In his recent book on directing musicals, Arthur Laurents, the
brutally frank librettist of Gypsy and West Side Story, divided the practitioners of theater into those who have
the musical in the bone and those who don’t. He equated the later
to a toxic gardener mutilating the delicate buds needed to cultivate a
musical garden.
If Laurents had encountered the joyless chunkiness of director
William Roudebush’s production of Little Shop of Horrors at the
Beck Center, it would have driven him to tears. For — short of
personally spraying toxic herbivores onto the stage — the
director’s consummate lack of style, nuance and feel for the music was
the most virulent attack on foliage since Chekhov chopped down the
cherry orchard. He managed to perpetrate a double offense: first,
eviscerating the attitude from a show that is an ode to attitude, and
second, allowing a ready, willing and able cast to flounder in a
birdbath of clumsy ineptitude.
Little Shop of Horrors opened Off-Broadway in 1982 and became
the progenitor of an endless line of musicalizations of pop-culture
trash icons, including The Evil Dead, presently blood-spattering
SRO audiences at Beck’s own Studio Theater.
Little Shop of Horrors was based on a miniscule-budgeted 1960
cinematic trifle of the same title concerning a man-eating plant and
its nebbishy victims. It was caviar for college students discovering
the ironic joys of faux tackiness. Book and lyric writer Howard Ashman
and composer Alan Menken proved to be showbiz Rumplestilskins who spun
polyester into silk. Their song pastiches of late ’50s pop satirized
but also enhanced the original styles. Most miraculously, they imbued a
live, beating heart into a tinkertoy of a story.
Small, lovable and abounding in tongue-in-cheek charisma, this
fragrant theatrical blossom joined Bye Bye Birdie and Our
Town, as theatrical dandelions sprouting in every high-school
auditorium and church basement. The only nourishment Little Shop needs to thrive is intimacy, affection for period spoof and a sense of
innocence.
Starved of these nutrients, the Beck Center’s incarnation wilted
before our eyes. It seems that neither Roudebush nor the creative staff
understood the comic life force that propels the style of this show.
The costumer should have used the script as a design guideline rather
than a period Life magazine. The costumes clearly did not
support the jokes and the lyrics, or enliven the characters.
Don McBride’s massive, gloomy set seemed more appropriate to the
bloodletting of Sweeney Todd. Here, bulk contributed to
asphyxiation. And the visual puns included such distasteful images as a
drunk wallowing in his own vomit.
The ultimate betrayal was the director’s dereliction of duty. Every
cast member had the equipment to embody the characters vocally and
physically. Timothy Allen, for example, has the boyishness, pipes and
vulnerability to make a truly spectacular Seymour, the show’s unwitting
fall guy/leading man. It was only the lack of guidance that made his
performance — and so many of the others — slightly
off-kilter.
This article appears in Jul 1-7, 2009.