Little Shop of Horrors

New Theatre                                                                            

until 13 December

Bookings: 1300 306 776

A night out at the New Theatre can be as unpredictable as a hairdresser with bipolar. But when they get it right, boy do they get it right and with this revival of the 1982 cult musical Little Shop of Horrors they have scored a direct hit.

The show itself, based on a 1960 horror flick by B-movie king Roger Corman, has plenty of camp appeal without being chilly. Actually, it is quite a conventional musical despite being set in a rundown flower shop on skid row and the story being built around a potted succulent that morphs into a man-eating monster. It has a killer plot and memorable characters and the songs by Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman, hummable tunes with clever lyrics, simply get stuck in your head.

The calibre of performers attached to this production attests to the quality of the show and the director. After all, no one has been paid diddley squat to take part and yet the entire cast bring oomph (as my mother would say) as well as originality to their performances. It seems unfair to mention some performers and not others but as the show hangs on the kooky coupling of Seymour, the weedy shop assistant who finds instant fame with his exotic plant and Audrey, his delicate, helium-voiced co-worker who longs for a home with “a fence of real chain-link” and because Andrew Threlfall and Sophie Webb are so damn good in the roles I will draw attention to their work. The band is insanely tight and not forgetting those working behind-the-scenes, the design team perform miracles with their shoe string budget.
 
But really this is director and choreographer, Stephen Colyer’s triumph.  He does not allow the show’s nuances to get lost and still finds its exuberance in the big, broad moments.  

This is theatre that rocks (in more ways than one) and with a bit of luck some positive and passionate word of mouth will bring in the punters. I hope so because the talent on show here deserves to play to packed houses.

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