October is here, so set aside your King and Is and Thoroughly Modern Millies, it’s time for your Broadway Sing-Along Spotify mixes to be taken over by Beetlejuice and Jekyll & Hyde. If you’re the type of person who likes to sit in the Evil Dead blood splash zone every year or teach your friends how to do the Time Warp, these are the five stage musicals you need this month.
Little Shop of Horrors
The meek floral assistant Seymour Krelborn stumbles across a new breed of plant he names “Audrey II” - after his coworker crush. This foul-mouthed, R&B-singing carnivore promises unending fame and fortune to the down and out Krelborn as long as he keeps feeding it, BLOOD. Over time, though, Seymour discovers Audrey II’s out of this world origins and intent towards global domination! (Music Theater International)
Little Shop has long been one of my favorite musicals, which is why it kicks off our unranked list. Based on the 1960 horror comedy from low-budget impresario Roger Corman, the musical exaggerates both the horror and the comedy to great effect. The story follows budding botanist Seymour Krelborn as he raises a “strange and unusual” Venus flytrap-looking plant that just grows and grows and grows...as Seymour keeps feeding it the blood it needs to survive. The plant’s outrageous fame might get him out of Skid Row, but he has to be careful to make sure that his crush, Audrey (he names the plant Audrey II after her), and boss, Mr. Mushnik, don’t catch wind or, even worse, wind up dead.
And that doesn’t even get into the sadomasochist dentist. Did I mention it’s a comedy? And a damn funny one? Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, best known for their work on Disney movies like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, wrote this small-cast musical for a little Off-Broadway space having no idea it would be the enduring success it is today (the current off-Broadway revival has been running for six years - low-budget productions appear everywhere.) Menken’s catchy tunes (you probably know “Somewhere That’s Green” or the title song, even if you don’t know the musical) and Ashman’s dark humor (unfortunately, so many productions miss his nesting doll jokes, which is why I liked the Ford’s Theatre production, pictured above - they got almost all of them) just get better and better the long you live with them.
In his book Attack of the Monster Musical, Adam Abraham said it well when he wrote, “Little Shop of Horrors remains a curious entry in the musical-theatre pantheon, with a disreputable origin story as a quickie film produced on the tattered fringe of Hollywood. Ashman and Menken transformed their source material into something iconic: an apocalypse with a smile. When asked about the show’s enduring afterlife, Cameron Mackintosh said, ‘It’s timeless: a little work of art.’”
The Rocky Horror Show
Sweethearts Brad and Janet, stuck with a flat tire during a storm, discover the eerie mansion of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. As their innocence is lost, Brad and Janet meet a houseful of wild characters, including a rocking biker and a creepy butler. Through elaborate dances and rock songs, Frank-N-Furter unveils his latest creation: a muscular man named “Rocky.” (Concord Theatricals)
It’s important to distinguish here that we are talking about stage musicals, Broadway and West End and regional and community and college and community college and everywhere else. The Rocky Horror Show is not the same thing as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, though its enduring popularity would not exist without its cult film adaptation. A pastiche of science-fiction creature features and Hammer horror films, the musical is both a send-up of genre tropes and unabashed affection for all of the things that make up B-movie goodness. Underneath all of the pageantry and catchy-ass songs, it’s just a story about a button-up regular couple, stranded in the pouring rain and forced to take cover in an old castle run by a mad scientist and his ghoulish groupies. That has “Science Fiction/Double Feature” written all over it - the queer overtones and schlock propaganda are just bonus!
Now, Rocky Horror as we know it and love it today would not exist without the film version, the ultimate midnight movie. The performances from Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O’Brien (the show’s writer/composer!), Patricia Quinn, Nell Campbell, and Meat Loaf are so iconic that most stage performers have to do everything in their power to come up with something original, and, honestly, few people can. Plus, so much of the cult audience’s traditions for the cinema have been brought into the theatre - from throwing rice and toilet paper to the naughty callbacks to dressing up in Halloween-ready costumes. Those 50 years of traditions can be daunting for a Rocky “virgin,” but do not fear: the movie hits 4K Blu-ray next week (including subtitles full of the most famous audience quips - yes, I’ve already pre-ordered!); there’s an excellent documentary out now, Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, directed by Richard’s son, Linus O’Brien, that covers five decades of stage, film, and audience reactions; and there are always shadow-casts, big and small (many feature Rocky alum!) that pop up this time of year.
Carrie
Carrie White is a teenage outcast who longs to fit in. At school, she’s bullied by the popular crowd, and virtually invisible to everyone else. At home, she’s dominated by her loving but cruelly controlling mother. What none of them know is that Carrie’s just discovered she’s got a special power, and if pushed too far, she’s not afraid to use it. (Concord Theatricals)
Carrie is one of the most infamous flops in Broadway history, lasting only 16 previews and five performances. Starring Linzi Hateley, in her first professional leading role, as the title character and Betty Buckley (who played Miss Collins in Brian De Palma’s film adaptation; she’s best known in the musical theatre world for busting out “Memory” in the original production of Cats) as her controlling mother, critics and audiences cringed at the idea of a Stephen King novel coming to the Great White Way.
