‘Feed me, Seymour!” Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s 1982 comedy has so many catchy songs that you simply arrive hungry to listen to them. Fortunately it is a musical front-loaded with delights and its beaming rock’n’soul refrain, every member named after a 60s lady group (the Ronettes, Chiffons and Crystals), clearly is aware of how irresistible their harmonies are.
The trash cans on stage could counsel Oscar the Grouch’s Sesame Road however we’re, after all, in New York’s Skid Row, the place green-fingered klutz Seymour cultivates a blood-guzzling flytrap whose rising movie star saves his boss Mr Mushnik’s wilting flower store. A sequence of successively greater puppets are used to painting the rapacious plant, named Audrey II after Seymour’s keenly admired co-worker. The primary resembles a foam-and-felt Muppet and the final stretches out plump tendrils which have entwined Seymour’s life by means of their Faustian pact: a gradual provide of human blood for the plant, a shot at happiness for jittery Seymour.
Whereas the supremely rich-voiced Anton Stephans screeches, rumbles and hollers because the demanding, smart-mouthed flytrap, Michael Fowkes’ puppets themselves – managed by Matthew Heywood – don’t fairly obtain a gross and deliriously menacing character as within the 1986 movie adaptation or the 1960 Roger Corman film that impressed the musical. However, its enjoyable to see them develop from potted plant to sprawling monstrosity.
A co-production by the New Wolsey, Bolton Octagon, Theatre By the Lake and Hull Truck, Lotte Wakeham’s present is persistently nicely sung and infrequently endearing however slightly buttoned-up, brief on schlock and satirical punch. There are robust particular person performances but not sufficient cost within the interactions whether or not it’s between demonic rockabilly dentist Orin Scrivello and Audrey or between Seymour and Audrey II, whose cravings are usually not correctly paralleled.
Oliver Mawdsley brings a tense physicality to Seymour, Andrew Whitehead appears completely set to burst a blood vessel as Mushnik and Matthew Ganley is arresting as Scrivello, gamely licking his rusty energy drill even when an unbridled sense of perversion by no means totally emerges. Laura Jane Matthewson makes an affecting Audrey who balances humour with pathos in her solo Someplace That’s Inexperienced, a eager for suburban uniformity removed from unpredictable Skid Row, and Wakeham handles the home abuse fastidiously.
TK Hay, a designer on the rise, has created an angular slab of shopfloor with a lurid inexperienced glow from the basement and Gabrielle Ball’s band housed above. The doowop refrain includes keyboardist Janna Might and guitarists Zweyla Mitchell Dos Santos and Chardai Shaw (in her robust skilled debut), all dressed by Hay as bobby soxers. The trio seize the suitable understanding tone for a horticultural horror present with loads of earworms.
