Little Shop of Horrors

There seems to be a current trend in professional musical theatre to mount revivals in the West End and on tour of more traditional musical favourites (presumably based in commercial reasons) some of which seem to stary very near to traditional amateur musical theatre society territory.  One that has seemed to be able to avoid the revival-with-a-makeover treatment is “Little Shop of Horrors” and Brierley Hill Musical Theatre Company have wisely moved in and filled that gap for Black Country aficionados, and they filled it superbly.

The story of 'Little Shop Of Horrors' follows the lives of the two employees of Mushnik's Flower Shop on Skid Row, and how the extra-terrestrial arrival and intervention of a 'strange and unusual' plant alters the course of their lives forever.

A simple premise so it would appear but it means that it gives us the opportunity to really get to know and either love or hate the characters in equal measure but that also means that what we see on stage needs to be toally believable in an equally unbelievable setting.

The cast of “Little Shop of Horrors” achieved this with ease and managed to move away from some of the cardboard-cutout interpretations associated with the film, giving real depth and interest to their characters.  Ben Cooper, as ‘Seymour’ had us totally on his side from the off, a very personable and watchable performance showing tremendous talent and a great singing voice. His love interest, although not the most obvious theatrical match, was Rebecca Thorne as  ‘Audrey’  who gave the traditionally dumb-blonde interpretation a more sensible and practical side and her duet of “Suddenly Seymour” with ‘Seymour’ was a delight. The shop’s owner ‘Mr Mushnik’ was deftly played by Martin Francis, again cleverly adopting his own characterisation away from the traditional Jewishness of the film interpretation and showing some great comic timing regarding the delivery of the lines. Matt Dudley as ‘Orin’ the dentist bought out all the ironic humour in the portrayal rather than focussing on the sadist!

The Ronettes, a sort of Greek-Chorus element of the show, moving the story along with musical interludes as well as some great comedy moments, were a joy, played by Darcy Powell, Tori-Jayne Parks, Rhi Luckins and Jessica Skidmore.  Not easy roles to play as you rarely got the opportunity to establish characters due to the limited dialogue and length of appearances but they made a great impression. They were also complemented by some great musical staging.

The highlight though, had got to be Joshua Hawkins as ‘Audrey II’, it is very rare that as an audience member you see a show where the integral central character of the plot is ostensibly a large, evil and thoroughly vile puppet – and yet you still can’t fail to find yourself loving the character.  XXXx  achieved this by voice alone aided by some deft puppeteering skills!

“Little Shop of Horrors” is not blessed with huge chorus set pieces, but most members of the cast get to contribute to the whole with cameos and vignettes that were very well performed and really added to demonstrating the versatility of the company.

The set worked tremendously well with some very sympathetic lighting, especially in defining the various acting areas without them spilling into other areas of the stage.  The acoustics at Brierley Hill Civic Hall do not always help the production as a whole and there were a couple of occasions when dialogue over music was lost.

Props must have been a nightmare but the whole look was very well executed, congratulations to the whole technical set up.

My most grateful thanks to Brierley Hill MTC for their kind invitation and hospitality.

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