Review: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, Hope Mill Theatre

An hour before the curtain, I learned that A Little Night Music was coming to town in December. I pondered, as I walked into one of Manchester’s repurposed industrial spaces, the Hope Mill Theatre, on the contrast between a musical written in ¾ time that reflects on lives slipping through fingers and what I was about to see, a madcap poppy rollercoaster ride into surreality. Turns out they had more in common than I expected.

We open on Skid Row (go back to the 80s when the show was written and you would have seen it right outside the stage door) where Mr Mushnik’s Flower Shop is failing. He still has two employees (the iron fist of management consultants had not yet pared every business in the developed world back to absolute minimum staffing levels) but it’s tough. He wants out. 

You’ve probably met his two workers before. Seymour is an orphan, taken under the owner’s wing as a kid, and the kind of lovable dork who always turns up in shows like this. Audrey is glammed up in a Reality TV star way, tottering on stilettos in a push-up bra, but she’s a good kid struggling in an abusive relationship with a sadistic dentist. A pseudo-Greek Chorus comments sardonically on events in the style of a 60s Motown girl group - if we didn’t get it, they’re named Chiffon, Crystal and Ronette, natch.

It’s a comfortingly familiar set up for a musical, but Little Shop hasn’t been produced as often as it has been without some grit in the oyster. That arrives with Seymour’s mysterious plant, with its Venus Flytrap mouth and Triffidesque danger, a novelty in the window that revives the shop’s fortunes, but like the tiger who came to tea, it needs a lot of food.

Few elements of theatre have improved as much as puppetry in the last couple of decades and, in an intimate venue of this size and with expectations set so high, Audrey II (the psychotic plant) has nowhere to go if it fails to convince. But it does, Robert Allsop and Associates doing a fine job to give that crocodileish maw the credibility it needs. Added to Morgan Large’s beautifully detailed set, it’s the solid platform the craziness needs.

Jed Berry has a lot of fun with Seymour, lovelorn but excited about his meal ticket with the dodgy appetite. Suddenly Seymour is a celeb, in demand from the tabloids and radio (the music and costumes locate the show in the paranoid US of the 1950s) and enjoying his success and the attention it brings.

Not least from Maisie Smith’s Audrey, who realises he’s her guy - well, he’s fed her sadistic ex, Orin (a glorious turn from Benjamin Yates) to the plant, so he’s kinda the last one standing. Mr Mushnik, a gruff and tough-loving Michael Starke, starts to suspect, before, well, you know.

Alan Menken’s score comprises song after song filled with catchy hooks and upbeat tempos that lighten what is a dark B-movie plot, very much Roger Corman’s artistic sensibility. He was something of an anti-establishment film-making genius, whose edge can be hidden in low-budget compromises and exaggeration, but it’s real all right. Director, Carrie-Anne Ingrouille, pays a worthy homage to the 1960 movie that inspired the 1982 Off-Broadway show, while the score keeps everything jaunty. Musical Theatre, done well of course, is uniquely placed to deliver that payoff.

Audrey II, eventually towering over the shop and the star of the show, is voiced magnificently by Marcus Ayton, whose sonorous baritone is as impressive speaking as it is singing, the plant gaining sentience as it consumes more and more and telling us exactly what it thinks.

And that’s where an unexpected reflective mood elbowed its way into the fun, not quite as melancholic as in the Sondheim masterpiece, but there all the same. 

The plant was invited into Seymour’s workplace and solved so many problems, but it needed continual resources pouring into its insatiable mouth. It then gained a consciousness and understood its own power sufficiently to take its own decisions and, before anyone really grasped the danger it posed, cuttings were sent into the world with havoc sure to ensue, yea unto an apocalyse. 

As the closing number tells us - 

“Hold your hat and hang on to your soul.

Something's coming to eat the world whole.

If we fight it we've still got a chance.

But whatever they offer you,

Though they're slopping the trough for you,

Please, whatever they offer you,

Don't feed the plants!
Don't feed the plants!”

(This review was written without the use of Artificial Intelligence).

Little Shop of Horrors runs at Hope Mill Theatre until 28 November

Photo images: Rosie Moore and Danny Kaan

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