Humor of "Horrors"

Ashman and Menken created their iteration of Little Shop of Horrors during a moment of cultural pessimism. It's current popularity belies a certain amount of anxiety in our modern society.

Howard Ashman and Alan Menken created their musical adaptation of the 1960 horror comedy during the beginning of the Reagan administration, when the former Hollywood B movie actor was ramping up the arms race with his "Star Wars" program and cutting funding to public goods like art and education. This poppy musical about the extinction of the human race is currently playing in two TCG member theaters (the Bristol Riverside Theatre in Pennsylvania and A.C.T. in Seattle), and at least one university theater (Southern Oregon).

Loveable loser Seymour Krelbourn (played by Andrew McNath at Bristol, Joshua Carter at A.C.T. and Ethan Niven at Southern Oregon) works at a flower shop whose cash flow is drying up. He's in love with the beautiful Audrey (Laura Giknis at Bristol, Jessica Skerritt at A.C.T. and Alyssa Birrer at Southern Oregon), who's in an abusive relationship with a sadistic dentist (Danna Vaccaro - Bristol, David Anthony Lewis - A.C.T., Cameron Gray - SOU). Seymour's luck turns around when he discovers a mysterious flytrap (voiced by Carl Clemons Drake and puppeteered by Nate Golden at Bristol, by Ekello Harrid, Jr. and Eric Estebb at A.C.T., and Karen Fox and Michael Hays at SOU). People flock into the flower shop to see the curiosity, unaware that Seymour is keeping it alive by feeding it his own blood. As the flytrap Seymour realizes he doesn't have enough blood to keep her alive. And thus he sets out on a path of serial killing in exchange for fame, fortune and the girl of his dreams.

 

When Little Shop of Horrors premiered off-Broadway in 1982, our country was facing the possibility of another World War, except this time with more nuclear weapons. Reagan's emphasis on military build-up only exacerbated anxieties. Between the two of them, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had enough fire power, anecdotally, to obliterate human life several times over. Little Shop's humor comes from a place of powerlessness: if we can't stop human extinction, we might as well make a joke about it. While he was moving money into defense, Reagan was taking money from the arts. If arts were to succeed, they would have to adapt to the capitalist model that the nation was pushing them into. Hence, Little Shop of Horrors needed to be a poppy musical with a laugh a minute and songs the audience would hum in the lobby. Its continued popularity is a statement on our national mood. All the defense and public safety infrastructure we've accumulated couldn't stop the 9-11 attacks, or the Boston Marathon bombing. We can't even stop non-political violence like the Isla Vista killings. And even if we don't die in some awful instance of mass violence that all our defense spending apparently can't protect us from, how's our quality of life? The students at and in SOU's Little Shop of Horrors will earn their bachelors hopelessly in debt, and then they'll have thin opportunities to get the kind of employment that will dig them out of that debt. For all it's frolicking, Little Shop of Horrors opines that, if the earth is going to hell with all of us on it anyways, then we might as well just sing.

The Little Shop of Horror's perennial popularity tells us something about our relationship with the 80s, specifically, that we're not a whole lot happier or more secure than we were then. As such, it's an enduring indictment of Reagan's presidency. Sure, he thought he was helping the country by building up our defense infrastructure and pushing his brand of capitalist ideology on us, but look where we are now. If all theater's political, and every artistic choice is a social statement, then surely Little Shop of Horrors is one of the most nihilistically leftist plays there is. Bristol, A.C.T. and SOU's choice of Little Shop belies an unhappy acquiescence to unpredictable violence and the economic blight of neo-liberalism.