Riverside Theatre opened its 2025-26 season with the rock sci-fi musical comedy “Little Shop of Horrors,” which originally ran off-Broadway for five years beginning in 1982. Hundreds of professional productions and a feature film later, it arrives in Vero Beach while still running in an off-Broadway revival that opened in 2019.
The musical is based on a schlocky 1960 low-budget movie shot by director Roger Corman in under a week. Its story centers on Seymour Krelborn, a hapless schlemiel who lives and works at the wilting Mushnik’s Flower Shop on Skid Row.
Secretly besotted with his coworker Audrey, and exploited by his boss Mr. Mushnik, Seymour is sold a strange, unidentifiable plant in the aftermath of a mysterious solar eclipse. He dubs the plant Audrey II in honor of his crush, and before long it has taken control of his life – for good and bad.
As his and the flower shop’s fortunes turn, the plant demands payment … in human blood. [Cue dramatic chord here.]
From its humble beginnings, the musical was a fun and campy little show, and for the most part Riverside avoids the bloat that can occur when such a piece is grafted onto a theater much larger than it was conceived for.
The fun-filled score is by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, who would go on to collaborate on the Disney animated musicals “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast,” winning Oscars for their work on each.
Here, their affection for the sound of the early ’60s is apparent. A trio of street urchins functions as a kind of Greek chorus, guiding us through the action while singing in the idiom of Black “girl groups” of the time.
Their names are Crystal, Ronette and Chiffon – get it? And, as played by Grace Ellis Solomon, Harper Miles and Bri Javis, respectively, they are streetwise and mercenary as they cash in on the fame that Audrey II brings to their neighborhood. Director-choreographer DJ Salisbury gives them Motown-ready dance moves, and Kurt Alger’s on-point costumes visually chart their rise from waifs to Dreamgirls.
Brian Golub makes a swell Seymour, appropriately nebbish and increasingly tormented by the ever-more-bloodthirsty demands his extraterrestrial plant makes on him. Whether singing, dancing or pining for the girl, Golub has the audience on his side every step of the way.
Ruby Lewis has the unenviable task of stepping into a role virtually owned by Ellen Greene since she originated it in the original off-Broadway production and then again in the 1986 movie version. Yet Ms. Lewis creates an Audrey all her own: sweet, vulnerable, exasperating in the low self-esteem that keeps her tethered to an abusive boyfriend.
She longs for something better but doesn’t believe she deserves it, which makes her first act “Somewhere That’s Green” wistful and heartbreaking, even as Ashman’s clever lyrics poke fun at all the 1950s conventions she so covets. Kudos also to wig designer Alger, who’s given her dark roots; this is a girl who can’t afford to maintain her bleached blonde hair.
It’s to the writers’ credit that, amidst all the sci-fi silliness, they make us care about Audrey and Seymour and want them to find happiness together. Their voices soar in “Suddenly, Seymour,” the big Act Two duet that signals they just maybe could have a future with one another.
The cast is wisely kept to nine performers, one of whom, Adam LaSalle, plays a multiplicity of characters. This affords the audience the fun of anticipating who he’ll show up as next.
Chief among these is Orin Scrivello, DDS – Audrey’s abusive, nitrous-oxide-addicted boyfriend. LaSalle gives him a comic twitchiness that points up his drug-fueled meanness, and no one is sorry to see him get his due as plant food.
As the flower shop proprietor Mr. Mushnik, Allen Lewis Rickman could have stepped out of a Skid Row production of “Fiddler on the Roof”; that’s how stereotypically Jewish the character is written. His adoption of Seymour as his son as a means of keeping Audrey II under his roof gives Rickman and Golub a funny, splendidly performed duet.
No small part of the fun are the puppets that trace Audrey II’s growth from cute potted flytrap to gargantuan maneater.
Of these, the second, whose pot Seymour carries in one arm and restrains as the ravenous plant stretches and snaps at the urchins behind their backs while they sing and dance obliviously, is the most fun. In its next incarnation, after a growth spurt fueled by Seymour’s bloodletting, the plant features several limb-like tendrils and a tongue that seems to have a mind of its own.
Once grown, Audrey II is brought to life by puppeteer Clint Hromsco, who seems to have the flexibility of Gumby and more limbs than a Hindu god. Nicholas Ward lends his bass-baritone voice to the plant’s slangy, smart-aleck dialogue, with laugh out loud results.
The production’s set, credited to the Music and Theatre Company, frames the action nicely, with the flower shop undergoing spiffy upgrades as the dough rolls in. A distinctive pop art-inspired backdrop tells us immediately we’re in a comic book-like world where anything goes.
Music director Brent Alan Huffman gets a fitting early-rock sound from the band in the pit, and keeps the vocal styling in synch with that of the era, with only a couple of contemporary vocal runs.
If the final tableau of the show is a bit unsatisfying – the characters’ costumes resemble odd spacesuits more than blossoming offshoots of the plant – overall the production is a stylish and superbly sung good time.
“Little Shop of Horrors” runs through Nov. 9 at Riverside Theatre, 3250 Riverside Park Dr., Vero Beach. Tickets are available online at RiversideTheatre.com or by calling the box office at 772-231-6990.
Photos provided
