‘Feed me, Seymour!” Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s 1982 comedy has so many catchy songs that you arrive hungry to hear them. Luckily this is a musical front-loaded with delights and its beaming rock’n’soul chorus, each member named after a 60s girl group (the Ronettes, Chiffons and Crystals), clearly knows how irresistible their harmonies are.
The trash cans on stage may suggest Oscar the Grouch’s Sesame Street but we are, of course, in New York’s Skid Row, where green-fingered klutz Seymour cultivates a blood-guzzling flytrap whose growing celebrity saves his boss Mr Mushnik’s wilting flower shop. A series of successively bigger puppets are used to portray the rapacious plant, named Audrey II after Seymour’s keenly admired co-worker. The first resembles a foam-and-felt Muppet and the last stretches out plump tendrils that have entwined Seymour’s life through their Faustian pact: a steady supply of human blood for the plant, a shot at happiness for jittery Seymour.
While the supremely rich-voiced Anton Stephans screeches, rumbles and hollers as the demanding, smart-mouthed flytrap, Michael Fowkes’ puppets themselves – controlled by Matthew Heywood – don’t quite achieve a gross and deliriously menacing personality as in the 1986 film adaptation or the 1960 Roger Corman movie that inspired the musical. Nevertheless, its fun to see them grow from potted plant to sprawling monstrosity.
A co-production by the New Wolsey, Bolton Octagon, Theatre By the Lake and Hull Truck, Lotte Wakeham’s show is consistently well sung and often endearing but a little buttoned-up, short on schlock and satirical punch. There are strong individual performances yet not enough charge in the interactions whether it’s between demonic rockabilly dentist Orin Scrivello and Audrey or between Seymour and Audrey II, whose cravings are not properly paralleled.
Oliver Mawdsley brings a tense physicality to Seymour, Andrew Whitehead looks permanently set to burst a blood vessel as Mushnik and Matthew Ganley is arresting as Scrivello, gamely licking his rusty power drill even if an unbridled sense of perversion never fully emerges. Laura Jane Matthewson makes an affecting Audrey who balances humour with pathos in her solo Somewhere That’s Green, a longing for suburban uniformity far from unpredictable Skid Row, and Wakeham handles the domestic abuse carefully.
TK Hay, a designer on the rise, has created an angular slab of shopfloor with a lurid green glow from the basement and Gabrielle Ball’s band housed above. The doowop chorus comprises keyboardist Janna May and guitarists Zweyla Mitchell Dos Santos and Chardai Shaw (in her strong professional debut), all dressed by Hay as bobby soxers. The trio capture the right knowing tone for a horticultural horror show with plenty of earworms.
At New Wolsey theatre, Ipswich, until 23 March. Then at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, 27 March–20 April; Octagon, Bolton, 24 April–18 May; and Hull Truck, 22 May–8 June.
