If you start taking the Little Shop score apart, you see that the music is like that of a bad little boy who knows what his father’s music should sound like, but doesn’t want to do it. But it’s still part of the grand tradition of the American musical.
—Ethan Mordden
In late 1959, legendary B-movie producer/director Roger Corman was given temporary access to some film sets left standing from another production. Before they were torn down, he hoped to use them to make a quick film. But according to screenwriter Charles Griffith, Corman was unable to make the film he had in mind because the screenplay violated the Production Code. So Griffith suggested “How about a man-eating plant?”, and Roger said, “Okay.”
Griffith quickly wrote a black comedy with the working title The Passionate People Eater, and just as quickly Corman cast it with his usual band of unknowns, including a very young Jack Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient. Shot in two days on a budget of $30,000, it was released as The Little Shop of Horrors and attracted little notice. Corman thought so little of the film, he let the copyright lapse and it came into public domain. Slowly however, through late night television broadcasts, a cult following developed for this brash and quirky slapdash film about a nebbish and his carnivorous plant. One fan was 30 year-old writer/director Howard Ashman, who together with composer Alan Menken (they would later write Disney’s Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, collecting Academy Awards for each) refashioned the quickie cult movie into a classic musical comedy that brilliantly satirizes many things: science fiction, ‘B’ movies, the Faust legend, and even musical comedy itself. Ashman and Menken met as members of the legendary BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. They tested out their new, improved Little Shop there, and Menken recalls that early versions of Little Shop were quite traditional, but “Howard sort of retooled it saying, ‘I think we could tell this story through rock and roll.’ Kind of like the dark side of Grease.’’
Ashman was the Artistic Director of the tiny WPA Theatre on lower Fifth Avenue and staged Little Shop’s world premiere there on May 6, 1982. Recounting in a 1986 interview he said, “Little Shop would never have been produced had I not had my own theater. In order to reach the public, it had to get past the New York theater establishment.” The initial five-week run was as enormous success, the “establishment” was won over and a quick transfer arranged in July 1982 to the larger Orpheum Theatre on Second Avenue. The critically acclaimed production won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical, and the Outer Critics Circle Award. The Shubert Organization offered Little Shop a Broadway transfer, but Ashman and Edie Cowan, the original choreographer, felt the show belonged where it was, Off Broadway. Little Shop of Horrors ran for five years at the Orpheum and when it closed after 2,209 performances, it was the third-longest running musical and the highest-grossing production in Off Broadway history. Frank Oz directed a hit movie version of the musical in 1986. In 2003 Little Shop finally got its Broadway production.
Little Shop of Horrors leaves the audience ravenous for more.
—The New York Times
