Halloween Weekend Treat: Little Shop of Horrors, the musical and the cult movie classic

This weekend, Contra Costa Musical Theatre’s wickedly entertaining "Little Shop of Horrors" continues its run at the Lesher Center for the Arts.

If you can, try and see this production of the Tony Award-winning musical this weekend or before the show closes Nov. 13.

If you get to the show this weekend, CCMT is offering some special Halloween treats for its Sunday matinee performances: One free ticket for every regularly priced ticket; free ice cream for kids and youths donning costumes; and, the chance to get your photos taken with one of the show’s Jim Henson created-puppets.

If you’re a fan of pop culture and stealthily genius B movies, you’ll like CCMT’s show, as well as its source material, a 1960s horror spoof by Roger Corman. Corman’s original is a strange but extremely funny, low-budget concoction that pokes fun at 1950s sci-fi movies, Dragnet-style police procedurals and a whole lot of other movie and TV conventions.

It tells the story of Seymour Krelboyne, a hapless clerk at a florist shop on “Skid Row.” To keep his job, he starts raising an exotic plant whose appetite for human blood prompts Seymour to go to the dark side. The plant, Audrey Junior, grows into an amazing colossal carnivorous creature that brings Seymour fame and the promise of fortune, but at a steep price.

I recently watched Corman's movie, after finding it online. I was looking for information on the movie and on Corman after hearing about CCMT’s production. I had been hearing about Corman for years, in my perusal of old movies and books and articles about cinema history.

Corman’s legacy looms large over American popular culture, and his name pops up frequently in books or articles about B movies from the 1950s and 1960s. His include horror fests starring Vincent Price and flicks about bikers, people tripping on LSD or women in prison and from prehistoric planets.

Corman’s name also comes up in biographies of the pioneering film artists who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Robert Towne, Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson. Corman mentored this generation and gave a young and unknown Nicholson some screen time when he cast him as a masochistic dental patient in Little Shop of Horrors.

Over the course of a long and iconoclastic career, Corman has directed 50 feature films, produced 350 more and headed his own studio, making him a very successful Hollywood mogul. And, he’s still going at it. His IMDB profile says that, as executive producer, he has three films in post production, one with the very intriguing title: Piranachonda.

So Little Shop of Horrors was my first Roger Corman movie. Or maybe my second. I have some memory of being a kid and catching on TV the Corman-produced Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, which was directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starred the blond bombshell Mamie Van Doren.

The original Little Shop of Horrors served as the inspiration for Jason Jeffrey’s directorial effort for CCMT. While Jeffrey admires the 1986 take on the Broadway musical version — starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin and directed by Frank Oz— Jeffrey says he wanted to get back to the simplicity and heart of the original. Made in three days on a budget of $27,000, the original has that feel of a group of friends who got together to make a movie, just for the fun of it.

Of course, this bunch was made up of some savvy, talented individuals, including Corman and Nicholson, who walk that fine line between not taking anything too seriously and honoring the underlying humanity of its story and characters. Seymour is a sweet guy, and his romance with co-worker Audrey is heartfelt, as is the dream of both of them to have a wonderful life together. Jeffrey and his CCMT actors capture that sweetness, notably when Audrey sings of wanting to live in a Donna Reed vision of suburban bliss.

But in walking that fine line of the original, the CCMT crew also revels in the show’s campy, wicked humor, cultural references and elements of spoof and Jewish humor. There is a surprisingly delightful dance to the tune of “Mushnik and Son" involving Seymour and his boss, Gravis Mushnik, that recalls a famous scene from Fiddler on the Roof. The voracious Audrey II plant is voiced by the actor Kelly Houston, who recalls another bass-voiced actor, James Earl Jones, and who can rip out the show’s R&B infused songs “Freed Me” and “Suppertime” with gusto.

It’s not a stretch that composer Alan Menken and writer Howard Ashman decided to create a musical out of Corman’s little movie. The original has a hip, jazzy soundtrack. The musical gives the story's soundtrack and R&B, Motown twist.

To get tickets to CCMT's Little Shop of Horrors at the Lesher Center for the Arts, call 925-943-7469 (SHOW) or visit www.lesherartscenter.org.

Martha Ross, the former editor of Walnut Creek Patch, now provides publicity for the Diablo Regional Arts Association and the Lesher Center for the Arts.