Gemma @ 'Little Shop of Horrors' - Fame Can Be A Killer
What’s it about?
Little Shop of Horrors is equal parts gory and hysterical, featuring a memorable rock score by Alan Menken and lyrics and book by Howard Ashman.
The musical is based on the 1960 movie, The Little Shop of Horrors, and tells the story of Seymour, a dissatisfied employee in Mr. Mushnik’s Skid Row flower shop. Seymour’s luck suddenly changes (seemingly for the better) when he finds himself in possession of a bizarre plant that is attracting the flower shop and himself a great deal of attention. However, Seymour’s morals are tested when his mysterious plant appears to require a steady diet of human blood to grow.
My experience.
It was one of those bitterly cold New York City February days, and despite my best efforts, I had a cold. My nose was in a constant state of drippage, and I was trying to work while also popping DayQuil tablets and regularly blowing my nose, which was getting more chapped by the second.
My mother and I had tickets to see Little Shop of Horrors at 7:00 pm, which didn’t give me much time to get to Hell’s Kitchen from my Wall Street office. I planned ahead, telling my mom to wait for me at a Japanese restaurant called Sushiva, conveniently located a block away from the theatre, and to order and pay for the both of us in advance. As soon as I finished working for the day, I took the train to the Hell’s Kitchen area and grabbed our tickets from the theatre’s box office. When I joined my mom at Sushiva, the food was already on the table. We had a full half-hour to eat and chat before we even had to worry about leaving for the show.
By the time my mom and I entered the Westside Theatre, my most recent dose of DayQuil had kicked in, and I was beginning to feel real excitement in the pit of my stomach. I had never seen a professional production of Little Shop of Horrors before. If I had seen a non-professional production, it was some school production from longer ago than I’d like to admit and one I barely remembered now. Had I even seen the movie? I didn’t think so. Little Shop of Horrors was such a classic. Everyone and their mother had seen the show, and I wanted nothing more than to be included in that company.
The theatre space was delightfully intimate. It appeared that there wasn’t a bad seat in the house, something I especially appreciated as a short person far too used to my vision of the stage being at least partially blocked.
I was familiar with and very much looking forward to hearing the following songs:
Somewhere That’s Green
Dentist
Suddenly, Seymour
I would often sing the lines I knew from the three songs around the house because I enjoyed them so much. But hearing them performed live in their entirety for the first time gave me a newfound appreciation for them and a clearer understanding of the characters singing them.
Seymour was orphaned as a child and now worked in Mr. Mushnik’s unsuccessful flower shop in the poverty-stricken Skid Row. Mr. Mushnik took in Seymour as a child but belittled and overworked him instead of treating him with any kindness or respect. I felt a lot of sympathy for Seymour and resented Mr. Mushnik’s mistreatment of him. I wanted Seymour to have a win - he deserved one.
Seymour secretly loved his coworker, Audrey, and longed for them to have a life together. But Audrey was a prisoner in her just all-around abusive relationship with Orin, a sadistic, motorcycle-driving, leather jacket-wearing dentist. I was rooting for Seymour to get the girl, especially because Audrey, unbeknownst to him, fantasized about living a simple, suburban life with Seymour, “somewhere that’s green,” and cared for him exactly as he was.
Orin was just…the actual WORST sort of man…all the while being one of the best characters PERIOD, and he was played to side-splittingly comedic perfection by Christian Borle, whom I remembered from his Smash days.
In the aftermath of a total eclipse of the sun, Seymour spotted and purchased a peculiar plant, unlike anything any botanist had ever seen on Earth and decided to name it Audrey Two, after his beloved Audrey. But Audrey Two wouldn’t grow for Seymour, not for all the sunlight, water, fertilizer, and attention in the world! Audrey Two would only grow after consuming fresh human blood.
*SPOILER ALERT*
Initially, Seymour was pretty game to satisfy Audrey Two’s blood cravings with little droplets of blood from his own fingers. And Audrey Two’s growth was rapid, generating customers and business for the flower shop and turning Seymour into a celebrity overnight. But Audrey Two COULD TALK (!) and kept demanding from Seymour (in a surprisingly booming, masculine voice) larger and larger quantities of blood.
Orin abused Audrey in front of Seymour, and Audrey Two used the opportunity to convince Seymour to murder Orin and then turn the evidence, AKA THE BODY into plant food.
Fame can be a killer, folks. It got its hooks into insecure Seymour, and suddenly he was willing to do anything to maintain his VIP status. He not only allowed Orin to laugh himself to death on nitrous oxide but chopped him up and fed him to a human blood-happy plant. Later Seymour purposely arranged for Audrey Two to eat Mr. Mushnik.
I believe that fame is best reached as an unintentional consequence of pursuing a passion. If you do anything with the sole goal of becoming famous, it’ll come back to bite you in the end. The price of fame is often far from a pleasant existence with no privacy and anonymity, and intense scrutiny.
Audrey deserved better. Seymour was, quite simply, the worst thing that ever happened to her. He let Orin die, which freed Audrey from his abuse, but ultimately if indirectly, resulted in her getting eaten by Audrey Two. Seymour only experienced real regret after the fact, when it was too late and Audrey was needlessly dying in his arms (and way too forgiving of Seymour in her last moments, if you ask me).
Each of the puppets who made up Audrey Two at every size was bigger and more intricate than the last and had me on the edge of my seat in open-mouthed awe. And the legends controlling these puppets were just, NEXT LEVEL. Audrey Two was the real star of the show, taking ownership of some of the flat-out funniest lines (“Does this look inanimate to you, punk?”) and belting out banger songs like Feed Me (Git It) and Suppertime.
DayQuil might have been doing its job suppressing my cold symptoms, but being in the same room as Christian Borle performing Dentist was the first thing that made me feel truly well in days. When the show let out, I was on such a high from the whole experience that I was half-convinced Westside Theatre’s Little Shop of Horrors could cure the common cold.
See it:
Tickets as low as $69
Through May 10th, 2020
