GETTING eaten alive on stage can be a lot of fun, as “CityNews” discovers when talking to Brent Hill, star of the cult musical “Little Shop of Horrors”, coming to town soon in a show staged by the team behind the 2014 production of “Sweet Charity”.

Hill, who gets to play the hapless flower-shop worker, Seymour Krelborn, tells me by phone from Adelaide: “I love it, the audience is responding lovingly, too.”
To the Perth-raised acting graduate of the WA Academy of Performing Arts, the challenge of getting eaten is “a bit like being in ‘Hamlet’,” where pretty well everyone dies. He deplores efforts in the American movie to create a happy ending.
He says “Little Shop of Horrors” tells the story of “a whole bunch of people on skid row who want to be better and of the blood-eating plant that starts to grow”.
Hill shares the stage with that grotesque show-stopper, “Audrey II”, the extraordinary plant created for this production by puppet-makers Erth, who have, the Canberra Theatre claims, created “a brand new Audrey II for the 21st century”.
Unexpectedly, “Little Shop” is in part a love story.
“Love and power are the two main themes,” Hill says, and so the loser Seymour, adopted by the manipulative flower shop owner Mr Mushnik, falls in love with a lovely, innocent girl (not a plant) called Audrey.
“Seymour is the everyman character in the sense that he is an orphan, he is looking for love but he’s always down on his luck and he’s a bit of a slave worker.”
He chooses to call his favourite plant in the shop Audrey and to nurture her, little suspecting that she/it is destined to be a killer. Hill says that when Erth brought her into the theatre it was quite scary. “Beware”, he warns, “she might slobber all over you”.
As the actor playing Seymour, he has to get inside the character and though many might find it chilling that he should name her after the innocent Audrey, whom he adores, “he’s got a lot to give and he gives all that to the plant”.
Audrey I, played by Esther Hannaford (who played another innocent as Ann in “King Kong the Musical”) is the victim of an abusive relationship. But her alter-ego, the foul mouthed Audrey II, is no pushover. As Hill says: “As she drinks more blood, she gets too big for her boots”.
We were all taught at primary school never to write a story that ends: “And then I died”. So, does Seymour really die?
“Well, I’d call it being assimilated into the plant,” Hill says, “It’s very Grecian, very tragic… Seymour is a scaredy-cat ultimately ground down by power.”
But hang on, isn’t this supposed be a fun musical?
“It’s not a gloomy night in the theatre,” Hill asserts. The music, he says, is joyous, full of ‘60s doo-wop and soul, and the numbers include the popular songs “Feed Me”, “Suddenly Seymour” and “Somewhere That’s Green”.
“It’s all about antithesis – dark truth and death, but done in a way we can laugh at,” Hill says. “We just want to do it with joy.”

“Little Shop of Horrors”, Canberra Theatre, May 25-29, Bookings canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.