Review: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley Takes a New Look at the Campy Cautionary Musical Tale

In the entire canon of the musical theatre, I don't know that there's another show even remotely like Little Shop of Horrors. It's cheesy fun and also makes you think. It wraps a deadly serious cautionary tale in a delightfully campy exterior. Just when its plot becomes the most outrageously surreal is when it paradoxically feels truest to life. And - based on the evidence of the new production at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, it hasn't aged a single day since it premiered way back in 1982. If anything, given our current ethically-challenged political scene, it is even more relevant now than it was 40 years ago.

The musical is based on the no-budget Roger Corman film from 1960, and follows a similar plot. Meek, mild-mannered orphan Seymour is an underling in a failing flower shop and secretly in love with co-worker Audrey. He acquires a "weird and exotic" plant that he names Audrey II and places in the window to hopefully lure in customers, thereby saving the shop from financial ruin and winning Audrey's love and rescuing her from her abusive dentist boyfriend in the bargain. Of course, there's just one little hitch: Audrey II turns out to be one bloodthirsty plant (literally!), requiring a fresh supply on a regular basis. Initially creeped out at the thought of acquiescing to Audrey II's bloodsucking demands, Seymour rationalizes it by telling the plant "Well, I guess it's okay... as long as you don't make a habit out of it or anything." Anyone who's been alive and sentient since Trump took that fateful trip down the escalator in 2015 and dragged much of the country's leadership down with him one moral transgression at a time can imagine exactly where this will lead. Audrey II's insatiable need for more, more, more can only end in mass destruction.

For TheatreWorks' production, director Jeffrey Lo came up with the intriguing concept of resetting the show to San Francisco's Chinatown. I went in thinking this made a lot of sense, as the show and the neighborhood share a paradoxical combination of grime and glitz. Both have an easy surface appeal that obscures a more authentic and complicated world lying just underneath. The fact that Chinatown is a tourist magnet while also providing a cultural home to a sizable Chinese population neatly mirrors the way the musical uses irresistibly retro pop music styles and horror film tropes to reel us in for a surprisingly moving tale of people struggling to live their lives with dignity and authenticity.

So far so good - in theory. Based on the evidence onstage at TheatreWorks, the rub is that Howard Ashman's incisive lyrics don't fully support that concept. We have Asian American characters reverentially referencing white icons like Ozzie Nelson and Andy Hardy, and I'm not sure what we're meant to make of it. Or when Audrey sings the plaintive "Somewhere That's Green" (perhaps the most poignant "I want" song ever written for the musical theatre IMHO) and dreams of a place where "I cook like Betty Crocker and I look like Donna Reed." What exactly does that mean when it's sung by an Asian American woman? Does she long to live in a homogenized white world? Is she being intentionally ironic? Time and again my brain was working overtime to bridge that disconnect, until I ultimately reached the conclusion that the production and performances weren't providing sufficient answers.

I was also confused by the decision to set the show in the present day, rather than circa 1960. All manner of references to mid-20th century pop culture (Howdy Doody, Lucille Ball, Levittown, etc.) seem very strange indeed coming from the mouths of characters living in our contemporary world. I spent way too much time wondering about this and hoping the concept would become clear by the show's end, but alas that did not happen, at least not for me.

Of course, the Chinatown setting does give Asian American actors the opportunity to take on roles they would seldom have a chance to play otherwise, and that in and of itself is certainly a worthy goal. But I was also hoping the change in location would make the show resonate in new and surprising ways. Instead, what we get is a fairly standard reading of Little Shop, which to me feels like a missed opportunity.

What I was left with was a reasonably solid, sometimes slightly underwhelming production of a show that I love. Fumiko Bielefeldt's fanciful costumes contain more hits (Audrey's saucy black miniskirt with peekaboo lacing up the sides) than misses (the urchins' unflattering dresses in the opening number). The set by Christopher Fitzer is appropriately grungy, yet also visually interesting and nicely functional as it moves between locations. I particularly enjoyed the graffiti-style portraits of Bruce Lee and Anna May Wong on the brick wall extreme stage left. William Thomas Hodgson's choreography for the urchins was slyly nostalgic and well-performed in classic girl-group fashion.

Naima Alakham, Alia Hodge & Lucca Troutman as the trio of neighborhood urchins (aka Crystal, Chiffon & Ronette) all sang well and had the right sassy attitude for this sardonic Greek chorus. Katrina Lauren McGraw as the voice of Audrey II showed off an impressive set of pipes, although I would have liked a greater sense of menace from her. Similarly, Nick Nakashima's abusive dentist leaned a little too hard on the daffy comedy and not enough on the sadistic nature of the character. That said, one of the major delights of this production was the was the way Nakashima threw himself into a whole panoply of other minor characters, each deliciously offbeat and distinct from the others. I was rather confused by Lawrence-Michael C. Arias' interpretation of shop owner Mushnik as a sort of bumbly Jewish-Filipino uncle type, which had the effect of sanding down the character's rough edges.

The two leads were both quite strong. Sumi Yu as Audrey evinced a blithely comic sensibility as a disguise for the more troubling aspects of her existence, sang quite well, and wore Audrey's intentionally taste-challenged costumes with aplomb, which is not an easy thing to pull off. Phil Wong was an almost perfect Seymour, believable in his transformation from downtrodden "jerk" to conniving social striver once he gets a taste of power, and relatable enough throughout that we are willing go on that journey with him.

I don't think it's giving anything away to note that the show ends with a cautionary anthem stirring us to action with lyrics like "Hold your hat and hang onto 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, don't feed the plants!" It sounds like it could have been written yesterday. As I left the theater, I couldn't help thinking "Now THAT should be our theme song for the 2024 election cycle!"

(All photos by Kevin Berne)

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Little Shop of Horrors runs through December 31, 2022 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. For more information visit TheatreWorks.org or call (877)-662-8978.

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