“The advance word was not good - to say the least - but the anticipation in New York was keen nonetheless,” wrote David J. Skall in his 1993 book The Monster Show. “Red-and-black posters (appeared) all over New York with one simple message: CARRIE. THERE’S NEVER BEEN A MUSICAL LIKE HER. No one would deny the claim. But few were prepared for the astounding mess that began previews at the Virginia Theatre in May 1988.” Ken Mandelbaum finishes the story in his 1992 book, Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops, “As the audience files out, some appear thrilled, others appalled; the world more frequently bandied about is ‘unbelievable.’ For show freaks, this has been like a night unlike any other, the kind of show for which they have waited a lifetime.”
Little did they know that the musical, after some time stuck as a laughing stock in musical history, would one day receive a cult resurgence and total critical reevaluation. In 2012, with a revised book, an Off-Broadway revival showed that the show had both the goods and the guts to make true horror work on the stage. The book still works, De Palma’s movie still totally plays, so it turns out nasty New York types were the problem. Nowadays, with amateur licensed productions popping up all over the place, maybe you could one day live out your dream of being doused in pig blood.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Sweeney Todd, an unjustly exiled barber, returns to London, seeking vengeance against the lecherous judge who framed him and ravaged his young wife. The road to revenge leads Todd to Mrs. Lovett, a resourceful proprietress of a failing pie shop, above which, he opens a new barber practice. Mrs. Lovett’s luck sharply shifts when Todd’s thirst for blood inspires the integration of an ingredient into her meat pies that has the people of London lining up...and the carnage has only just begun! (Music Theatre International)
If we’re being honest, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, is probably the “best” musical on this list - it was written by the late, great Stephen Sondheim, after all - but if we’re thinking about this list as “shows you might be able to see this Halloween season,” I’m sliding it down the non-ranked list because Sweeney Todd is produced year-round. April is not the ideal time for Rocky Horror, but Sweeney Todd isn’t always stuck in the fall slot in your favorite regional theatre’s season announcement.
Based on the penny dreadful character of the same name, and more specifically on Christopher Bond’s 1970 stage adaptation, the musical follows the infamous throat-slitting barber and his meatpie-making accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, in their deadly quests for vengeance. Major productions have seen a collection of excellent Sweeneys (Len Cariou, Michael Cerveris, Michael Ball, Norm Lewis, Josh Groban, and Aaron Tveit) and a murderers’ row of Mrs. Lovetts (Angela Lansbury, Patti LuPone, Imelda Staunton, Carolee Carmello, Annaleigh Ashford, and Sutton Foster), while plenty of high school productions feature your nephew as Judge Turpin in the junior-year performance he thought was his first step to Juilliard. But, luckily, Sweeney Todd always works thanks to the possibly career-best work from Sondheim. With a score as beautiful as the show is grotesque, it’s a tonal masterpiece.
Don’t believe me? Watch the seven-year-old girl in Kevin Smith’s 2004 film Jersey Girl just kick total ass and tell me it doesn’t still play.
The Addams Family
Wednesday Addams, the ultimate princess of darkness, has grown up and fallen in love with a sweet, smart young man from a respectable family—a man her parents have never met. And if that wasn’t upsetting enough, Wednesday confides in her father and begs him not to tell her mother. Now, Gomez Addams must do something he’s never done before—keep a secret from his beloved wife, Morticia. Everything will change for the whole family on the fateful night they host a dinner for Wednesday’s “normal” boyfriend and his parents. (Theatrical Rights Worldwide)
I am totally aware that this last pick is controversial. While horror on stage almost always seems to need a slow-burn cult response or reassessment, a few in the past few years have been sure-fire hits with audiences, like Beetlejuice and Heathers. Others have spooky or gothic elements tied into their bigger pictures, from the long-running Hadestown to the even-longer-running Phantom of the Opera. Why then am I writing about a footnote in Broadway musical history that’s done most of its business in dinner theatres and high school auditoriums?
Because it’s the freaking Addams Family! Regardless of how strong the musical material is, it’s a sure-fire hit for audiences of all ages in between the roast beef and the specialty cocktail. Who doesn’t love the Addams Family? The show has never been perfect (it changed quite a bit from its out-of-town tryout in Chicago to the version that landed in New York), but if you can get the right cast, especially one that resurrects, if you will, those classic beloved performances (regardless of whether or not you grew up with the television show or the film series), you’ll be just fine. That’s what the people want! And Broadway delivered, featuring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth as Gomez and Morticia, with Krysta Rodriguez, Kevin Chamberlin, Terrence Mann, Carolee Carmello, Wesley Taylor, and Jackie Hoffman filling out the cast. Start with that Original Broadway Cast recording and tell me this was a bad pick.
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