I think it’s safe to say that no one at Brandeis has ever laughed so hard at a giant, fake, people-eating plant. 

This past weekend in the Shapiro Campus Center Theater, Tympanium Euphorium put on “Little Shop of Horrors,” a tragicomedy about a Venus flytrap hungry for human blood. 

The show features a lowly young man named Seymour (Nathan Schneider ’18) who works in a flower shop in a poor neighborhood. Seymour’s life dramatically changes when he discovers a rare plant that drinks blood. 

The plant — which he names Audrey II after the girl he likes — grows bigger and bigger, and as time goes on, it requires more and more blood, forcing Seymour to make decisions about how he’s going to feed it. Meanwhile, Audrey II gains fame across the country and brings Seymour and the flower shop big success. As much as the musical is about a fantastical plant, it is also about the mundane wants and needs of life: to get out of a poor neighborhood, become successful and fall in love. These things are what fuel each character’s decisions, especially those of Seymour. 

In an interview with the Justice, director Tres Fimmano ’18 said he very much wanted the set to have the look of “a bad sci-fi movie.” The set consisted of Seymour’s flower shop with the musical band visible through a cutout window. The prop that dominated the stage was Audrey II. 

Though the plant started out small, by Act II it was an enormous green and fluffy felt mass, which a puppeteer controlled from inside. 

“Each character’s costume has its own background story to it. That’s not something you will see in the show but was something we thought about when designing,” Fimmano said about the costumes. Seymour, always dressed in a nerdy concoction of sweaters, button-ups, polos and khakis,  never was without his glasses. Meanwhile, Audrey, his love interest, always wore some frivolous dress. 

The best costumes, however, belonged to the characters that composed the chorus: Chiffon (Rachael Schindler ’19), Crystal (Yael Matlow ’18) and Ronnette (Sarah Dublin ’18). Their costumes were biker chic and included converse, crop tops and leather jackets. Fimmano said he and the costumers chose to focus on the 1960’s for inspiration. 

The tone of the play was light and comedic despite the gravity of some of the situations the characters found themselves in. One such moment is when Seymour goes to the office of Audrey’s abusive boyfriend, Orin Scrivello (Zain Walker ’18), intending to shoot him. However, Orin is a dentist, and convinces Seymour that he should instead worry about his teeth and let Scrivello examine and fix them. 

As the characters found themselves in exceedingly dire circumstances throughout the musical, the tone became more serious. The majority of the characters end up getting eaten by Audrey II, and each character left behind mourns their loss.

 Fimmano said, “This is very much a show about decisions. What makes a good decision and what makes a bad decision … there are no good or bad decisions, just choosing which consequences you want to live with. None of the characters in this show made good or bad decisions but did what they thought was best in the moment.” 

The problems with Audrey II never even get resolved in the end. The plant breeds and starts taking over the world, and the musical ends with all of the characters — dead or otherwise — coming out to beg the audience not to feed the plant. 

Fimmano said that it is very possible to tell that Alan Menken — the same man who wrote the music for “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Little Mermaid” —  wrote the music for “Little Shop.” He said the music for this play does not just comment on what is happening but rather intentionally moves the plot forward. In fact, most of the big moments of the play occur through song. 

The play had everything: comedy, beautiful singing and music, fantastic acting, stylistic costumes and a giant puppet plant.