The Little Shop HORRORS

“Feed me, Seymour. Feed me!” As Audrey II turns 35, director Frank Oz looks back on his epic allsinging, all-dancing – and all-consuming – musical comedy hit…

- SIMON BLAND

When Frank Oz first received a script for The Little Shop Of Horrors, he’d only directed one movie. Well, that’s not strictly true. While his first official stint in the director’s chair was for 1984’s The Muppets Take Manhattan, two years earlier he’d helped his long-time creative partner Jim Henson helm his creature-filled passion project The Dark Crystal; a sinister fantasy opus that left audiences and critics a little cold (at the time, at least). When mega-producer David Geffen suggested Oz’s second fulltime directing gig should be an adaptation of lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken’s hit Off-Broadway musical about a giant alien plant with an insatiable bloodlust, he wasn’t exactly convinced. Music? Horror? Puppets? Humour? It felt a little too much, too soon. However amid the bustle of his burgeoning solo career, Miss Piggy, Fozzie and Yoda’s real-life alter ego had overlooked the fact that he was perhaps the only person with the skills needed to bring this all-singing, all-dancing dark musical comedy to life. By the mid-’80s, Oz had worked on a huge array of increasingly complex Muppet projects, and through extensive exposure to Henson’s infectious ‘anything’s possible’ work ethic (something that was tested and cemented on The Dark Crystal’s arduous shoot), he’d gained tenacious storytelling skills that even he didn’t know he had. With these thoughts lurking in the back of his mind, he agreed to take a look.