A killer plant? Monty Don was never this exciting!
HERE’S a 1980s revival, spoofing 1960s sci-fi horror with vigorous bebop and Motown, but very apt for Budget week 2024. For we’re on skid row, with dustbins, dossers and a small shop going bust.
Orphan Seymour will lose his job, and poor Audrey, with a black eye from her loutish boyfriend, will have to go back to working the clubs.
But Seymour (a sweetly geeky Oliver Mawdsley) has been tending a rare Venus flytrap. How rare he has no idea. The novelty brings customers in, but a cut finger reveals the plant’s taste for human blood, and Seymour gets anaemic keeping it going, as it grows before our eyes.
Luckily, when you have a really good villain — Matthew Ganley going rock’n’roll nutty as a sadistic,
nitrous-oxide addicted dentist — the plant can be an instrument of natural justice.
But can it also free our hero Seymour to woo the lovely, goldenhearted Audrey? You bet it can.
By this time the thing is 8ft tall and a very messy eater: all credit to invisible puppeteer Matthew Heywood both for eloquent writhing and some flawless, green lip-synching to the wild and terrifying offstage baritone of Anton Stephans.
During the interval screens go up on the open stage, happily suggesting that the plant might get even more enormous. It does. Excellent.
Thus the four co-producing theatres do honour to Howard Ashman’s loopy story, and the cast to Alan Menken’s songs: especially Laura Jane Matthewson as Audrey singing of her dream about living ‘somewhere that’s green’, and her ‘Suddenly Seymour’ duet with Mawdsley.
Not to mention Stephans’s bluesy, hungry musical howling as the carnivorous giant avocado.
Shrieks of glee meet every demise. Monty Don was never this exciting.