Little Shop of Horrors

Salvage work on a cheap B-picture

The musical began as an act of salvage. Its source is Roger Corman's 1960 black comedy The Little Shop of Horrors, a low-budget picture about a nervous florist's assistant and a plant that eats people. Howard Ashman, writing book and lyrics, and Alan Menken, writing the music, turned it into a stage piece two decades later. It was workshopped at New York's WPA Theatre between 6 May and 6 June 1982 and moved to the Orpheum Theatre on 27 July that year.

The decision that made it work was musical rather than dramatic. Ashman and Menken wrote in early-1960s rock and roll, doo-wop and early Motown, which handed the three street urchins of skid row — Crystal, Ronnette and Chiffon — a form to occupy: a girl group operating as a Greek chorus, narrating the plot in harmony while Seymour Krelborn feeds the thing in his shop. Around twenty numbers are split thirteen to seven across the two acts, and the original off-Broadway orchestration was a five-piece combo, scaled to the room it played in.

The Orpheum run closed on 1 November 1987 after 2,210 performances. It took the Drama Desk award for outstanding musical for 1982–83 and a second Drama Desk for Ashman's lyrics, the New York Drama Critics' Circle award for best musical and an Outer Critics Circle award. The London transfer won the Evening Standard award for best musical in 1983.

The film, and the ending nobody could settle

Frank Oz directed the screen version, released in 1986, with Rick Moranis as Seymour, Ellen Greene as Audrey, Steve Martin as the sadistic dentist Orin Scrivello and Levi Stubbs voicing Audrey II. "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space", written for the film, was nominated for an Academy Award.

The film also exposed the piece's structural argument. Oz shot the stage ending, in which the plant wins, then replaced it with an upbeat finish for theatrical release; the original was restored in the 2012 Director's Cut. That tension is the work itself — a score written as pastiche comedy sitting on a plot in which the sympathetic characters are eaten — and every production since has had to decide how hard to lean on the second half of that sentence.

Broadway proved the piece does not scale

The only Broadway staging tried out at the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, from 16 May 2003 and opened at the Virginia Theatre on 2 October that year, with Hunter Foster as Seymour, Kerry Butler as Audrey, Rob Bartlett as Mushnik and Douglas Sills as Orin. It closed on 22 August 2004 after 372 performances. Foster was nominated for a Tony, but the recurring critical complaint was that the intimacy of a shabby little shop had gone missing in a large house.

Later revivals largely took the lesson. The Menier Chocolate Factory staged it in November 2006 before a West End transfer; the Hayes Theatre in Sydney opened a production on 22 February 2016 that won eight Sydney Theatre Awards. The conspicuous exception went the other way: Maria Aberg's staging at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, 3 August to 22 September 2018, with Marc Antolin as Seymour, played the whole thing outdoors.

Seven years upstairs at the Westside, and a record broken

The production that now defines the title opened off-Broadway. Previews began on 17 September 2019 and it opened on 17 October at the Westside Theatre Upstairs, a 270-seat room, directed by Michael Mayer with choreography by Ellenore Scott, sets by Julian Crouch, lighting by Bradley King, costumes by Tom Broecker, sound by Jessica Paz, puppets by Nicholas Mahon and music supervision and orchestrations by Will Van Dyke. It shut in March 2020 with the rest of New York theatre and resumed on 21 September 2021.

In the first week of September 2026 it passed the Orpheum's 2,210 performances to become the longest-running production in the show's history, and stood at 2,226 by 10 September. The company marked it through the month: a post-show singalong after the 15 September performance, talkbacks from 22 to 26 September with cast members and guests, and a collectors-edition Playbill cover honouring the original Orpheum production, timed around Little Shop Day on 21 September.

Casting churn is how an open run of this kind renews itself. Jordan Fisher and Nikki M. James played their last performances on 19 July 2026; Ethan Slater and Betsy Wolfe took over on 21 July and opened officially on 30 July, alongside Claybourne Elder as Orin Scrivello, Reg Rogers as Mushnik and Christian McQueen voicing Audrey II. Slater and Wolfe finish on 25 October, with T.R. Knight as Seymour and Hannah Cruz as Audrey from 27 October. Tickets are on sale through to 23 January 2028.

Two British productions in the same autumn

A new revival opened at Manchester's Hope Mill Theatre on 25 September 2026, with national press night on 30 September, running into late November before transferring to the Liverpool Playhouse from 3 December to 9 January 2027. It is produced by Thomas Hopkins with Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, directed and choreographed by Carrie-Anne Ingrouille, with set and costumes by Morgan Large, musical supervision and arrangements by Paul Schofield, lighting by Rory Beaton and sound by Kelsh Buckman-Drage. Maisie Smith plays Audrey and Jed Berry Seymour, with Marcus Ayton voicing Audrey II, Benjamin Yates as Orin and Michael Starke as Mushnik at both venues. More than forty performances had sold out before opening, including every preview, with waiting lists. Hopkins pitched it as one of the most faithful readings the country has seen in years; Liverpool's creative director Nathan Powell framed the Christmas run as "wonderfully odd, full of cracking tunes" and a deliberate alternative to festive programming.

A separate production runs at the same time on a smaller circuit. Exeter Northcott stages it from 1 to 17 October 2026 — the theatre's first musical in twenty years — co-producing with Lighthouse Poole, which has it from 20 to 24 October, and the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry from 27 to 31 October. Martin Berry directs, Leanne Pinder choreographs, and the cast has Scott McClure as Seymour, Leigh Quinn as Audrey, Dashaun Vegas as Audrey II, Ross Clifton as Orin and Andrew Whitehead as Mushnik, with community performers in the ensemble. Exeter has a BSL-interpreted performance on 6 October, audio-described and captioned performances on 10 October and a relaxed performance on 17 October; the recommended age is ten and over.

A frame that keeps taking new weight

The skid-row setting has proved portable. At the New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco, running to 25 October 2026, Ben Villegas Randle moved the action out of the Eisenhower era into Reagan-era skid row and cast Bria Gaia Padilla as a transfemme Audrey, with puppetry designed by Dave Haaz-Baroque and William Schmidt voicing the plant. A review published on 25 September called the result "an energetic, darkly comic, gender bending allegory for all that's wrong with our current state of affairs", and singled out the flytrap as demanding and manipulative rather than merely funny.

What the piece asks of a company has not changed much since 1982. The plant has to grow visibly across the evening, worked by puppeteers while a singer supplies its voice from out of sight. The trio has to carry the narration without stopping the comedy. And two numbers hold the emotional weight — Audrey's "Somewhere That's Green" and the duet "Suddenly Seymour" — which is why casting announcements for a show running on an open contract still move tickets. Three productions in two countries are currently proving the point.