Little Shop of Horrors – Drury Lane Theater – October 14, 2018

“Feed me.” That’s all you really need to know about the plot of a show that only runs two hours, including intermission, during which excellent chocolate chip cookies were available for purchase.

The play (based on the 1960 movie) originated Off Off-Broadway in 1982.  I believe there have to be be three Offs before its birth place is considered to be outside the state of New York.

Music and lyrics are by Menken and Ashman (his brilliant dark side) – The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin – that’s all you need to know about that.

Lorenzo Rush, Jr., who is magnificently omnipresent in Chicagoland theater, as Audrey II. You hear, and love, but don’t see him until he comes out for a bow at the end of the show wearing a t-shirt that says Voice of Audrey II. He would make Levi Stubbs proud, although I was disappointed that the play does not include the song Mean Green Mother From Outer Space, written for the 1986 movie version, and sung by Stubbs of The Four Tops. I almost saw Stubbs in concert in 1968, but he was sick so I wound up seeing The Three Tops.

The 1960, very campy original, replete with malapropisms (Does it have a scientific name? Of course, but who can denounce it?), non-musical film of The (later dropped) Little Shop of Horrors was, in part, a Dragnet takeoff, narrated by Sgt. Joe Fink, shot by Roger Corman on a budget of $30,000, in two days, using sets that had been left standing from A Bucket of Blood. And one of the actors was a young Jack Nicholson, in a three and a half minute scene, as the masochistic dental patient played by Bill Murray in the 1986 Frank Oz version of the movie.

I’ve seen people eat people in Sweeney Todd, and plants from outer space kill people in The Day of the Triffids, but none of them leave you smiling like a hungry man-eating plant in a flower shop.

 

42nd Street – Drury Lane Theater – December 30, 2017

This performance at the Drury Lane Theater marked the 20th play at 13 different theaters that I have seen in 2017. That’s not even in the ballpark compared to the numbers put up by people I know on the Jeff Awards Committee, but I can narrow my selections of what I see to the kind of shows I prefer, which, if you haven’t figured it out yet, means ones that make me smile and laugh, and, even better, include tap dancing (which is why I loved SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical and its tap dancing squid, which might destroy my credibility but for the fact that The New York Times loved it also).

I went to see 42nd Street on a last minute whim. You can do this a lot when you’re retired. Every day is Saturday. Okay, this time it actually was Saturday, which is why there was a 5:00 performance. I bought my ticket online at 3:00 and was out the door by 3:45.  I love that theaters hold back house seats. As a result, I wound up sitting in the 7th row center, with an empty seat to one side for my puffy coat.

At intermission a woman two seats away on the other side, leaned across her husband to tell me that she was enjoying this show more than Hamilton. I haven’t seen Hamilton (I’ve never seen 1776 either – hmmm) – I can see a half dozen or more shows for the price of one Hamilton ticket – so I couldn’t respond regarding my preference, but I did comment on not wanting to spend the money on Hamilton, which immediately made a best friend of the husband, who apparently had made that same, albeit losing argument to her.

As hoped for, 42nd Street made me smile. The tap dancing was fabulous and there was a lot of it. Going to the 5:00 show enabled me to avoid traffic in both directions, get a good parking spot, and make a quick exit. It’s the little things in life.