Best of KC 2024: Outrageous talent makes for a bodacious bloodbath in KCRep’s Little Shop of Horrors

Chioma Anyanwu, Alyssa Byers, Chloe Castro-Santos, and Amari Lewis in KCRep’s 2024 production of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. // Photo by Don Ipock

Earlier this month, we published The Pitch’s annual Best of Kansas City issue. You can take a peek at the results of the readers’ poll here. The issue also included a list, compiled and written by our editorial staff, of some local people, places, and things that we thought clearly won 2024. We’ll be publishing these items online throughout November. 

It’s hard to serve up a bad production of Little Shop of Horrors. The musical is, even in the plot abstract, a total banger: a horror b-movie where fame and fortune come to a down on his luck orphan via horticulture haute couture… at the expense of his prize plant being an alien that feeds on human beings. A tale as old as time! Between the songs that are mostly short, straightforward bops, a short runtime, and that Roger Corman-esque aesthetic of schlock comedy, it’s just hard to bungle a staging of this.

But that makes it equally hard to deliver a version that is truly out-of-the-park memorable—an improvement on generations of productions that came before it. Back in May, KCRep staged an adaptation that was, amid a year of city-wide theatrical excellence, simply one of the greatest live performances we’ve ever seen. Not just in musicals, but really in any kind of situation where someone stands on a stage and other people applaud. 

The choice to have Shon Ruffin sing the Audrey II part from above the stage, among the band and visible to the audience, while Zachery Garner manipulates the gigantic plant puppetry? Stellar. Jordan Matthew Brown brought nuance and pathos to build a perfect Seymour while Chloe Castro-Santos’ take on Audrey (the person) was culturally elevated and remade some of Menken/Ashman’s greatest works in her image. The Greek chorus of Chiffon, Crystal, and Ronette—played by Alyssa Byers, Amari Lewis, and Chioma Anyanwu, respectively—had vocal shredding that left our audience (literally) screaming for more.

Let this serve as a reminder that when you see announcements from one of the dozen god-tier local theatres about staging a show, even something that sounds experimental or a little too familiar/overdone, make time to get your ass in the seats. The metro is where live theater in the Midwest lives or dies… and you can watch the actors do a lot of both.