Stage presence
After 36 years, audiences remain sold on ‘Little Shop of Horrors’
NORTH SALEM, N.Y. — Thirtysix years after its birth, the musical spoof “Little Shop of Horrors” still resides in a special chamber of the heart of its mega-successful composer.
“Like few things in my life,” Alan Menken says, as he sits at a keyboard in an impressively outfitted studio on his Westchester County, New York, estate, a room glistening with shelves of Oscars and Tonys and Grammys. “When people ask, ‘What’s the complete masterpiece?’ I have to say ‘Little Shop.’ The structure of the story, the conceit of the score and the tone. They just meshed perfectly with the tale of a plant that eats people.”
That voracious arrangement of stalks, leaves and lips, the basso-voiced Audrey II, has materialized all over the world since first sprouting on the stage of off-off-Broadway’s WPA Theatre in 1982. The show, an affectionate lampoon of a schlocky 1960 Roger Corman horror movie of virtually the same title (it had a “The”) was an instant sensation, moving a couple of months later to the Orpheum Theatre in the East Village, where it would run for five years and enter the pantheon of all-time off-Broadway smash hits. Its book writer and lyricist, the beloved Howard Ashman, who died in 1991, declined offers at the time for a Broadway transfer, saying that off-Broadway was where it belonged.
Some of its many incarnations since have been both high-profile and somewhat anticlimactic, such as the cold 1986 big-screen version, with Rick Moranis and original cast member Ellen Greene, and a belated Broadway premiere in 2003 with Hunter Foster and Kerry Butler that received only tepid notices. Now, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., hoping for results closer to those of the early glory days, is finally taking a crack at “Little Shop,” in a production directed by Mark Brokaw that began performances Wednesday and runs through Sunday.
It is also a reunion, of sorts, for Menken and one of the original cast members, Lee Wilkof, who created the lead role of Seymour, the nebbishy flower shop clerk who slakes Audrey II’s blood thirst and in the process wreaks rock ‘n’ roll havoc on the unsuspecting denizens of Skid Row. The actor is back in the shop, this time as Mushnik, the craven proprietor who is, in essence, ultimately eaten up by his own profits.
“It completes a circle for me,” says Wilkof, who has taken a train up to Menken’s house from New York City for a chat about the days when “Little Shop” was being dreamed into being. “Getting to work at the Kennedy Center is a thrill. And going back to the show now, I will tell you that I have no intention of telling Mark Brokaw how we did it. I’m just looking forward to being in it again.”
The show is being mounted as the first of this season’s three offerings in the institution’s Broadway Center Stage series. Begun last year, with concert versions of “Chess,” “In the Heights” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” the program revives musicals from distinct eras, luring Broadway talent for a week of performances in what are intended to be stripped-down productions, and actors appearing with scripts still in hand. For this second season, the other musicals will be “The Who’s Tommy” and “The Music Man.”
In “Little Shop,” the second season kicks off with a bona fide crowd-pleaser and another cast of proven mettle: Josh Radnor as Seymour, Tony Award winner James Monroe Iglehart (the genie in “Aladdin”) as Audrey II and Megan Hilty as Audrey, the role that inscribed Greene as an off-Broadway legend.
Musical comedy milestone
It’s surprising that “Little Shop of Horrors” has never appeared on a Kennedy Center stage. It is a milestone in American musical comedy, its signature numbers — “Downtown (Skid Row),” “Somewhere That’s Green” and “Suddenly Seymour” — enshrined in show-tune lovers’ hearts. “We were pulling from classic rock and pop prototypes,” says the 69-year-old Menken, for whom the revival is another enshrinement of working with Ashman. Their partnership not only resulted in “Little Shop,” but later in two of Disney’s biggest movie musical hits, “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Both were turned into Broadway musicals.
Wilkof has worked regularly on stage and television, and in 2016 directed a little gem of a movie about the actor’s life, “No Pay, Nudity.”
Menken, of course, has gone on to collaborate with other lyricists, including Tim Rice, with whom he wrote what he describes as “the most successful song” of his career, “A Whole New World,” from “Aladdin.” Menken’s successes also include the stage version of “Newsies” and the movie musicals “Pocahontas” and “Enchanted,” the latter two written with Stephen Schwartz. But it’s clear that for the gregarious Menken, the memories of Ashman are burnished with a special luster. “His kind of brilliance, the gold standard. Nobody has touched it.”
“Little Shop” has an exuberant soul, thanks to Ashman and Menken, et al., but it was not all effervescence bringing it to life. “It was a painful birth,” Wilkof says. “There was lots of sturm and drang. It was not one of those companies where there were hugs and kisses backstage.”
Greene’s intensity was something they both remember. “She pushed herself like crazy,” Menken says. “She would dissect every moment. But then she came up with a performance for the ages.”
In slightly tawdry surroundings, the show found its milieu; “Little Shop” excelled in an atmosphere of decrepitude. “There’s a concept of economy and tackiness that is essential to it,” Menken says. Something about its spiky sense of kitsch satisfied a savvy audience’s yen for winking trashiness, because once the show began running, the response was electric.
“It was explosive when it opened,” Menken says. “The WPA was unbelievable,” Wilkof adds, referring to “Little Shop’s” first home. “They were begging for tickets. Begging.”
Is it possible to recapture some of that beguiling tastelessness today, in the more luxe confines of the Kennedy Center? One delightfully tacky thing this “Little Shop” won’t feature is an actual Audrey II puppet, long a mainstay of “Little Shop” productions. “There’s no physical plant onstage,” confirms Jeffrey Finn, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of theater producing and programming. “The plant will be James Iglehart!”
For what that means for the comic horrors that “Little Shop” tallies, and how they measure up to the irreverent carnage Audrey II left behind in the past, Menken and Wilkof might be among the best positioned to make the call. The bar, from their perspective, has been set pretty high. As Wilkof says of that production all those years ago, when Audrey II was first taking root: “I think it was close to perfect.”