Little Shop of Horrors (theater)/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Fridge Brilliance

  • I JUST realized why Seymour says "Do I know you?" to Bernstein at the beginning of The Meek Shall Inherit in Little Shop of Horrors. Because of And You Were There, Seymour HAS met him before-when he played the first customer, and the dentist. --@/OOZE
  • It hit me in Advanced English (while reading Jane Eyre, of all things) that Little Shop has many of the elements of a Greek tragedy (albeit, a very funny one). While it is certainly modern in much of its set-up, much of it seems to root in tragedy: The Doo-wop girls are a Greek chorus. The reversal (peripiteia) comes after he kills Mushnik. Anagnorisis (moment of recognition) comes when Seymour realizes Audrey II had planned this from the start. Pathos (scene of suffering) is when Audrey is killed by Audrey II. And Seymour fits the bill for a tragic hero: "a great man who is neither a paragon of virtue and justice nor undergoes the change to misfortune through any real badness or wickedness but because of some mistake (flaw)."
  • I recently realized that Seymour's flaw is being utterly and completely passive. He knows Mushnik doesn't really care about him, but ends up consenting to be adopted anyway, and then the plant talks him into committing murder--twice. Seymour doesn't even have the guts to kill Orin himself, even though he walks in fully intending to do so: he sits down all ready to go through a hellish session of dental work with no gas and a rusty drill rather than complete his mission, simply because Orin said so. Then he's relieved when he has the chance to kill Orin by refusing to help him instead of actively murdering him ("I can off the guy by sitting in the chair"). It all comes to a head in "The Meek Shall Inherit", when Seymour miserably signs every contract handed to him, knowing full well he'll have to kill more people to keep the plant fed. Why is this brilliant? The chorus to "The Meek Shall Inherit" (sung by the Doo Wop Girls, who, of course, are the Greek Chorus and have inside knowledge of the plot):

They say the meek gonna get it
And you're a meek little guy
You know the meek are gonna get what's coming to 'em by and by!

    • They never mention what is coming to the meek (or whether it's good), and if you look at it another way, they're implying that Seymour is getting his just desserts for letting everyone walk all over him. (Additionally, the song's title is a fragment of the quote "The meek shall inherit the earth", and although Audrey II promises Seymour everything, the play ends with the plant inheriting the earth--literally.)
  • There's a possible running parallel between Audrey and Seymour in that they allow themselves to be abused and dominated by Orin and Audrey II, respectively. While Audrey is unhealthy because Orin beats her, Seymour is cutting himself and losing blood to keep the plant fed. In one scene ("Ya Never Know"), Seymour walks around holding the plant; the actor who plays Seymour here wears a jacket with a fake hand so that he can stick his real hand up through the pot and operate the plant's stem. This renders him unable to use one of his arms. Two seconds later, Audrey shows up, and she's late because Orin was beating up on her again. Her arm is in a cast.
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