By GUILHERME YAZBEK
Yesterday, as I made my way to downtown Pittsburgh on the bus, I found myself trying to recall what I remembered about the musical Little Shop of Horrors. Not much, as it turned out—just the insistently catchy opening melody, the kind that loops in your head with remarkable persistence, a hallmark of Alan Menken’s melodic craft, and the vague premise of a carnivorous plant. By the time I arrived at Point Park University’s Pittsburgh Playhouse, I still felt anchored more in fragments than in a clear recollection of the work. What I did not expect, however, was that my experience of the evening would begin even before the performance itself. By chance, I had chosen to wear a black leather jacket—something I don’t wear very often. It was only later, somewhere past the midpoint of the show, when protagonist Seymour appears wearing one in a somewhat desperate attempt to emulate Orin—the show’s leather-clad, sadistic dentist and principal antagonist—in his bad-boy persona (to Audrey’s clear disapproval), that I realized how loaded that object would become within the production’s visual and symbolic economy. The delayed recognition made the coincidence all the more amusing, as if I had unknowingly dressed in anticipation of a sign I had yet to encounter. What began as a trivial choice ended up functioning as an unexpectedly precise entry point into the show’s symbolic logic.
A brief note: what follows in this review contains spoilers.
At its core, Little Shop of Horrors can be read as a contemporary variation on the Faustian narrative. Seymour Krelborn’s encounter with Audrey II—an alien plant that virtually promises success, recognition, and love in exchange for an escalating series of moral compromises—sets into motion a structure of desire and exchange that closely mirrors the logic of the Faustian pact. What begins as a seemingly benign opportunity for social mobility quickly transforms into a cycle of dependency, in which each gain demands a greater ethical concession. The promise of upward mobility, framed here through the possibility of romantic fulfillment and economic success, reveals itself as inseparable from violence. This dynamic is further sharpened through the opposition between two models of masculinity embodied by Seymour and Orin. If Orin represents a hyperbolic, aggressive masculinity—confident, violent, and theatrically excessive—Seymour appears as its inverse: hesitant, awkward, and structurally out of place. When Seymour later adopts Orin’s aesthetic in an attempt to emulate his persona, the gesture exposes not a transformation, but a misalignment. What is revealed is not the acquisition of power, but the impossibility of inhabiting it as such.
What gives this Faustian structure its particular force in Little Shop of Horrors is the way it unfolds as a tragic trajectory. Seymour’s actions are not driven by abstract ambition alone, but by a desire that feels, at least initially, modest and even sympathetic: to be loved, to be seen, to become someone of value in the eyes of Audrey and the world around him. And yet, it is precisely this desire that sets into motion a chain of decisions from which he cannot withdraw. Each step forward—each feeding of the plant, each moral concession—deepens his entanglement in a system that demands more than he can ethically sustain. The logic is unmistakably tragic: in attempting to secure a form of life that seems desirable and attainable, Seymour produces the very conditions of his own undoing. By the time he recognizes the extent of his involvement, the possibility of reversal has already collapsed, and what remains is not redemption, but the inevitability of consequence.
If the structure of Howard Ashman’s book recalls Fausto, its unfolding is punctuated by moments that evoke another figure: Raskolnikov. Not as a direct parallel, but as a way of naming a particular experience of guilt that emerges alongside action. Seymour’s trajectory is marked not only by what he does, but by how he inhabits the consequences of his actions—hesitating, rationalizing, wavering, and yet continuing. There is a point at which the ethical boundary has clearly been crossed, and still the movement does not stop. What unfolds is less a psychological descent in the novelistic sense than a compressed, theatricalized version of moral disintegration, in which awareness does not prevent complicity. The crime does not produce only clarity; it produces continuation—and, ultimately, punishment, in a way that once again brings the piece into unexpected proximity with the Russian classic, albeit in a condensed, stylized, and accelerated form. And it is precisely this inability to interrupt the chain of action that binds Seymour to a logic from which he can no longer extricate himself.
What ultimately binds these threads together is the sense of a tragic horizon that governs Seymour’s trajectory. If the Faustian pact structures the exchange and Raskolnikov names the experience of guilt, it is tragedy that gives shape to their unfolding. Seymour does not simply make a series of poor decisions; he enters a sequence whose consequences accumulate beyond the possibility of control or reversal. What might begin as contingency gradually assumes the weight of inevitability. By the end, what is revealed is not only the cost of his actions, but the extent to which those actions have already inscribed their own misfortune. The trajectory closes in on itself, not as a moral lesson, but as the unfolding of a tragic logic, in which what begins as a seemingly minor error gradually assumes the force of inevitability.
