Marriott’s Little Shop of Horrors Eats
Tommy Rapley’s production nails the pitch-black satire in this sci-fi musical.
As high camp creature features go, Little Shop of Horrors is in a category all by itself. The musical about killer plants hell-bent on their mission to “eat Cleveland and Des Moines and Peoria and New York and where you live!” is ridiculous in the best possible way. It is also a pitch-dark, thorn-sharp satire on the cost of unchecked capitalism and Faustian bargains that enrich a few at the fatal cost of many. In this case, death comes via a botanical serial killer with a voice like Barry White.
In the Marriott Lincolnshire production, director/choreographer Tommy Rapley pulls off a feat I’ve not seen in the dozen or so Little Shops I’ve reviewed over the past 30-plus years: His ensemble gets all the yuks without obscuring the musical’s incongruously bleak depths. The show is comedy with a point as sharp as a new pair of garden shears. It’s a tightrope between mass carnage and slapstick, and Marriott’s cast makes it look easy.
The tale (60s-inspired soul and doo-wop tunes by Alan Menken, book and lyrics by Howard Ashman) evolves around Mushnik’s “Skid Row” flower shop that’s about to die from lack of business. Mr. Mushnik (Mark David Kaplan, a gifted physical comedian/vocalist/actor) is about to shutter the place when his impoverished assistant Seymour (Jackson Evans, a loveable nerd in demeanor and song) raises a “strange and interesting plant” that sprang to life during an eclipse.
Seymour has named the plant Audrey II (Lorenzo Rush Jr. making every note rich and smooth) after Audrey (Maya Rowe), the coworker he pines for. Alas, the human Audrey has a boyfriend—a sadistic, nitrous-huffing dentist named Orin (Andrew Mueller, channeling Dennis Hopkins circa Blue Velvet, but way more over the top). In an all-too-familiar refrain, Audrey is afraid to leave Orin: If he abuses her like this when he likes her, she says, gesturing to her broken arm, imagine what he’ll do when he’s angry. It’s a valid argument. Every day in 2025, 137 women were murdered by their domestic partners—roughly one every ten minutes, or fifty thousand total.
But Little Shop is the kind of comedy where the horrors of femicide and getting rich at any cost lurk below the raucous laughs. It’s the musical answer to a classically framed query: Tell me what you know about capitalism and femicide without mentioning either.
Seymour sells his soul and enables the behavior of botanical serial killer Audrey II after the plant promises him fame, fortune, and the girl. Everybody’s got a price, even nice-guy nerds. And so the horticultural menace grows and grows, getting hungrier and hungrier until Seymour decides to shoot it.
The final scene of Little Shop is not thematically dissimilar to that of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but the ensemble’s vocals make the likely annihilation of an entire nation sound positively luscious. Rapley has nailed the show’s built-in cognitive disconnect. On the one hand, you have a singing, dancing plant. On the other, probable extermination of the human race.
Shout out to the Ronettes/Chiffons-like vocal trio of Crystal (Lydia Burke), Ronnette (Daryn Whitney Harrell) and Chiffon (Miciah Lathan), who deliver a mix of a girl group, a Greek chorus, and the Furies. It’s a tough gig, merging horror, comedy, and social commentary. Little Shop gets all three.
