Finale flowers: ‘Don’t Feed the Plants’

Sometimes the actors aren’t the ones stealing the show. That may be the case during Glenwood Vaudeville Revue’s fall production of “Little Shop of Horrors” — which runs Sept. 22 to Oct. 29; visit gvrshow.com for more information — when four elaborate puppets threaten to upstage the cast.

(Stop reading here if you’re spoiler averse and unfamiliar with this decades-old show.) The show features Seymour, an awkward but earnest young man, and the venus flytrap he’s named after his crush, coworker Audrey. The pair work at Skid Row Florists, a struggling shop, and Seymour can’t figure out why his new plant isn’t thriving.

But Seymour pricks his finger on a rose thorn and Audrey II consumes a drop of his blood—and once the plant has the taste, it can’t get enough.

Audrey II appears in four stages through the course of the musical, and by the final scene, she occupies a quarter of the space. Glenwood Vaudeville Revue proprietor John Goss rented the puppets from McAvene Designs in Las Vegas, which used the blueprints from the original Broadway production. Goss offered a peek at how the typically inanimate object develops throughout the show.