Review: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS at Stray Cat Theatre

Guest contributor David Appleford takes the pruning shears to Stray Cat Theatre’s LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, a production that sprouts with daring choices and unexpected twists—some deliciously dark, others best left unwatered. What blooms under Ron May’s direction is part punk bouquet, part Venus flytrap, with petals worth praising and plenty that could use a trim—and Appleford isn’t afraid to feed it some honest fertilizer.

Stray Cat Theatre in Tempe doesn’t just pick plays; as its name suggests, it pounces on them with claws out and teeth bared. This is a company that thrives on the weird, the wild, and the wonderfully subversive. So, when a musical suddenly slips into its season lineup like a punk rocker crashing a black-tie gala, you sit up and pay attention, particularly when it comes to its choice of material.               

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, now playing at the Tempe Center for The Arts in Tempe until May 17, is the kind of show that feels like it was patched together on a dare, yet to everyone’s surprise, it somehow turned out to be a gem. Alan Menken’s doo-wop-and-Motown-fueled score hums with the irresistible energy of a jukebox you can’t turn off, while Howard Ashman’s lyrics and book spin a B-movie horror gag into something both funny, yet surprisingly savage.

The setup sounds like a prank. A sad-sack florist raises a bloodthirsty plant on Skid Row. But the way it plays out - half splatter movie, half broken-hearted love story - makes LITTLE SHOP an intoxicating little monster of its own. Loosely based on Roger Corman’s dirt-cheap 1960 film, where you could almost see the cardboard sets wobble, Ashman and Menken weren’t simply doing a campy rehash; they were reimagining the whole thing with a twisted sweetness and a real pop sensibility.

For those who only know the original black and white movie with a cult following, Ashman, who also wrote the book, stripped away some of the original’s messier side plots (goodbye, nosy cops and neurotic mother) and tightened the focus on Seymour, the orphaned underdog, and Audrey, his tragic, dream girl.

So, why would Stray Cat Theatre restage LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS?  Maybe it’s because of the story that’s as deliciously twisted as it is endearingly old-school, plus the music that’s soulful and sticky as candy.

As directed by Ron May, the show is a wild, weird, dark ride; a freaky mashup of music, puppet mayhem, and heartbreak.  You know the routine: boy meets girl, boy raises a blood-sucking plant.  Just your average love story.

What sets this fun but heavily flawed Stray Cat production apart is how it sheds the usual layers of camp and cartoonishness associated with musical. Despite it still taking place in New York, those Nu-Yawk Skid Row accents are miles away. Here, the black humor bubbles up sneakily, like a grin you can't suppress.

Isaac Greenland disappears into the role of Seymour, the meek flower shop flunky. His Seymour is sweet, earnest, and completely unequipped to handle the carnivorous little secret he’s nursing. Estrella Parra, so good in Stray Cat’s La Ruta, plays Audrey not as a peroxide blonde in sky-high heels and a tight dress with a heavy Bronx accent but as an intentionally dowdy Plain-Jane with dark hair and comfortable looking flats. She’s the girl Seymour pines for, but Audrey’s stuck on her abusive, sadistic boyfriend, played with wicked, unhinged glee by Nathan Spector, a dentist who practices pain as performance art.  He’s too chilling to laugh at outright, but when he launches into his deranged number, he somehow makes cruelty both horrifying and grotesquely funny.

The musical’s Greek-chorus trio - cheekily named after the three prominent all-girl groups of the 1960s from New York - Chiffon (Leia Foehr), Crystal (Keilani Akagi), and Ronette (Arielle Tuffentsamer) aren’t just set dressing doubling as observant street urchins, these ladies deliver the goods with soul and brassy swagger.

As for the blood-sucking plant, Stray Cat takes a risky detour with its interpretation.  Instead of using the iconic, oversized Audrey II puppet familiar to fans of the show and available for regional theaters to rent, they’ve opted for a more experimental route - casting local performer Chanel Bragg as the plant itself. The decision to make her be Audrey II rather than just voice it is a jarring departure. Once free of the pot, Audrey II doesn’t resemble a terrifying alien plant so much as a costumed figure out of a nearby Mardi Gras celebration. It’s a choice that sacrifices the creepiness and charm of the original in favor of flash, and not always to the production’s benefit. Breaking free from the confines of its pot and strutting around the shop happens too early.  It breaks the sense of surprise and suspense and upends the show’s pacing.

Hector Coris nails it as the frazzled, fast-talking Mr. Mushnik, bringing just the right mix of exasperation and over-the-top flair to the beleaguered flower shop owner. He’s surrounded by a lively and impressively large ensemble, who seamlessly juggle multiple roles as Skid Row denizens and quirky walk-in customers, adding texture and humor to the unfolding proceedings.

Tiana Torrilhon-Wood’s set design conjures a wonderfully warped world for Mushnik’s shop, with towering painted beams and crooked windows that give the space a twisted, dreamlike feel. Paired with Jeff A. Davis’s moody, jewel-toned lighting, the set has an eerie presence like a pop-art version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It’s both visually striking and deliciously off-kilter.  

But several of the show’s bolder choices and added gags miss the mark by miles. A flatulent Skid Row drifter gets a cheap laugh, but when he’s later shown defecating behind a cloth screen, complete with newly added voice-over narration, the humor nosedives into something downright juvenile.

Then there’s the puzzling decision to wedge in a scene lifted straight from the candy-colored 1986 film - a moment that never existed in the original stage show.  It’s not especially funny, doesn’t move the story forward, and feels more like filler than flair adding nothing to the overall production other than tacking on an additional five minutes the production doesn’t really need.

But the biggest culprit dragging this production down is the volume. While softer moments - like Audrey’s tender Somewhere That’s Green, beautifully sung by Parra - allow the lyrics and Mark 4man’s sharp musical direction to shine, too often the sound cranks up to a level better suited for a stadium than the smaller Studio Theater at Tempe Center.  At times, it’s less musical theater and more sonic assault, with lyrics lost in a wall of noise. It’s as if the show forgot that it's telling a story through song, not throwing a rock concert for teens with amps permanently stuck at eleven.  And with Chanel Bragg’s power-house vocals, her character has to be the last member of the cast in need of any additional amplification.

It’s no small miracle when a musical hits that sweet spot of creative combustion, especially from a company and a director that doesn’t typically traffic in this style of heightened art form. Musicals are high-wire acts, after all, where everything - book, score, design, dance, and those all-or-nothing performances - has to lock into place.  But this show doesn’t always get there. It should snap, and bloom like Audrey II on its blood diet, instead of occasionally drowning good performances in a cacophony of ear-piercing noise.

But what does work and comes across well is how Audrey II’s monstrous character is a perfect, leafy stand-in for capitalist greed as it devours and grows. You could read the whole thing as a brutal little parable about how the American Dream sells us hope but demands blood in return.

Even though much of the production simply doesn’t work, in a culture built on consumption, this LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS grins like a demented jack-in-the box sprung loose from a nightmare while it asks: what do you think you’re really feeding, and worse, what’s feeding on you?

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS runs through May 17th at:

The Tempe Center for the Arts ~ https://www.tempecenterforthearts.com/ ~ 700 W. Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe, AZ

Stray Cat Theatre ~ https://straycattheatre.org/ ~ 480-227-1766