Scotts Valley High School’s rendition of “Little Shop of Horrors” will debut this Friday at the Student Union Building on SVHS campus.
This dark musical comedy is based on the 1960s film of the same name. The show is centered around a floral shop on Skid Row — which is the worst part of town — that is having financial difficulties.
When Seymour, the shop worker, encounters a mysterious plant and brings it back to the shop, business suddenly turns around.
Director Kendra Kannegaard, 21, graduated from SVHS in 2012 and has returned just three years later to fill the director’s shoes. She co-directed the fall play and the spring musical, but this is the first musical that she is directing all on her own.
“It’s been really fun, it’s been a really interesting experience,” she said, “we have such a huge cast — I think we have 32 maybe — and then we probably have 15 or 20 crew members who are working on this show.”
The musical originally has a small cast, so Kannegaard and the other directors have had to double cast some of the roles over the nine total performances.
“So the people who were double cast were our Audreys — the female lead — our Audrey IIs, which is the voice of the plant, and then Mr. Mushnik has an understudy,” Kannegaard said.
The musical director for the show, Arindam Krishna Das, said that he begged Kendra and the drama teacher to do “Little Shop of Horrors.”
“The concern is that sometimes it doesn’t seem there’s enough parts for females as it happens in too many musicals,” Arindam said. “So where you have three of those doo-wop girls, we times threed it so we have these nine urchins, that — for me as a music director — it just sounds awesome.”
Kannegaard warned that characters do die in this dark comedy, which plays with the classical theme of making deals with the devil.
Matt Valencia, a junior at SVHS, plays the lead role of Seymour Krelborn, who finds the plant, brings it back to the shop and begins feeding it humans.
“Seymour is an orphan, he is really poor and he grew up without a mother or father on the street and this guy Mr. Mushnik, who owns the flower shop, took him in and he gave him a job,” Valencia explained of his character.
Once the plant — Audrey II — shows up, the flower shop mysteriously starts to prosper.
“(Seymour) finds out that the plant can talk and it just all of a sudden has this hankering for blood, that’s just all it wants and (the plant) says in the iconic words, ‘feed me!’” Kannegaard explained.
Valencia is interested in acting in the future and enjoys challenging himself by playing a variety of characters.
“My favorite part is being someone else and making people laugh and entertaining people,” he said. “I like being in front of people its fun.”
Seymour’s romantic interest, Audrey, is played by Haley Powell, a junior at SVHS.
“Audrey is really pretty and she talks in a super high-pitched voice, which is kind of annoying sometimes, but she is in a abusive relationship with this sadist dentist and so she doesn’t feel that she is worthy of anything better than that,” she said.
Seymour and Audrey give each other strength and Seymour originally names the plant after her — Audrey II.
“That’s one of the things that really works between the two of them, they are both kind of nobodies, but they think so highly of each other,” Powell said.
Kennedy Cartwright, an SVHS senior, is double cast as the voice of Audrey II.
“Going into it, I wasn’t expecting to get a part where I had to sing so low because the plant is normally done by the bluesy deep voice of an older man,” Cartwright said.
Thanks to this role, Cartwright said that her vocal range has gotten much deeper.
“What is really interesting about it is that at the end of the day I am actually going to major in theater and having to do this role and having to stretch it so much — because I am usually up in other registers that are higher — it kind of proves to me that I can be successful in this and it proves to, I think, everyone else that we have something cool here,” she said.
Audrey II is a popular character that will actually grow on stage as it consumes more and more people.
“It’s terrible, but you fall in love with the plant, you fall in love with Audrey, but you fall in love with this plant as well, which is scary,” Das said. “Someday I hope I can do the voice of the plant in some production somewhere.”
Student Director and junior Ariana Carruthers transferred to SVHS from Harbor High this year and has made many new friends throughout the production. She works closely with Kannegaard to make the play come to life.
“I got to direct a scene or two and then I take notes with her when we do run-through and give people pointers,” Carruthers said.
With the show’s opening fast approaching this Friday night, the cast has been working overtime to make sure that everything runs smoothly.
“Since we are now into the final week before the show, we have been running the show over and over again and taking notes on everything that we need to work on and then afterwards we work on those scenes and then we go home at like 11 o’clock at night,” she said.
As a collective whole, the cast has banded together to make this musical happen.
“I think it really forms a family with the cast,” Kannegaard said. “You get to know these people that you spend literally three hours with every day over the course of three months.”
