That mean green mother from Outer Space is back. Broadway Series South has brought Audrey II, the wonderfully wicked man-eating plant of the uproarious rock-and-roll musical Little Shop of Horrors, back to Raleigh Memorial Auditorium for eight performances, starting Tuesday night.

The current national tour of this hit Broadway musical, produced by The Routh-Frankel-Viertel-Baruch Group et al., directed by four-time Tony Award® winner Jerry Zaks, and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, who won a 2004 Tony for her work on Wonderful Town, stars Jonathan Rayson as nerdy — and oh so needy — Skid-Row flower-shop clerk Seymour Krelborn; Tari Kelly as Audrey, the ditzy blonde bombshell on whom Seymour has a monster crush; Lenny Wolpe as Seymour and Audrey’s cranky employer, Mr. Mushnik; and James Moye as Audrey’s handsome but violently abusive boyfriend Orin Scrivello, DDS.

Michael James Leslie co-stars as the Voice of Audrey II, the marvelous, murderous, rapidly growing alien puppet designed by The Jim Henson Company and Martin P. Robinson and manipulated for this production by Michael Latini, Paul McGinnis, and Marc Petrosino. A strange and exotic new out-of-this-world plant species that Seymour discovers and names for his beloved fellow flower-shop clerk, Audrey II grows from a medium-sized houseplant at curtain rise to a monstrous plant the size of a compact car by the end of the show.

"Little Shop of Horrors is a Faustian tale,” explains Virginia native James Moye, who plays Audrey’s sadistic boyfriend Orin. “Seymour is promised all kinds of things if he just does what the plant asks him to do: feed him blood. Since Orin is a very abusive guy, it doesn’t bother the audience that he gets killed, chopped up, and fed to the plant.”

Moye was born in Lynchburg and grew up in Christiansburg, a small town in the southwestern mountains of Virginia. “I went to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where I actually majored in history,” he says. But then he got bitten by the theater bug, started his theatrical career in Chicago, and then moved to New York three and a half years ago.

Before auditioning for the national tour of Little Shop of Horrors and landing the plum role of Orin, the man that audiences love to hate, Moye appeared in the ensembles of The Full Monty and Urinetown on Broadway.

"Orin has some Elvis Presley qualities and some Marlon Brando qualities from the 1950s,” Moye claims. “[The hip-swiveling, leather-jacketed] Orin is a wannabe Elvis[, who frequently acts like] the Brando tough-guy character. I am the bad guy in this production, and its kind of fun to play the bad guy from time to time.”

Moye adds, “Orrin gets what’s coming to him [at the end of Act I],” and he notes that he gets to play a number of other characters in the second act. “I play an agent, a magazine mogul, a TV producer — all people who offer Seymour lots and lots of money for the plant,” Moye reports.

"It is fun to let yourself go and be the bad guy,” Moye admits, “and not worry about the audience liking you. In this show, they love to hate Orin. It’s funny, and it is fun.

"One of the best things about doing this show,” Moye claims, “is it’s probably one of the strongest casts that I’ve been associated with. It’s full of Broadway veterans from top to bottom, great voices and great actors. It just makes my job easy, because it’s easy to play opposite everybody.”

Little Shop of Horrors is based on director Roger Corman’s low-budget 1960 horror film, shot in only two days. It features music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman, and a book Ashman based on the screenplay by Charles Griffith. (Impressed by the frisky melodies and biting lyrics of Little Shop of Horrors, Disney recruited Menken and Ashman to write songs for its animated motion-picture versions of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin.) The science-fiction/horror musical debuted Off Broadway on May 6, 1982 at the WPA Theatre, subsequently transferred to the Orpheum Theatre on July 27, 1982, and ran for 2,209 performances overall.

The musical version of Little Shop of Horrors was filmed in 1986, with Frank Oz directing and Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene starring as Seymour and Audrey and Vincent Gardenia and Steve Martin co-starring as Mr. Mushnik and Orin. (Greene is the only performer from the cast of the Off-Broadway production to appear in the movie.)

The motion-picture version of the Off-Broadway musical received two 1987 Academy Award nominations — for Best Effects, Visual Effects (Lyle Conway, Bran Ferren, and Martin Gutteridge) and for Best Music, Original Song (composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman for “Mean Green Mother from Outer Space,” a new song written expressly for the film and not part of the stage musical).

The Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors, directed by Jerry Zaks and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, opened on Oct. 2, 2003 at the Virginia Theatre, and ran for 372 performances. The show received one 2004 Tony Award® nomination — for Best Actor in a Musical (Hunter Foster as Seymour Krelborn).

The show’s current national tour, also directed by Jerry Zaks and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, reproduces the Broadway scenic design of Scott Pask, the costume design of North Carolina native William Ivey Long, the lighting design of Donald Holder, the puppet design of The Jim Henson Company and Martin P. Robinson, and the hair-and-wig design of Robert-Charles Vallance. The tour has a new sound design by Dominic Sack and Carl Casella.

How does it feel to be upstaged by a giant plant puppet? James Moye admits, “[Audrey II] is definitely the star of the show. It was designed by the Jim Henson Company, and our puppeteers are fantastic. It’s really exciting to see them work.”

During the course of the show, the man-eating plant grows from size of a houseplant to about the size of a Volkswagen bug, Moye notes. He adds, “ I die at the end of the first act, so my character is the only one that doesn’t have to get into the plant. I get chopped up and fed to the plant.”

Moye says the other actors have to climb into the plant very carefully to avoid injury and to make their deaths look realistic.

James Moye says, “It’s been fun touring the country. [This national tour of Little Shop of Horrors] is a really strong production, and I have a great song — “(Be a) Dentist!” — to sing in the show.”

He adds, “My mom’s family is from Greensboro and, ironically, my first cousin is a dentist in Raleigh.” Moye says his dentist cousin from the City of Oaks will definitely come to see him cut the fool as Orin as a dentist who loves to inflict pain on his patients — and caricature the entire dental profession in the process. “I have a lot of family who’ll be coming from Greensboro and Virginia to see the show,” Moye says.

Broadway Series South presents Little Shop of Horrors Tuesday-Friday, March 1-4, at 8 p.m.; Saturday, March 5, at 2 and 8 p.m.; and Sunday, March 6, at 2 and 7 p.m. in Raleigh Memorial Auditorium in the BTI Center for the Performing Arts, 1 E. South St., Raleigh, North Carolina. $24.50-$68. BTI Box Office: 919/831-6060. Groups of 20 or More: 919/857-4565 or http://www.broadwayseriessouth.com/2004-2005/group.html#horror [inactive 5/05]. Broadway Series South: http://www.broadwayseriessouth.com/2004-2005/broadway.html [inactive 5/05]. Internet Broadway Database: http://www.ibdb.com/show.asp?ID=11223. Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054033/ (1960 horror film) and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091419/ (1986 musical). The Tour: http://www.littleshopofhorrors.com/.

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