There are evenings when horror rejoices, when a Faustian pact is signed in vegetable ink, when the end of the world looks like ecological revenge. A jubilant evening, Saturday December 10, at the Opéra-Comique, which offers the public until Christmas a new production of The Little Shop of Horrorsa musical created in 1982 on Broadway (“off Broadway”) by two major figures from Disney studios, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, based on the American film by Roger Corman, The Little Shop of Horrors (1960).
It was in the French version produced and directed in 1986 by Alain Marcel (at the Théâtre Déjazet then at that of Porte-Saint-Martin), the same year that saw Frank Oz direct a feature film from, this time , from the musical, that we are presented with the story of the little herbalist and his red blood cell-loving plant, whose destiny is none other than to engulf humanity. Located in the poor neighborhood of a New York “ghetto”, the Jewish florist Mushnik is on the verge of bankruptcy. He thinks of parting with his two employees, Audrey, a good girl mistreated by her violent companion, and Seymour, the somewhat simple-minded orphan he has taken in. But this one discovered in the back room, after a total eclipse of the Sun, a plant “strange and interesting”.
Between rock’n’roll and 1960s music hits (jazz, doo-wop, pop-jazz, gospel, soul, rhythm and blues, country), The Little Shop of Horrors unfolds a score rich in twists (with borrowings from traditional Jewish music). Its performers come from backgrounds as different as cinema (dubbing), music, gospel and soul, not to mention operetta. and opera, each identifying with a typology that summons pell-mell Elvis Presley, George Benson, Dolly Parton or the Supremes of Diana Ross.
A stylistic mix in the image of this disruptive American society that is burdened, fourteen years after the signing of the Civil Rights Act (1964), by segregation, population displacements, poverty, slavery and war in Europe – asphyxiated by a mask that he can no longer remove, the character of the sadistic dentist gasses himself with nitric oxide while brass bands from Eastern Europe loom.
Well-oiled mechanics
Familiars of the Opéra-Comique for having climbed there The Black Domino (2018), d’Auber, then Hercules lover (2019), de Cavalli, Valérie Lesort and her accomplice Christian Hecq have a great time on stage. A unique decor of a disused service station (Audrey Vuong), choreography (Rémi Boissy) and lights (Pascal Laajili) from a musical comedy and 1960s costumes (Vanessa Sannino), and even more the spectacular puppets of the plant, designed by Carole Allemand (the latest version, 3 meters high, requires, in addition to its manipulator Sami Adjali, two dancers): everything contributes to a well-oiled theatrical mechanism, full of gags and humor.
You have 43.93% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.