Music by Alan Menken
Lyrics and Book by Howard Ashman
Sell a Door Theatre Company
Choreography by Matthew Cole
Musical direction by Dustin Conrad
Directed by Tara Louis Wilkinson
Little Shop of Horrors is the show that put the songwriting team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman on the map, resulting in them becoming a major contributory factor in the great Disney revival of the early 1990s, the space of two-and-a-half films. Originally created in 1982, based on the Roger Corman comedy-horror film, the musical in turn was filmed in 1986, which was when I first became aware of it. I think, like a host of other people, the moment I fell in love with it was when Audrey II opened that flytrap mouth and the voice of Levi Stubbs growled out "Feed me!". However irritating I found Rick Moranis, the vocal casting of the movie was exemplary, and I knew that would be a hard act to follow - especially for a British cast - and was fully prepared to make allowances. I did not, however, expect the film version actually to be better than the stage one.
There's a lot of music in the original version that didn't make it's way into the film. For starters, Mushnik is a full singing role, which he was not on film. However, the film has definitely culled the best of the music. The last ten minutes of the show, for example, is largely reprised songs, and the final number, "Don't Feed the Plants" is decidedly weak. The company here have chosen to add "Mean Green Mother" (which was written specifically for the film) as the curtain-call number, which is a good idea, as it's much stronger than "Don't Feed the Plants". Less satisfactory is the omission of the masochistic dental patient's scene, which is in both films and is such a gleefully ghoulish episode.
In this Sell a Door Company production, the musical backing is just a three-piece band, keyboards, percussion and bass guitar, though there was no sense of any thinness or lack of sound. At times, in fact, I found the singers were a bit swamped, and their texts became unintelligible. This may also have been partly because of the placing of the microphones on the singers, which were taped to their foreheads over the right eye - terribly obvious, I've seen it done much more discreetly, close to the hairline at the temples, or just under the jawline - and I resent not being able to hear lyrics. That said, the singing, on the whole, was pretty good.
All of the cast had problems with their American accents in their spoken roles - best of the bunch was Neil Nicholas, who was supplying the voice of Audrey II. Paul Kissaun's Mushnick didn't play into the stereotypical Brooklyn Jewish shopkeeper enough, although he certainly looked the part. However, Sam Lupton and Stephanie Clift were very good as Seymour and Audrey, the three girls doing their Greek Chorus/down-market Supremes imitation were excellent, and Rhydian Roberts was clearly relishing not just his primary role as the sadistic dentist, but also the cameo parts in "The Meek Shall Inherit".
The company was very small, just ten visible performers, plus the puppeteer manipulating Audrey II in her larger phases, but it worked surprisingly well, nevertheless, while the set design was appropriately eccentric. The rising and falling facade of Mushnik's Flower Shop got a little tiring, it happened so often, but apart from that the space was effectively used. Yet although this was a well put-together show, and given good performances, there were two things I felt lacking. The first was a certain degree of energy, the performances sometimes seemed a bit perfunctory. The other was a sense of the fantastic, it was played a little too much just for laughs. The filmed version has extracted the best of the stage version (and I've yet to see the Director's Cut, which restores the originally planned ending matching that of the stage version), and this was not the performance to convince me otherwise.
[Next : 1st December]
No comments:
Post a Comment