When the six-foot-tall plant puppet was first rolled onto stage, students set the tone of La Salle’s production of “Little Shop of Horrors” with cheers, laughter, and selfies, director and theater teacher Mr. Michael Shelton said.  

The La Salle theater department’s performance of the cult-classic horror-comedy musical, a show about romance and a giant human-eating venus fly trap named Audrey II, has been in the works for months and debuts on Friday, April 17 with a cast and crew of nearly 70 people.

The show follows Seymour Krelborn, an insecure plant shop employee, and his encounters with a bloodthirsty alien plant.

The show’s comedic and vibrant mood, embodied by those first reactions to the Audrey II puppet, has permeated the show, giving it a unique and positive energy, cast and crew said. 

“I feel like this production, everybody really loves it, and everybody wants to be there,” senior Zoey Ferreira, Audrey II’s puppeteer, said. “I know personally, I look forward to going to theater every day — that’s the reason I come to school.” 

But even as the show has had a uniquely fun and celebratory atmosphere, it is also the final production for many seniors, which means there is a need for the next generation of the department’s student leaders to take the spotlight, Mr. Shelton said. 

“The amount of people who have been able to step up and practice leadership roles is a proud moment for me,” he said. “The largest class representation in this show are freshmen, and the quality that those freshmen have brought, in the way that they’ve kind of stepped up into those roles, has been really, really impressive.” 

At the same time, the show has represented the department’s first experience with a whole other set of challenges and opportunities — mainly the puppeting of Audrey II itself. 

“First I have to hear the music, so I’m cued in with my voice, and then I have to cue in Zoey so she knows when to move the plant,” senior Molly McKinlay, the voice of Audrey II, said. “So it’s a whole sequence of events — really hard to get the timing down.” 

And it’s not any easier being the puppeteer. 

“When I’m in Audrey II, the teen Audrey II, I’m fully inside the costume, and so I can’t see Molly,” Ferreira said. “She’ll be backstage and I’ll be on stage, so I don’t know when she’s going to start talking.”

But collaboration can look like a lot of things in theater.

Senior Miles Timberlake has taken on a swing role for the first time, as the deranged dentist, Orin Scrivello. As a swing, he gets to work with the main actor, sophomore Beckett France, to bring the character to life.     

“We can both coordinate on how we want to design this character, how we should portray him, and just little stuff like that,” he said. 

A swing role also gives Timberlake the opportunity to cover multiple roles without the same workload as a main role. 

With less on his plate, Timberlake has more opportunity for trial and error. His process is, “experimenting with all those aspects on how I want to perform as that person and just how I want to bring that character to life on stage,” he said.

Collaboration has also been key to helping build an inclusive community, another thing that Timberlake said he deeply values about theater. 

“[The theater] community welcomed me with open arms, and now that I’m a senior, I’ve opened my arms as well to them, to the newcomers,” he said. “[I’m] just carrying on that tradition of maintaining the open and inclusive community.”

McKinlay believes having that open space is crucial, as getting to perform on stage is vital to how she expresses herself and experiences the world — an opportunity she wants others to have too. 

“I think it’s important that the kids have that opportunity to not feel like they’re confined to their own character, and they can be someone else,” she said. 

Other members of the cast and crew also echo her sentiment.

“I think having theater is a really good way to have people come out of their shells and to gain confidence in a way that a classroom or a sport or some other extracurricular might not offer,” senior and stage manager Kat Marks said. 

Assistant stage manager, junior Millie Bennett, agrees with Marks, as theater can become an “escape from the craziness of your own life,” and a chance to “focus for so long on making sure every detail of telling a story is perfect,” she said.

As assistant stage manager, Bennett said that stage management can definitely get hectic and chaotic. She views stage management as being many moving pieces, which makes it all the more satisfying to see the final product. 

“It’s so magical just watching it all fall into place,” she said. 

For many performers, the beloved nature of the show makes the production all the more fun, and gives all the more reason for students and families to buy tickets. 

“I’ve been a fan of this show for so long, [so] getting to watch it come to life is really satisfying,” McKinlay said. “Your baby sister is gonna love it, and your great grandma’s gonna love it too.” 

Since so many of the performers have worked to make the show live up to aspirations as fans, they are hoping people will show up for opening night, McKinlay said.

“It means the world to us when we see you in the audience,” McKinlay said. “There’s no better feeling than seeing all the people who came to support you and enjoy the hard work you’re putting in.” 

Mr. Shelton also thinks that, besides the excellent work done by cast and crew, the show is valuable for the message it offers through its dark humor and wit. 

“The plant wants to do all these things, like carnivorously eat people, and the plant is asking the main character simply to just not do anything — ‘I’m not asking you to go get people for me, just don’t do anything,”’ he said. “The lesson is that for us as human beings when it comes to what’s going on in our own lives, what’s going on with our friends and family, what’s going on in the larger world … evil things can happen if we just don’t do anything.”