If the narrative unfolds within this tightly structured tragic logic, the staging responds with a strikingly layered set of strategies. The scenic design (Christian Fleming) leans into a heightened realism, constructing a world that feels materially dense and visually detailed. Nowhere is this more evident—and, at the same time, overtly theatrical—than in the storefront, whose metal shutter repeatedly rises and falls with uncanny smoothness. Unlike the heavy, noisy mechanisms one might expect from such an object, here the movement is nearly silent, gliding with a precision that borders on the uncanny. This is not realism as rough approximation, but as controlled effect—an illusion of material weight sustained by theatrical exactitude. The costumes (Michael Montgomery), however, operate in a different register. Rather than reinforcing realism, they move toward stylization, amplifying character types and social codes through color, texture, and exaggeration. What emerges is a world that feels materially grounded, yet visually heightened—one in which reality is meticulously constructed, while character is unapologetically performed.
Against this carefully constructed visual field, director Michael Campayno orchestrates performance as the primary site where character is fully articulated. The actors’ work resists naturalism—not merely as a stylistic choice, but as a necessity within a world already structured by exaggeration and artifice. Seymour’s physicality (Braden Max Stroppel) is particularly striking: marked by bent knees, a slightly collapsed axis, and gestures that appear clumsy or imprecise, he creates a figure that seems out of balance. Yet this apparent awkwardness is meticulously executed. His falls, hesitations, and even moments of dropping objects are clearly choreographed, revealing precision beneath the surface of instability. In contrast, Audrey (Mariana Sarmento) operates within a more contained and accelerated movement vocabulary. Her gestures are smaller, quicker, almost ticking—short bursts of motion that accumulate in a distinctly staccato rhythm. This is especially evident in her walk: balanced on high heels, taking tiny, rapid steps that produce a body both constrained and in motion. If Seymour expands into space, Audrey contracts within it. The trio of narrator-commentators (Mia Laverne,Kendal Williams, and Kat Bruce) oscillates between fluid, highly feminized movement and sharper, more percussive gestures rooted in urban vocabularies of movement and speech. Their presence evokes the legacy of musical trios while functioning as a structuring device within the performance—commenting on the action as it unfolds and shaping its rhythm from within. The femininity they construct is not fragile but assertive, rhythmic, and socially marked. Orin (Logan Johnson) fully embraces caricature, pushing his vocal performance into an exaggerated high register that amplifies the character’s entanglement of pleasure and pain. This excess extends to the scenography of his dental office, which breaks from the production’s otherwise more grounded visual logic. Installed at the proscenium for this sequence, the set operates less as an environment than as a sign, dominated by an enlarged X-ray image of a mouth that assumes exaggerated, almost monumental proportions. Here, the comic and the grotesque converge, as both performance and design lean into distortion, amplification, and theatrical excess. It is precisely this differentiation that holds the production together, producing a coherent theatrical language across distinct corporeal, vocal, and visual registers.
The overall impression is of a production whose technical execution and performative training could easily circulate within high-profile professional contexts. The precision of the performances, combined with the sophistication of the material elements—set, lighting, costumes, and musical direction, including a fully live band—produces a theatrical event of remarkable finish. There is no reliance on pre-recorded tracks here; the music is performed live, adding yet another layer of immediacy and complexity to the production.
It is precisely this sense of polish, this feeling that the work could seamlessly inhabit spaces often associated with large-scale commercial production, that invites a shift in perspective. Not to question the result, but to consider the conditions that make it possible. In this context, the university emerges not only as a site of training but as a structure capable of approximating, and in some cases reproducing, the material and organizational logics of the professional field. What becomes visible, then, is not only the performance itself, but the infrastructure that sustains it. And from that visibility, a broader question inevitably follows: who has access to these conditions, and to the forms of artistic production they make possible?
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Point Park Universzity’s Conservatory of Performing Arts production of Little Shop of Horrors has perfrormances now through May 3, 2026. For tickets visit: https://playhouse.culturaldistrict.org/production/101127
Guilherme is a Brazilian theater practitioner and scholar, currently pursuing a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Reviews
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