For the uninitiated, the comedy-horror musical “Little Shop of Horrors” follows Seymour, a wimpy employee in a flower shop, who purchases an unusual plant from a mysterious source. He names the plant Audrey II after his coworker and crush Audrey. That’s before he realizes the plant has needs besides the standard water, soil and sunlight.
“Little Shop of Horrors” is full of relevant, contemporary themes. For instance, throughout the musical Seymour is confronted with the toughest question of modern life—‘Do I know anyone who deserves to die so I can feed them to my talking plant monster?’
Elizabethtown College is putting on a production of this Alan Menken and Howard Ashman classic. They’re the composer-lyricist duo behind “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin” (if the bloodthirsty uber flytrap hadn’t already sold you). It is directed by Dr. Anne Gross and assistant director and production stage manager Erin Vago.
The show is serving as an outlet for its cast and crew.
“The musical is a nice escape after a long day of classes, and engineering, and mathematics and computations to be able to be myself and have fun on stage and enjoy my cast and work with everybody on this great show,” civil engineering major Devon Moravec said.
Moravec plays the male lead Seymour Krelborn.
When the show’s costumer Emma Mesko spoke to the Etownian via Zoom from her costume room, she was hard at work sewing intestines to feed to the plant monster.
“This is my safe space,” Mesko said. “I’m here almost every day.”
In some versions of the show, Audrey II rains down baby plant plushies into the audience in the finale. I mention this to Mesko and she leans out of frame, shocked.
“I have to make them?” she asked, checking with someone out of frame. “Now you tell me?”
Thankfully Vago didn’t have to sew Audrey II. The plant grows up throughout the show, so it comes in four variants of increasing size, from a hand puppet at the beginning to a six-foot-tall behemoth at the end.
Audrey II, at least in its later stages, is such a gargantuan centerpiece that members of the cast and crew disagree on how to even classify it.
While Mesko refers to the uber fly trap as a prop, Moravec said, “I would consider it part of the set. For the big one at the end, we had to remove a wall to make sure we can fit it.”
So, there’s evidently much work to go but the cast and crew are confident in the final product.
“Everyone has just done a great job and it’s gonna be[a] phenomenal show when it all comes together,” Moravec said.
Etown’s production of “Little Shop of Horrors” is part of a broader story of a reorganization that has made the highest-ranking student member of the crew Vago the last of a dying breed.
The theatre program and other programs were cut in the summer of 2019. Subsequently, seven faculty and staff members were furloughed.
“I am the last theater major here, at least for now,” Vago said. “I’m hoping that since the department was revived before, it will be revived again someday but I don’t know when that is.”
The assistant director views the play as a swan song for the cut theater department. Vago is a theatre performance and technology major at the College.
“The show is not important to only me, but it is extremely important to me because this is part of the last part of the legacy I get to leave. So,” Vago chuckled a tad nervously. “Please come see it.”
“Little Shop of Horrors” debuts Oct. 29 at 7:30 p.m. in the Tempest Theater located within the Baugher Student Center (BSC). Subsequent performance times can be found at https://www.showtix4u.com/event-details/56814.
