Talk about a 48-hour movie-making festival! Before any such thing existed, back in the waning days of 1959, B-movie king Roger Corman discovered a set left over from his previous film, A Bucket of Blood, and set out to shoot a completely different feature in two days in order to beat a change in actor union laws. He didn’t have a script but he had a screenwriter, Charles B. Griffith, the writer behind A Bucket of Blood, Death Race 2000 and many others, who came up with an idea for a film about a house plant named Seymour that lives off of human blood plant that became Little Shop of Horrors, which begat an Off-Broadway musical in 1982. Theatre Calgary’s own adaptation of that Little Shop arrives this week, just in time for a month devoted to scary, silly thrills, so why not sing those feelings for audiences looking for a few chills and thrills to go along with a generous helping of laughter? While the original 1960 horror-comedy film came and went without much fuss -- despite a cameo appearance by three-time Oscar winner Jack Nicholson before he was on Oscar’s radar-- the 1982 musical, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics and story by Howard Ashman, was a huge Off-Broadway hit in New York City, running for an astonishing 2, 210 performances. It also struck a note with Theatre Calgary artistic director Stafford Arima, who acted in a production as a Toronto emerging artist and then saw the musical at the Orpheum Theatre on Second Avenue in New York’s East Village years later. “Beneath the outrageous comedy, irresistible score, doo wop rhythms and, of course, one extremely hungry plant, there is a surprisingly human story about wanting more and family,” Arima said, in a media release. “Seymour wants to be seen. Audrey dreams of a better life. Both believe happiness exists somewhere just beyond their reach. And into that longing comes Audrey II, offering everything they think they desire, for a price. “Little Shop of Horrors is hilarious, theatrical and deliciously dark,” he adds, “but underneath all that fun is a cautionary tale about ambition, temptation, love and the choices we make when opportunity suddenly knocks.” Little Shop of Horrors runs through Oct. 25 at the Max Bell Theatre in Werklund Centre. For more information, go here.
