the schlemiel should come across as fateful. Seymour wears a shell hardened by Mushnik's browbeating manner, relieved only by the boss' transparent ploy of adoption, which the employee can hardly believe. (Artsberger was delightful in the well-choreographed duet "Mushnik and Son.")

The duet "Suddenly, Seymour" is justly the show's hit, in which both Audrey and Seymour realize their mutual benefit  in rising together from miserable circumstances. It had the requisite sunshine and devotion as Godinez and Lawson rendered it Friday night.

Until then it's easy to take Audrey only as a victim who gradually responds to Seymour's sympathy for her suffering her boyfriend's cruelty. Orin (demonically funny as played by Kyle Patrick) is a sadistic dentist through whose unprofessionalism Ashman builds upon dentist portrayals in popular culture, represented among others by Charlie Chaplin and W.C. Fields. I'm old enough to remember the anxiety generated by the slow-motion, jackhammer drills of my youth, even absent the pain. 

Seymour's desperation in satisfying Audrey II gradually consumes him. He's still a hero, and that transformation should be evident. But he's a tragic hero, which I'll admit might be overstating his nature. He sees that his escape is a sort of love-death sacrifice, a Wagnerian parody. Eyebrows might rise when I also see him as earning the demise Robert Louis Stevenson summarizes rhetorically in an essay on the kind of death that ennobles life: "Does not life go down with better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?"

When both Seymour and his beloved tumble into somewhere that's green at the end, he has earned such grace, despite the silly, fantastic accident that led him to the precipice. The sandy deltas of perpetual urban squalor have been left behind. He has been led astray in succumbing to the American Dream, but he has found a larger purpose, and audiences will have had fun following him to the devouring brink.

[Photos by Zach Rosing]