A little-known, yet quietly industry renowned bit of producerial lore is this: When "Little Shop of Horrors" was in the successful throes of its original, long off-Broadway run, lyricist-librettist Howard Ashman (who was also its director and uncredited co-producer) received numerous offers to move the show to Broadway.
He forbade each and every one of them.
As far as he was concerned, the surprise of the show, its power and its charm, should stay right where it was: at the small Orpheum Theatre, downtown. The musical, based on Roger Corman’s B horror movie (screenplay by Charles Griffith)–about a skid row nebbish who works in a flower shop, and discovers a man eating plant that promises him fortune and fame in return for its grisly sustenance–had smart, funny lyrics; boasted catchy tunes in Phil Spector-ish 60s style rock styles (composer Alan Menken), and a plant that grew by way of increasingly larger and more complex puppets, voiced by a deep bass black soul singer. What could be more downtown than that?
Well, it’s twenty years later, Mr. Ashman is nearly thirteen years dead and other forces have prevailed. And a 2003 "Little Shop," following a tumultuous out of town tryout in which its original director and some of its cast members were fired (astonishing to contemplate, ain’t it? It’s a warhorse, how badly could they have screwed it up, and if the answer is very, how the hell did that happen?) has finally arrived on Broadway, at the Gershwin Theatre.
How right was Mr. Ashman to resist the transfer?
It’s hard to give a categorical answer.
On the one hand, the set design by Scott Pask very smartly does not try to create spectacle; he keeps the scale small, the action forced down front, and the surrounding environment sort of like an inner city picture frame that emphasizes, rather than dilutes, the illusion of off-Broadway intimacy. The puppet design–as ever, by Martin P. Robinson (who operates it)–hasn’t been tampered with much, either. (Except at the end, where the plant, as one Broadway insider put it, "was obligated to become a thing"–meaning an over-produced special effect.) The material is still sharp and entertaining, the music catchy as ever, and the show hits most of its marks handily.
On the other hand…
Director Jerry Zaks, though he has for the most part kept to the spirit (and at times, it seems, the letter) of Ashman’s original staging, seems unable to have resisted interpolating comic schtik that doesn’t really help anything and draws attention to itself–a running gag about a broken clock; a preponderance of long reaction takes, standard tummler stuff. And the cast, though very nice, is nowhere near as iconic as the original, for the most part. Although they could be, as Rob Bartlett proves–he plays Mushnik, the beleaguered owner of the flower shop, and it’s not that he does anything special; but in his delivery of low-rent Yiddishkeit he just has an assurance of presence and personality that anchors the role with freshness and authenticity. By contrast: Hunter Foster as the nerdy hero is full-voiced and funny, but you never doubt the leading man underneath the nebbishy "drag"; Douglas Sills, having delightfully swashbuckled and ponced his way through the title role in "The Scarlet Pimpernel" would seem in the abstract to have been a fine idea for the sadistic dentist Orin, and various other smaller roles–but the comic turns, for all their skill, seem consistently clinical and (pardon the irony) bloodless; and as for Kerry Butler’s Audrey… "That poor girl," another Broadway insider remarked to me. Not that she’s disgracing herself. It’s a perfectly respectable performance–for an understudy. She knows where the role lives, but brings nothing memorable or uniquely hers to the party. Michael Leon-Wooley voices the plant decently, and the black, streetsmart girl group of pop Greek chorus commentators that the script calls the urchins is, due to the nature of the device, kind of foolproof in the hands of DeQuina Moore, Trisha Jeffrey and Carla J. Hargrove.
If you’ve never seen "LSOH", there isn’t anything really wrong here. You’ll have a very decent time of it and maybe better than that.
But if you have…you may find that it doesn’t quite have the edge anymore.
And maybe therein lies another motivation for Mr. Ashman keeping "LSOH" away from the Great White Way.
Even done up nicely, there’s just no compelling reason for it to be there.