REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
Stray Cat Theatre in Tempe doesn’t just pick plays; as its name suggests, it pounces on them with claws out and teeth bared. This is a company that thrives on the weird, the wild, and the wonderfully subversive. So, when a musical suddenly slips into its season lineup like a punk rocker crashing a black-tie gala, you sit up and pay attention, particularly when it comes to its choice of material.
As directed by Ron May, the show is a wild, weird, dark ride; a freaky mashup of music, puppet mayhem, and heartbreak. You know the routine: boy meets girl, boy raises a blood-sucking plant. Just your average love story.
What sets this fun but heavily flawed Stray Cat production apart is how it sheds the usual layers of camp and cartoonishness associated with musical. Despite it still taking place in New York, those Nu-Yawk Skid Row accents are miles away. Here, the black humor bubbles up sneakily, like a grin you can't suppress.
Isaac Greenland disappears into the role of Seymour, the meek flower shop flunky. His Seymour is sweet, earnest, and completely unequipped to handle the carnivorous little secret he’s nursing. Estrella Parra, so good in Stray Cat’s La Ruta, plays Audrey not as a peroxide blonde in sky-high heels and a tight dress with a heavy Bronx accent but as an intentionally dowdy Plain-Jane with dark hair and comfortable looking flats. She’s the girl Seymour pines for, but Audrey’s stuck on her abusive, sadistic boyfriend, played with wicked, unhinged glee by Nathan Spector, a dentist who practices pain as performance art. He’s too chilling to laugh at outright, but when he launches into his deranged number, he somehow makes cruelty both horrifying and grotesquely funny.
The musical’s Greek-chorus trio - cheekily named after the three prominent all-girl groups of the 1960s from New York - Chiffon (Leia Foehr), Crystal (Keilani Akagi), and Ronette (Arielle Tuffentsamer) aren’t just set dressing doubling as observant street urchins, these ladies deliver the goods with soul and brassy swagger.
As for the blood-sucking plant, Stray Cat takes a risky detour with its interpretation. Instead of using the iconic, oversized Audrey II puppet familiar to fans of the show and available for regional theaters to rent, they’ve opted for a more experimental route - casting local performer Chanel Bragg as the plant itself. The decision to make her be Audrey II rather than just voice it is a jarring departure.
Hector Coris nails it as the frazzled, fast-talking Mr. Mushnik, bringing just the right mix of exasperation and over-the-top flair to the beleaguered flower shop owner. He’s surrounded by a lively and impressively large ensemble, who seamlessly juggle multiple roles as Skid Row denizens and quirky walk-in customers, adding texture and humor to the unfolding proceedings.
Tiana Torrilhon-Wood’s set design conjures a wonderfully warped world for Mushnik’s shop, with towering painted beams and crooked windows that give the space a twisted, dreamlike feel. Paired with Jeff A. Davis’s moody, jewel-toned lighting, the set has an eerie presence like a pop-art version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It’s both visually striking and deliciously off-kilter
But what does work and comes across well is how Audrey II’s monstrous character is a perfect, leafy stand-in for capitalist greed as it devours and grows. You could read the whole thing as a brutal little parable about how the American Dream sells us hope but demands blood in return.
...in a culture built on consumption, this LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS grins like a demented jack-in-the box sprung loose from a nightmare while it asks: what do you think you’re really feeding, and worse, what’s feeding on you?