By Owen Bryant
I wonder what Shakespeare would have thought if he knew that centuries after his peak, his likeness would be associated with a work featuring carnivorous alien plants and psychotic dentists.
It may seem a wonder to you, too, but that’s exactly what is happening right now up at the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival. Sharing the stage with several other showcase events, the beloved horror-musical comedy “Little Shop of Horrors” is dying to feed you a good old time.
As the story goes, Seymour Krelborn (Steven Huynh) is a meek and lonely nobody working in a failing flower shop down on Skid Row. His boss Mr. Mushnick (M.A. Taylor) and co-worker/crush Audrey (Adrian Grace Bumpas) aren’t making any ends meet and Mushnik is ready to close the shop. Complicating matters further, Audrey is involved with an abusive, nitrous-huffing dentist boyfriend, Orin Scrivello (Mark Bedard).
None of them have much hope until Seymour displays a mysterious pod-like plant, Audrey II, he found during a solar eclipse. The plant is a hit and ends up attracting more business—and more horrors—than any of them could imagine.
If you’re familiar with the 1986 film, the stage show is very similar, albeit pared down in some ways. Most of the action takes place in the flower shop, or the street outside where Crystal, Ronette and Chiffon (Sydney Alexandra Whittenburg, Sydney Jaye, Kris Lyons), the story’s narrators, sing and saunter around.
The scene in the dentist office is brought to life simply with a single dentist chair. However, there are several musical numbers that didn’t make it into the movie that give the stage show its own character. And the ending is the original one, which was scrapped for an alternate ending in the film. It’s enough of its own thing to make it worthwhile for the movie fans and is sure to charm those who aren’t familiar with the story at all.
While the characters themselves don’t stray much from their screen counterparts, the performers hold their own very well. Bedard, in particular, is larger than life, stepping into several other quick-change roles in addition to Dr. Scrivello.
And I mustn’t forget the utterly giddy joy of seeing Audrey II grow from a seedling into a monster, puppeteered by Chad Ethan Scott and voiced by Jay C. Ellis. This Audrey II is a near identical replica of the movie Audrey II, just with a simpler design and mechanics. But seeing her open that toothy maw for the first time is a delight and a fright.
The performance I saw was interrupted by some sound issues right before intermission, but I have to give it to the cast and crew for handling it expertly. At a key scene, the music went out and without missing a beat, Dr. Scrivello ad-libbed “I can sing it a capella” before most of us even knew something was wrong. But with intermission right after that scene, the unexpected difficulties couldn’t have happened at a better time and barely affected the performance.
If you’re looking for something fun and different, seeing Little Shop under the setting sun on the shores of Lake Tahoe is a marvelous experience for the entire family. It runs nearly every day through August 20, so you have plenty of time to get up there and see it. But you had better watch out, because someone is hungry.
Details
The productions runs through Aug. 20, 2023 at Sand Harbor.
Learn more at Tahoe Shakespeare.
Editor’s Note: For those who are wondering why the festival does not include a William Shakespeare play this season, the answer is that the festival is working to rebuild following three missed seasons due to the pandemic. Artistic Director Charles Fee said, “To be prudent, we have decided to produce a single mainstage offering in 2023. We chose to produce the small cast musical ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ instead of a large-scale Shakespeare title because it enables us to maximize production cost efficiencies – as the musical has already been built, fully rehearsed, and played to great success at our partner theaters in Boise and Cleveland.” The festival expects to bring its two-Shakespeare-play format back in 2024.
