Review: Greater Boston Stage Company's LITTLE SHOP of Delights

The fragrant aroma wafting through Greater Boston Stage Company these days isn’t only the scent of the nearby florist, it’s also the sweet smell of the success that the Stoneham company is having with its wondrously well done production of “Little Shop of Horrors.”

Loosely based on the 1960 Roger Corman movie “The Little Shop of Horrors,” but minus the “The,” the Skid Row-set stage show, with music by EGOT winner Alan Menken and lyrics and book by the late Academy and Grammy Award winner Howard Ashman, first opened off-off-Broadway in 1982 before moving off-Broadway to the Orpheum Theatre for a five-year run. A new feature film followed in 1986. A current off-Broadway mounting is now in its sixth year at New York’s Westside Theatre.

The show – which will be at GBSC through June 29 – mixes a Motown-infused score with dark comedy to tell the tale of mild-mannered Seymour Krelborn, a floral assistant, who discovers that a strange new plant, Audrey II, will gain him fame in exchange for a diet of human blood. As the plant grows, its hard-to-satisfy nutritional needs intensify as do the related consequences.

Ilana Ransom Toeplitz’s brisk, perfectly paced direction, Chris Shin’s eye-catching choreography – which includes a dentist drilling his patient while astride him on his dentist’s chair on “Now (It’s Just the Gas)” – Bethany Aiken’s peppy music direction, Eric D. Diaz’s layered scenic design, and Chelsea Kerl’s era-capturing costumes all showcase “Little Shop” in all its campy sci-fi glory.

What gives it heart, however, is a terrific cast, led by the marvelous Stephen Markarian as Seymour, the workaday everyman who stands up a little straighter in the presence of his co-worker Audrey, played affectingly by Kayla Shimizu. Seymour likes Audrey and would like to get to know her better, but she’s already taken, at times by force, by her sadistic dentist boyfriend, Orin Scrivello. Audrey’s sweetly sentimental “Somewhere That’s Green,” with its lyrical references to plastic-covered furniture, frozen dinners, and other onetime pleasures of suburban living, is a musical paean to the past that Shimizu makes work for today.

A popular fixture on Boston area stages, Jared Troilo is a stand out here, playing everything from a hip-swiveling, nitrous oxide-huffing Orin to a propeller-beanie-wearing boy, a hophead, a talent agent, a network executive, a product marketer, and more. With the comedic chops of a Borscht Belt headliner, Troilo dances like Elvis and sets his leading-man looks aside just long enough to chomp a cigar like Milton Berle and chew the scenery with the best of them.

Also bringing laughs as irascible flower shop owner Mr. Mushnik – a rumpled businessman with few soft spots who, when he realizes the value Seymour and Audrey II bring to his shop, sets about using the trusting Seymour for his own ends on “Mushnik and Son” and “Sudden Changes” – is the very funny Bryan Miner, who by day serves as GBSC’s Director of Philanthropy and Marketing.

The musical throughline is provided from the show’s familiar opening title number by the aptly named vocal trio of Crystal (Becky Bass), Ronnette (Pearl Scott), and Chiffon (Cortlandt Barrett, recipient of this year’s Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Featured Performance in a Musical for the Central Square Theater and Front Porch Arts Collective co-production of “Next to Normal”). Conceived as the show’s resident girl group, Bass, Scott, and Barrett also lend smooth backing vocals to “Da Doo,” “Dentist!” and “Suddenly Seymour.”

And since there wouldn’t be a “Little Shops of Horrors” without its attention-getting Venus flytrap, it’s fitting that Audrey II is skillfully puppeteered by Sydney T. Grant and voiced by the multi-talented Anthony Pires, Jr., an actor and singer seen most recently in the Umbrella Stage Company production of “The Spitfire Grill.”