**** van Michael Coveney voor whatsonstage.com. De show is net ook genomineerd voor de Whatonstage Awards in de categorie Best Off West End Production.
It’s “Suddenly Seymour” all over again as this campy, witty, off-Broadway, off-the-wall 1983 musical (based on a Roger Corman horror movie) steams into the Menier for a jolly holiday season: how charmingly appropriate that the heroine endures an abusive relationship with a sado-masochistic dentist and all the principals are dead by the end, swallowed by a man-eating Venus flytrap in a flower shop on Skid Row.
There was always a problem with the musical: it peters out feebly at the end and all that camp knowingness can become wearing after… oh, about ten minutes? The latter problem is neatly sidestepped by director Matthew White, whose leading actors really do come up with sensationally thorough and affecting performances.
Audrey was originally played – in New York and London, and on film – by Ellen Greene as a sort of manically indomitable Fenella Fielding. The more subtly brilliant Sheridan Smith – of Two Pints of Lager, The Royle Family and Grown Ups television fame – plays a funny but deeply injured, possibly anorexic, waif whose delivery of “Somewhere That’s Green” is the show’s emotional heartbeat. Shame that the “green” turns out to be the deep throat of a botanical carnivore, not the trim lawn by a white picket fence.
Her bad boy nemesis, the dentist, is played by the equally brilliant Jasper Britton (who also chips in with a handful of hilariously observed small parts), avoiding the obvious “Elvis” act – as seen in the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s revival four years ago – but still coolly gyrating as the motorbike-riding “leader of the plaque.” The sight of him being asphyxiated inside his own gas mask (still singing, of course) while wielding a spanner-like tooth extractor lends the Christmas message of good will a whole new toothsome meaning; and justifies a lovely rhyme of molars with Holy Rollers.
The lyrics are matched by Disney composer Alan Mencken’s punchy 1950s score of blues, rock and roll and even a witty tango for the shop owner (delightfully played by Barry James, if not Jewish enough) and his newly adopted son, the nerdy but nice shop assistant Seymour (perfectly cast Paul Keating).
There is a huge, unnecessarily cumbersome set by David Farley, but it does have to accommodate the sprouting Audrey II as a day at the flower shop becomes a night of the triffids. The greedy, gobbling voice is that of Mike McShane, whom we also see in his new slim-line manifestation every now and then.
Audrey has her “suddenly last Seymour” moment in the show’s best song before the munching gets serious. Then it’s on to the finale with the fabulous trio of denim-jacketed street girls – Chiffon, Crystal and Ronette (Katie Kerr, Melitsa Nicola and Jenny Fitzpatrick) – ending up where they started, out on the stoop, but with a new choric function as counterpart to the big green seasonal Brussels sprout in the window. No sign of a turkey, though: this one’s a cracker.