little shop of horrors

MENKEN/ASHMAN

BERKSHIRE THEATER FESTIVAL , COLONIAL THEATER

2016

"Downtown"

The plant shop before Audrey II

Seymour's on the radio!

"Ya Never Know"

The girls meet Orin in the alley by the shop backdoor

Feed Me!

If I can talk and I can move, who's to say I can't do anything I want?

"Get it"

Dentist's Office

Set rotating as Seymour puts bloody dental outfit into trash

The shop with Audrey II in Act 2

Mushnick gets eaten

Seymour and Audrey II

Finale - "Don't Eat The Plants"

Finale - Set rotates to reveal Audrey II, now a fabulous drag queen "spore"

A posed shot of Finale Audrey II on the set

Directed by Ethan Heard

Choreography by Parker Esse

Music Direction by Rick Bertone

Set Design: Reid Thompson

Costume Design: David Murin

Audrey II Design: Mio Gubernic

Lighting Design: Oliver Wason

Sound Design: Tyler Kieffer

Photographs: Tyler First, Emma Rothenberg-Ware, Reid Thompson, Ethan Heard

Actors: Stanley Bahorek, Lindsay Chambers, Stephen DeRosa, Taurean Everett, Bryonha Parham, James Ludwig, Alia Hodge, Kay Trinidad, Jalise Wilson

For this production of Menkin/Ashman's campy hit, director Ethan Heard had the vision to try something different for Audrey II, the alien plant usually played by a muppet-like snapping puppet. He cast Taurean Everett, a gifted lip-synching drag queen, to be the body of the plant and Bryonha Parnham, a singer with incredible range and gospel colorations to play her voice. We landed on a rotating design to bring us inside the plant shop, on the streets of Skid Row and to a back alley location. We pulled the whole set quite close downstage to feel like a slice of a city street right behind the proscenium. Our Skid Row was drab and sapped of color, the set soared 4 stories high so the opressiveness of the city made us understand why Audrey longs for somewhere that's green. Reinventing the plant and our rotating set made for quite a bit of complicated engineering to achieve all the special effects that the script calls for. All the meetings and logistics paid off; with the hard work of the staff at BTF the production functioned beautifully.