‘Feed me, Seymour,’ and bring your whole support system

When Altadena Music Theatre opens its production of Little Shop of Horrors on Sept. 3, audiences may expect the familiar combination of comedy, music and a carnivorous plant with an appetite for human blood. What they may not expect is just how deeply this production will delve into the darker psychology beneath the camp.

After sold-out productions of Hair, Cabaret, Guys and Dolls and most recently Grease, under the direction of founder Sarah Azcarate, the company is approaching Little Shop of Horrors not simply as a comic musical about a man-eating plant, but as a story about poverty, addiction, abuse, trauma, ambition and the dangerous hunger to feel worthy finally.

Many members of the Little Shop creative team and cast lost homes and possessions in the Eaton Fire. The company lost its home at the Charles S. Farnsworth Park Amphitheater, and its founders, Sarah and Oliver Azcarate, lost their own home. Yet the company has continued to create, perform and rebuild, creating another chapter in a story of rising from the ashes.

Chris Wade: a lifetime in music

Leading the production is Music Director Chris Wade, whose own relationship with musical theater reaches back to childhood.

Wade has worked as a music director, accompanist, arranger, producer, composer and vocal director in Los Angeles and New York, with professional credits ranging from musical theater to television, concerts and major live productions. He has also been involved with LACHSA and Cal State LA productions, bringing years of experience as both a performer and musical director to the work.

In 2014, a client asked Wade to find a gospel group for a private event. He called on a singer friend from his cruise ship days, and the vocal group RAISE was born. In the years since, RAISE has served as the official singers for ABC’s “Defining Courage” with David Ono, performed at the Academy Gala with Vogue, toured nationally with Daybreaker on Oprah’s 2020 Vision Tour, and appeared in numerous television shows and music videos.

For Altadena audiences, Wade is already a familiar creative force. He has served as Music Director for Altadena Music Theatre since its founding in 2020.

Wade’s musical expertise is particularly fitting for this demanding show, calling on him to interpret the Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s score which moves among early rock, doo-wop, Motown, Broadway balladry and comic pastiche. The music has to sound exuberant and fun while carrying the emotional weight of the characters underneath it.

For Wade and the rest of the production team, Little Shop offers an opportunity to explore the emotional machinery underneath a story that is often presented primarily as comedy.

Little Shop of Horrors functions as a kind of psychological fable about what happens when people who have been deprived of love, security and self-worth become vulnerable to promises of something better. Seymour Krelborn’s (played by James Byous in this production) bargain with Audrey II (a 10-foot-tall puppet, voiced and accompanied by actor Lord Kraven) is essentially a Faustian bargain: fame, money and romantic validation in exchange for increasingly serious compromises to his conscience. The distinction between right and wrong becomes increasingly blurred as the plant’s demands grow.

In this production, Audrey II can also be understood as a metaphor for addiction. The plant provides Seymour with an intoxicating taste of success and attention. What initially seems like a solution to his loneliness becomes the force that isolates him from the people he loves until he is ultimately consumed by the very thing he created.

Ruby Lewis, a veteran of Broadway, who skillfully plays Audrey, puts it bluntly: “Audrey has horrible taste in men.” It is a funny line, but this production is interested in what lies beneath it.

Audrey’s relationship with the abusive dentist Orin Scrivello (actor Robert Manion, who also contributed as a graphic designer for the production), leans into the uncomfortable reality of why someone might remain trapped in an abusive relationship. Audrey’s poverty, low self-esteem and history of emotional neglect have shaped what she believes she deserves. The possibility of a gentle relationship with Seymour is almost beyond her comprehension.

Her dream of a home in the suburbs, expressed in “Somewhere That’s Green,” reveals an aching desire for safety, normalcy and a life far removed from the poverty and violence of Skid Row.

Seymour, no traditional hero, is an outsider who has spent much of his life feeling invisible. His hunger for recognition makes him particularly susceptible to Audrey II’s manipulation. Rather than portraying Seymour as a calculating murderer, this production explores a more tragic possibility: that loneliness and desperation can make an otherwise decent person vulnerable to coercion and moral compromise.

In this production, many of the characters take on almost archetypal psychological roles. Audrey II represents unrestrained appetite and desire. Audrey represents empathy and vulnerability, as well as the damage caused by internalized worthlessness. Seymour is caught between them, desperately trying to satisfy his own needs while holding onto a moral compass that becomes harder and harder to follow.

The result is a Little Shop that remains funny, irreverent and entertaining while asking some surprisingly difficult questions, questions that feel particularly resonate for a company whose members have experienced the sudden loss of homes, possessions, workplaces and performance space. The story’s themes of destruction and survival take on another dimension when the people telling it have lived through their own version of catastrophe.

The company has already demonstrated its determination with its recently sold-out production of Grease, which brought audiences back to a temporary outdoor venue at the Mountain View Mausoleum after the loss of Farnsworth Park. Now Little Shop of Horrors continues that journey, with the company once again transforming an unconventional space into a stage. There is a delicious irony in choosing a musical about something that grows wildly out of control for a theater company determined to grow again.

DEETS:

• • • • • • • Altadena Music Theatre’s Little Shop of Horrors
            • Performance: Sept. 3, 4, 5 and 6, and Sept. 10, 11, 12 and 13. 8 p.m.
            • Mountain View Mausoleum, 2300 N. Marengo, Altadena 91001
            • Tickets