James Whitmore used to peddle Miracle-Gro in TV. He vowed it would grow your tomatoes to the size of basketballs.
James Whitmore, meet Sesame Street and Soylent Green in “Little House on the Corner,” written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, directed by Steven Glaudini for Musical Theatre West.
It’s rollicking fun, delightfully underplayed, and quirky, to say the least.
Dissonance reigns supreme here. The visual mood is graveyard while the songs recall the soundtrack of American Graffiti, giving it a kind of Munsters feel, spooky though not really; tongue-in-cheek (not to mention body in mouth) diabolical. The story? Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl and feeds her and everyone else to a people-eating plant.
It’s a perky sci-fi horror spoof. There’s a carnivorous plant that sings R&B, flower shop employees that sings the blues (real life blues: business, love, and other Life-Threatening troubles, not to mention the always-present travails that attend success), and a fetching trio of schoolgirls (Chiffon – Fredericka Meek, Crystal – Kamilah Marshalla, and Ronnette – Melody Collins) who serve as a street urchin/Greek chorus singing doo-wop backup.
Scott Pask’s set is literally to die for. His sinister, bleak and neon skyline looks like something out of a German Expressionist painting. And though you don’t walk away humming the production’s melodies, the rhythm creates the same sort of hip, TV show “Dexter” mood as the theme song from the Addams Family TV show.
This sci-fi spoof is set in a flower shop in Harlem (Why not? As the song says, there’s a Rose that grows in Spanish Harlem). All’s appropriately morbidly capitalistic at the beginning: no demand for flowers in that part of town means that the owner, Mr. Mushnik (Stuart Pankin) must shutter the shop. This compounds the already-miserable lives of cute but low self esteem shop girl, Audrey (Lowe Taylor), abused girlfriend of S&M dentist Orin Scrivello (Peter Paige), and botanist/schlemiel Seymour Krelborn (Danny Gurwin), who has a crush on Audrey.
Then Seymour concocts a unique plant (voice by Michael A. Shepperd, movement by James W. Gruessing) that originally looks like Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent and ends up looking like a Crayola Crayon version of Fat Albert. The shop becomes wildly successful (supplying flowers for the Rose Parade), thanks to the celebrity brought on by this weird-looking plant. Speaking of Pasadena, it’s got the same marketing appeal as the city’s stinky plant that always packs the place. And Seymour gets Audrey; Orin’s mysteriously disappeared. Hmmm.
Only one teensy, weensy little problem. Tooey (Seymour named the plant Audrey II, the big softie): requires more-and-more amounts of, not bat guano, not coffee grounds, but human blood.
One thing leads to another and, well, as your mother says, you should eat your greens before they eat you.
Performances are 8 PM, Thu – Sat, 2 PM, Sat & Sun, 7 PM, Sun, July 19. The play runs until July 26. Tickets are $30-78. The Carpenter Performing Arts Center is located at 6200 Atherton St. For more information call 856-1999, ext. 4 or visit www.musical.org.
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