Little Shop of Horrors
October 27-30, 2016 - 5 performances
Florence Simmons Performance Hall, Holland College, Charlottetown
Written by: Howard Ashman; Music by Alan Menken
Director: Peter Krauskopf
Music Directors: Rowan Fitzgerald, Owen Aylward, Marti Hopson
Producer: Rob Thomson
Stage Manager: Sharon MacDonald
Choreographer: Morgan Wagner
‘Audrey II’ puppets - creator: Deb Erb
Cast:
Audrey: Robyn MacDougald
Seymour: Steve Bruce
Mushnik: Richard Fellbaum
Orin: Noah Nazim
Ronettes trio: Jenna Marie McDonald, Lindsay Schieck, Alexandra Sorensen
And many others...
Little Shop of Horrors is a sci-fi spoof set on Skid Row of the 1950s, about the mysterious plant which grows from a wilted seedling into a two-metre-tall monster which devours most of the lead characters.
It was the perfect musical comedy for Hallowe’en-time — a total eclipse of the sun; the mysterious ‘Audrey II’, the plant with attitude and voracious appetite; a Faustian deal with the devil; the plant’s diet of blood; a sadistic leather-jacketed dentist who dies of laughing gas. The music ranges from rock-and-roll and doo-wop to touching ballad, and the smart lyrics carry the story. There’s great dancing by the full company and particularly by the trio of street-girls who link the scenes with a sort of Greek-chorus commentary.
It involved lots of participants — cast/chorus of 35, with another half a dozen in the pit band. But the star of the show was Audrey, the magnificent 4-puppet creation of Deb Erb, which we bought from a Windsor Ontario theatre and later sold to one in Winnipeg. ACT saw this show as a sort of trial run for the brand new Florence Simmons Performance Hall.
