A rock musical comedy appropriately titled “Little Shop of Horrors” was on the Bowlus stage years ago and is being played by the Kansas City Repertory Theater now.
Howard Ashman wrote the play and lyrics sometime before it was produced on Broadway in 1986. It’s still drawing audiences 26 years later. No competition for Shakespeare, mind you, but its gruesome, quirky plot and appealing romance touch an American nerve.
Perhaps you saw the movie or maybe remember the local version. If so, perhaps you see, along with me, just how up-to-date it is.
The Shop of Horrors is a flower shop in New York City’s skid row. Seymour works for the owner, Mr. Musknik. So does Audry, a cute blond.
Seymour is into weird plants and is especially fond of a plant he’s named Audry II. He discovers one day, when he pricks a finger on a rose thorn, that Audry II can only grow if fed blood. Preferably human blood. The flower shop becomes the House of Horrors as a logical consequence of Audry II’s dietary demands, which are loudly expressed with the plant’s demand, “FEED ME, SEYMOUR!”
Yes, it talks, too.
After the curtain went down the mind was free to wonder what on earth was going through Mr. Ashman’s mind back in the 1980s when he dreamed up a man-eating plant with an insatiable appetite.
Then a blinding light flashed before my eyes. Ashman had had a vision. A vision starring Paul Ryan set 26 years in the future. Ryan had also discovered an unusual plant, that he had named Ryn II (after Ann) which would only grow if fed tax cuts. Not any tax cut would do, only those which eliminated benefits to the hungry, the homeless, the dispossessed, the disabled, the sick, the very young or the very elderly would do.
Ashman realized that a play with so many helpless victims would never make it past the first week, and tweaked the story. He substituted blood for tax cuts to avoid offending those who think there is a purpose for government and then had the plant eat people only one at a time.
Turned out to be a formula for 26 years of success.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
