‘Feed me, Seymour!” Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s 1982 comedy has so many catchy songs that you arrive hungry to hear them. Luckily this is a musical front-loaded with delights and its beaming rock’n’soul chorus, each member named after a 60s girl group (the Ronettes, Chiffons and Crystals), clearly knows how irresistible their harmonies are.
The trash cans on stage may suggest Oscar the Grouch’s Sesame Street but we are, of course, in New York’s Skid Row, where green-fingered klutz Seymour cultivates a blood-guzzling flytrap whose growing celebrity saves his boss Mr Mushnik’s wilting flower shop. A series of successively bigger puppets are used to portray the rapacious plant, named Audrey II after Seymour’s keenly admired co-worker. The first resembles a foam-and-felt Muppet and the last stretches out plump tendrils that have entwined Seymour’s life through their Faustian pact: a steady supply of human blood for the plant, a shot at happiness for jittery Seymour.
