Little Shop of Horrors: stage vs screen

Little Shop of Horrors started as Roger Corman's low-budget 1960 comedy, became Alan Menken and Howard Ashman's Off-Broadway musical in 1982, and returned to the screen as Frank Oz's 1986 movie musical. This page compares the stage show, which reached Broadway in 2003 at the Virginia Theatre, with both films. The biggest change, in every direction, is who gets eaten at the end.

Stage

Broadway musical (2003)

Screen

The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

1. The 1986 film's happy ending

On stage, the plant wins: Audrey is mortally wounded and asks to be fed to Audrey II, Seymour is eaten too, and the plant's offspring go on to menace the world in the finale, Don't Feed the Plants. Frank Oz filmed that ending, but test audiences reacted badly, so it was rewritten and reshot. In the theatrical cut, Seymour electrocutes the plant, marries Audrey, and moves to the suburbs, where a small bud lurks in the garden.

2. The original ending was restored in 2012

Oz's original 23-minute finale, which follows the stage ending and shows giant plants attacking cities, existed for years only as black-and-white workprint footage. Warner restored it for a 2012 director's cut. Viewers can now compare both endings.

3. Mean Green Mother from Outer Space is new

Menken and Ashman wrote a new song for the 1986 film, Mean Green Mother from Outer Space, in which Audrey II reveals it is an alien. It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Song, the first nominee with profanity in its lyrics. It is not part of the stage score.

4. Stage songs left out of the film

The movie cuts Mushnik and Son, Sudden Changes, Now (It's Just the Gas), Closed for Renovation, and Call Back in the Morning. Ya Never Know was rewritten as Some Fun Now, a trio for the street urchins Crystal, Ronnette, and Chiffon, and The Meek Shall Inherit was trimmed. With Mushnik and Son gone, so is Mushnik's offer to adopt Seymour.

5. How Mushnik ends up in the plant

On stage, Seymour tells Mushnik he hid the day's takings inside Audrey II, and Mushnik climbs in to find them. In the 1986 film, Mushnik holds Seymour at gunpoint over Orin's death, and Seymour backs him into the plant's reach while explaining how to care for it. In Corman's 1960 film, it is Mushnik who uses the money trick, on a burglar.

6. Orin and the masochistic patient

Steve Martin plays the sadistic dentist Orin in the 1986 film, which also brings back a character the stage show dropped: the patient who loves pain, played by Jack Nicholson in 1960 and by Bill Murray, as Arthur Denton, in 1986. In both the musical and the 1986 film, Orin is Audrey's abusive boyfriend and dies by suffocating on his own laughing gas. The 1960 dentist has no link to Audrey and is killed with a dental instrument.

7. What the 1960 original changed

Corman's film has Seymour Krelboined, a plant called Audrey Jr., and two neighborhood girls in place of the musical's girl-group chorus of Crystal, Ronnette, and Chiffon. Its plant is a crossbreed of a butterwort and a Venus flytrap rather than a creature from outer space. Seymour also lives with his mother, Winifred, and kills innocent bystanders, including a railroad worker. Neither detail made it into the musical, where Seymour is an orphan.

8. Faces in the flowers

In the 1960 film, Mushnik and Audrey survive, and the plant's crimes are exposed when its buds open to show the faces of its victims, Seymour among them. The musical borrows that image for its finale, when the plant's flowers open to reveal Seymour, Audrey, Mushnik, and Orin warning the audience not to feed the plants.

Little Shop of Horrors movie vs musical: FAQs