Little Shop Of Horrors

[scenicdesign71]

I'm starting this thread just because it's always been among my favorite musicals, and I'm excited to see the new Off-B'way revival three weeks from today.

http://www.playbill.com/video/cast-and-creatives-of-off-broadways-little-shop-of-horrors-at-the-westside-theatre-meet-the-press

Today's NYT interview with Groff includes a nifty picture of him and the Urchins, also featuring a bit of Julian Crouch's Skid Row set behind them.  I'm encouraged by the design's relative lack of strenuous whimsy (compared to the gaudy Technicolor and cartoonish distortions of the 2003 Broadway version), and by Groff's apparent ability -- much-discussed in the article, and visible to a degree in the photo -- to dampen his matinée-idol appeal and go full nebbish.

And, perhaps above all, by the producers' insistence that this production will not under any circumstances transfer to a larger (i.e. B'way) venue.  Not only the show's final "gotcha" effect, or indeed even the plant's ability to visually fill the space through much of the second act, but something crucial about the scale and intimacy of the entire evening, all depend on its inhabiting as cozy a space as possible.  As I wrote on another thread, the blockbuster treatment just doesn't suit this scruffy little gem of a show.

[scenicdesign71]

More design geekery!  Today at work, a colleague who had spent some time last month working on Crouch's Little Shop set showed me a whole bunch of "process" pics on her phone, explaining some of the challenges and tricks involved in painting what looked to me like a seriously nifty (and adorably small) set.  Needless to say, I was rapt.

Mostly she had been working on the faux brick "surround," and what delighted me apart from some of the technical details, which I won't delve into (you're welcome), was just how much of this brick -- extending into the audience far above and around the proscenium, and wrapping around the eponymous shop itself -- was alive with a ghostly panoply of chipped and faded hand-painted advertising, once-vivid period typefaces rendered in layers upon layers of peeling, flaking paint.

It's pretty yummy.   

In the first (and larger) of the two Little Shops I designed, in 2006, I used the peeling remnants of a few B-movie posters to break up some of the sheer acreage of my own brick surround.  And in the second, in 2009, I had a numerous projections indicating either painted or wheat-pasted billboard-style advertisements laid onto the brick wraparound show-curtain "screen" enclosing the shop.  But for some reason it never occurred to me to focus in a big way on old-fashioned large-scale typography handpainted onto the brick (or even projected to suggest such).  There are entire coffee-table books dedicated to that vanished art -- I own at least one (and have, I'm pretty sure, since before 2006).  Perhaps I just unconsciously assumed that that would be too old-fashioned, a remnant from rather earlier in the century than 1960.  But then of course -- duh! -- that's Skid Row in a nutshell:  a decaying relic of a neighborhood where no new signage (indeed, perhaps no new business) has dignified these crumbling buildings for several decades.  And the visible age and decrepitude of the signs that have remained, some perhaps dating from before the Depression -- long-gone brands and businesses now all but illegible -- is the real point.

Clever Julian Crouch.

[Chris L]

I'm going to flag @AmyG on this one. She worked costumes on the LA production of Little Shop through both Ellen Greene and Faith Prince as Audrey 1. And Brent Spiner told her lots of anecdotes about Mandy Patinkin from when they were doing Sunday together, which she may or may not be willing to share. (She'll probably kill me for dragging her into this, but I can live with that, so to speak.)

[scenicdesign71]

Amongst all the other upcoming reopenings, Little Shop will be back at the  Westside Theatre -- when else? -- "on the twenty-first [sic] day of the month of September...", with Blanchard and Borle returning, and Jeremy Jordan taking over as Seymour.

Apparently I'm not the only one who's dubious about the trend (perhaps kicked off by Jake Gyllenhaal at City Center a few years ago?) of casting hotties in the lead role; certain corners of the interweb are said to be upset by Jordan's casting.  But if Jordan can dial back the hotness as effectively as Groff did, all will be okay.

[scenicdesign71]

Worth checking out especially for Menken's heartfelt rendition of "Somewhere That's Green" at 8:47, delivered at a relatively brisk tempo with a composer's sensitive yet unfussy pianism -- and bone-deep connection to a character who, seemingly from the moment of her inception, has captured listeners' imaginations with more apparent depth than her cartoon contours might suggest:

[AmyG]

This looks like a great production. It even has a nerdy Seymour. I really enjoyed hearing Mencken's stories. I had a thought though. He said he and Ashman jokingly called "Part of Your World" "Somewhere That's Wet" but it seems to me it should have been "Somewhere That's Dry" since she dreams of living on land. It probably was. I don't think Ashman would have made that mistake.

And Brent Spiner told her lots of anecdotes about Mandy Patinkin from when they were doing Sunday together, which she may or may not be willing to share.

October 2019 was an insane time for me so I'm not surprised I didn't see this. There's not much to share about Spiner and Patinkin. Suffice it to say, he though Mandy was a diva. The anecdote I will share is this: Lee Wilkof, who shared a dressing room with all the other male actors in the show was dream-casting Audrey in the movie of Little Shop one night and said "I hope they get Bernadette Peters. She would be very easy to lift." I was in the dressing room doing wardrobe stuff and I'm sure I should have kept my mouth shut but instead ask why he thought he would be in the movie and Ellen Greene would not. And then added that I thought it was more likely to be the other way around.

[scenicdesign71]

I hadn't realized that Rob McClure (Chaplin, Doubtfire, etc.) was our latest Seymour (since July: in fact, his first performance must have begun literally minutes after @AmyG posted, above).

As of November 15, the role will pass to Company's Tony-winning Jamie, Matt Doyle:

https://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/news/matt-doyle-seymour-little-shop-of-horrors_94478.html

Lena Hall has taken over from Tammy Blanchard as Audrey, Bryce Pinkham from Christian Borle as Orin, and Brad Oscar from Tom Alan Robbins as Mushnik.