TheatreAddict.com - Bakersfield Drama Blog

BHS's production delivers the goods in their two week run of the green-themed musical. The sets are big and colorful, the band is an impressive mini-orechestra, and many of the performances were drop-dead fantastic. Hannah Whyte is phenomenal as Audrey. It is worth the price of admission just to hear her dazzle the audience as she pushes her voice to new heights for the song "Suddenly Seymore." Other standouts in Friday night's performance were Henry Blanton as the semi-sadist dentist and Myles Worthy as Mushnik. Each of these three had their characters down tight and were perfect on every action, line, and song. The rest of the cast was excellent. Jacob Parks is great as Seymour, especially when it comes to acting, but on Friday it seemed his voice was going out on him. Steven Littles II is also great as the voice of Audrey II, but to me needed a little more work on the mic and emulated the voice in the movie too much with excessive high pitch squeals that made for impressive voice-acting...but I think I'd rather see an original take on the voice of the fabled plant. Littles does a great job but whether intentional or not he sounds just like the guy in the movie version. The "Little Shop" cast is rounded out by the "Doo Wop Girls" who are fun as the white girls with soul, and a chorus of miscellaneous characters who add voices to the large numbers and otherwise populate skid row.

The production on the whole is a triumph for the BHS drama department and comparable in scale and quality to any done by professional theatre companies. The cast and crew should be very proud of themselves for that. As I said, many of the individual performances were very tight and it was very fun to watch these performers who had their parts down so well. The overall show needed a little tightening as far as the entire ensemble goes, however, with limited rehearsal time and only 2 weeks of performances, this tightening is still a work in progress.

It is clear that director Jacquie Thompson and all of her talented students have put an incredible amount of work into "Little Shop of Horrors" and it should be enjoyed by their friends and family but also anyone in the community who wants to come see a full scale, dark and campy musical for just seven bucks.

For more "Little Shop" fun, check out the picture gallery here on theatre addict.com AND listen to episode 7 of Bakersfield Theatre Radio, (the TheatreAddict.com podcast) for backstage interviews with the cast and crew.